Liberal Democrats and their allied special-interest groups freaked out the other day when Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker addressed the Connecticut Republican Party’s annual awards dinner.
The rap against Walker, as articulated in newspaper advertisements placed by the state teachers union, the Connecticut Education Association, was that he “divides rather than unites.”
Of course Walker is known for having enacted legislation reducing the privileges of Wisconsin’s government employee unions and for surviving a union-inspired recall election, which explains the CEA’s antipathy. But the CEA’s ad never mentioned that, instead denouncing Walker for opposing more restrictive gun laws.
And of course “dividing” is what advocates of change do. It is the prerequisite for progress. Among the country’s great dividers were George Washington, Susan B. Anthony, and Martin Luther King Jr. They also were accused of divisive tactics by people who did not want to have to defend a questionable order.
It’s no wonder that the CEA would prefer to argue gun control than the privileges it has achieved for its members, like the exemption of teacher performance evaluations from disclosure under freedom-of-information law.
“This is a state where bipartisanship brought us gun safety legislation this year and school reform last year,” the CEA’s anti-Walker ad said.
In fact bipartisanship — the agreement of the state’s political class to overlook crucial issues — has brought Connecticut to financial ruin, its economy declining faster than that of most states, in large part because the compensation of state and municipal employees has been moved, quite bipartisanly, outside the democratic process and into a system of binding arbitration, in which the public’s interest is subordinated to that of its supposed employees and every budget cannibalizes public services so that employee pay may be increased.
Walker, the CEA ad said, “has had dinner with a long list of right-wing extremists.” That charge is not an argument; indeed, back when such a charge was often leveled against liberals, it was called guilt by association.
But while Walker’s choice of dinner companions is supposedly a crime, it is OK for Connecticut Democratic Party leaders not just to attend a dinner honoring a leader of the state’s Communist Party but also to propose spending state government money to renovate Communist Party headquarters.
Apparently there is no extremism is advocating, as communists do, the liquidation of the private economy. After all, under Democratic administration Connecticut is halfway there already, between businesses moving out and the biggest companies lining up for corporate welfare.
Now that Connecticut Republicans have dared to dine with Governor Walker, maybe they will dare to raise the issue with which he has begun reviving (“dividing”) Wisconsin — restoring the public’s sovereignty over government.
Holding no statewide or congressional offices and comprising an irrelevant minority in the General Assembly, Connecticut Republicans have little to lose by trying something besides “bipartisanship,” which in Connecticut is only a euphemism for not making trouble.
Given the caliber of Republican state legislators, maybe serious issues can be raised only by the party’s nominee for governor next year. But even without taking sharp positions, just posing the right questions might be sensational.
For example, other than accommodating a government workforce that can’t be fired even for thievery, exactly how does Connecticut benefit from collective bargaining and binding arbitration for public employee unions?
Why have poverty and urban living conditions worsened despite decades of increasing appropriations in the name of ameliorating them?
Why have decades of “education reform” failed to improve schools?
Why is Connecticut’s economy doing so badly?
Only “dividing” Connecticut in an election can identify the causes and perpetrators of this failure.
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.