Nicolás Medina Mora Pérez
A moderate hope flickered in Hartford. New Haven’s surviving band of Republicans headed north to catch it.
The hope flickered Friday at the state Republican Party convention at the Hartford Convention Center, in the form of a nominating contest for an open U.S. Senate seat. Richter Elser wasn’t going to miss it — even if he had precious little company.
The Chairman
Richter (pictured) departed for the quest shortly before 11 a.m. from the Quinnipiack Club on Church Street. He manages the club, which, like the Republican Party itself, symbolizes to some a bygone, more genteel era in New Haven.
Technically Richter is also “the chairman,” the head of New Haven’s Republican Party, which like the Q Club once held significant clout in the city. But like the Q, the New Haven GOP is still kicking. It even has members: 2,458 at last count, compared to 45,549 registered Democrats and 64,302 voters overall. The party last elected a mayor in 1951; it couldn’t find a single person to run for alderman or mayor last fall.
But this Friday, Richter’s fight against Democratic hegemony in New Haven was on hold. His fight Friday was against his own party, a quest to return it to its Yankee roots, the pro-fiscal responsibility but moderate-on-social-issues platform of its past. (Remember Abe Lincoln? The ACLU? Lowell Weicker?) Richter and the few Republicans who qualify as delegates to the state convention were hoping to nominate former U.S. Rep. Chris Shays, a moderate in the Weicker/Stewart McKinney mold, as the party’s candidate for the open U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Joe Lieberman.
It wasn’t going to be easy. But who said life as a New Haven Republican is ever easy?
It still does have its perks.
“It’s the oldest private club in Connecticut,” Richter said as he showed me the Q Club’s ornate rooms, all wood paneling and tall windows, before departing for Hartford. “Some people like to believe that Mory’s is older, but the truth is that Mory’s didn’t become a private club until 1904. We’ve been around since 1871.” Business leaders still lunch there. The Chamber holds events; even an two-decade-entrenched populist Democrat will hold a fundraiser there.
Asked what it is like to support the Grand Old Party in a Democratic stronghold, Elser answered with a good-natured laugh.
“We are just a small band of scrappy politicos trying to keep the Republican Party going,” he said as we climbed into his silver S.U.V.
Elser — a Yale graduate and proud Yankee who lent his family name and grandfather’s moose head to the now defunct Richter’s Cafe/ Taft Tap Room — has unsuccessfully run for both mayor and U.S. Congressman. His face is affable, but nonetheless seems fixed in a tired expression, at least when politics is the issue at hand.
“What is frustrating,” he said as we drove out of the city, “is that my party hasn’t been able to stay a relevant force.”
“What people don’t realize,” he went on, “is that to be affiliated with the Republican Party in New Haven doesn’t mean that you are accepting the entire Republican Party platform. It means you are trying to be an opposition party, and perhaps a voice for change.”
It soon became evident that Elser is none too happy with the rightward direction his party has taken in the past few years.
“I genuinely believe in a smaller, less intrusive federal government,” he said as we tried to find a spot in the huge parking lot of the Hartford Convention Center. “That’s what puts me at odds with the Republican Party. Because most of the positions where I take exception to the party are where Republicans are advocating for government intrusion into people’s lives. I think the conservative thing to do is to let people alone, to let them make their own decisions.”
The Firefighter
Elser parked and entered the huge, hanger-like space that is the Hartford Convention Center. It has large windows and multicolored carpets not unlike the ones found in airport hallways. The red, white, and blue balloons that filled the place gave it the festive atmosphere of a kid’s birthday party — and indeed, everyone in attendance seemed thrilled to be there. The crowd was mostly white-haired, though a few young people ran around waving banners with the overeagerness of interns.
Elser introduced me to the New Haven delegation. There were five regular delegates and two “super-delegates” in all, kind and in high spirits. (The delegates: Elser, Robert Thomas, Joseph Corradino, Kevin Arnold, Victor Fasano. The superdelegates: Marlene Napolitano, Melissa Papantones.) Although New Haven is Connecticut’s second-largest city, its GOP team was among the smallest groups at the convention, which parcels delegates depending on Republican voter turnout. At the previous week’s Democratic convention, by contrast, the New Haven delegation had over 100 members.
We were having coffee in one of the Hartford Center’s many bars when a broad-shouldered man in a dark blue blazer approached. He was introduced as Frank Ricci, “as in Ricci v. DeStefano,” the Supreme Court reverse discrimination case. I noticed that Ricci wore a Republican Party pin. I asked him if he had ever been stigmatized for his political beliefs serving as a firefighter in a city so in bed with the Democratic Party. Like so many of his fellow Republicans, Ricci answered my question with a hearty laugh.
“I’ve been attacked on a national level for my political beliefs,” he said grinnin. “The city government tried to socially engineer the Fire Department, and I stood up against that. A lot of people didn’t like it.”
I asked Ricci whether public services should be a mirror of the communities they serve, lest they not be able to serve them well.
“I respectfully disagree,” he said. “When somebody’s house is burning, they don’t care if you are black, white, or Hispanic. They only care that you show up quickly, do the work competently, and treat them with respect. I work in a predominately Hispanic neighborhood, and I don’t speak Spanish. I always have people from the other side of the isle tell me that you can’t serve a Spanish-speaking constituency if you don’t speak Spanish — but respect is a universal language, and you serve them by giving them the same level of care that you would give anyone.”
Ricci went on to highlight the importance of a meritocratic system in a profession that increasingly requires specialized skills.
The fire department, he said, “isn’t about strong backs and weak minds anymore. We have to answer hazardous materials calls, for example. New Haven is no stranger to terrorism — they never found caught the guy who put the bomb at the law school. We have an airport, and the second busiest port in the country. When a Yale kid decides to climb East Rock and gets stuck, we need to know how to rappel. Our firefighters have to be competent in really technical skills. And when someone calls 911, there’s no time to look something up in a book — everything is time-sensitive. Not everyone can do this job. People who think otherwise don’t respect our profession, and we need to educate them so that they do.”
Despite his fierce love for his party, Ricci insisted that the fire department transcends political boundaries.
“For example,” he said, “when it comes to funding, we enjoy the support of the Democratic Party. We’ll support anyone who backs us up. The fact is that everyone wants a good fire service, and that the[department] is the only part of government that really works. You call 911, and we show up.”
Indeed, Ricci and his fellow firefighter union leaders return the favor to local Democrats. They endorsed New Haven’s Democrat mayor in last fall’s election, the man Ricci sued before the Supreme Court.
“Tell me,” Ricci went on, with a note of pride in his voice, “what other city agency will show up within minutes if you just pick up the phone, any day of the week, holiday or not, and without any paperwork?”
That wasn’t the last we would hear from Frank Ricci Friday.
The Comedian
Around 2 p.m., the convention broke up so that delegates could nominate candidates for Congress. The New Haven delegation took its place in the room set aside for the Third U.S. Congressional district and listened to a speech by State Party Chairman Jerry Labriola.
“We want to turn Connecticut into a red state! We need to show people that we are proud to be Republicans!” Labriola declared.
After the chairman’s speech, the convention’s president asked for nominations. East Haven state Sen. Len Fasano raised his hand and gave an eloquent oration praising the merits of Wayne Winsley (pictured). Winsley recently moved into the Third District so he could run against entrenched Democratic incumbent Rosa DeLauro. Republican have generally put up sacrificial lambs against DeLauro (first elected in 1990, the last time a Republican came close to beating her), concentrating their resources and higher-profile candidates in races that polling shows they have a shot at winning.
Winsley did stand out in the convention hall Friday. He’s black.
“Wayne was born in the projects and raised in an orphanage,” said Fasano. “But he understood that, in America, you’ll get far if you work hard. So he joined the Navy, where he served 12 years. Wayne used to do stand-up comedy, and was a motivational speaker for kids. He’s promised to get the federal government out of our schools, and that the first thing he’ll do is repeal Obamacare — because, as he says, giving money to the government is like giving whiskey and the car keys to your teenage sons.”
Any other nominations? The room fell silent for a moment. Then someone who identified himself only as “a Hamden resident” stood up. Without going to the podium, much less giving a speech, he nominated a man named Steve Packard for the race. Another Hamden resident seconded the motion, again without ceremony.
The chairmen of each Town Committee then counted the votes of their delegates. Elser joined the pack: One by one, they went to the podium to publicly announce the result of their ballots, and town after town, Winsley got all the votes. Winsley went to the podium to give his victory speech.
“When the dust clears out in Hartford on the day of the election,” he said, shaking his hands in the air, “the air will be filled with Republican voices singing, ‘Free at last! Free at last!’”
The overwhelmingly white and male crowd went crazy.
When people started leaving, I approached the candidate to ask him about his stance on Secure Communities, the federal immigration program that has drawn opposition in New Haven (the epicenter of the Third District) and in other Democratic circles. Critics say it pressures local communities to detain immigrants arrested for minor offenses like traffic violations, violating their rights and upending families. Supporters say it provides a needed new tool for feds to catch people here illegally who commit felonies. The program has become a headline controversy in Connecticut.
Winsley said he didn’t know about the program.
“Well,” he said after hearing the broad outlines, “I think that if you are here illegally, and you are brought to the attention of the police, you should be deported.”
I asked whether the gravity of the crime matters.
“It shouldn’t matter,” he replied.
“What if it is just a parking ticket?” I asked.
“Even if it’s only a parking ticket,” he said.
“And what if they have a family?” I said. “What if they have children who are American citizens?”
The candidate froze.
“So, is that a yes or a no?” I asked.
“Well, I don’t think it’s that simple,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s a complicated issue and there isn’t a yes or no answer.”
Winsley then excused himself.
The Election
Towards 7 p.m., the whole convention assembled for the day’s main event, the nomination for the Senate candidate to succeed Joe Lieberman.
Delegates rang cowbells and furiously waved placards with the names of different candidates. The New Haven delegates all rooted for Shays (pictured), the moderate Yankee Republican in the mold of the once-relevant New Haven Republican Party. Like the New Haven GOP, Shays was fighting an uphill battle Friday, against self-financing millionaire world-wrestling executive Linda McMahon.
Several other minor candidates technically were running for the nomination, too. Among them was an Albanian immigrant by the name Peter Lumaj. His pamphlets showed him scowling in a dark gray suit, his raven-black hair combed back with a generous application of pomade. His slogan was: “God, Country, Family. Unapologetically American. Absolutely Conservative.”
The program opened with a video showing the dangers of Democratic rule. It consisted of a series of black-and-white clips of journalists, experts, and Republican politicians bemoaning the state of affairs under Connecticut’s Malloy administration. It was set to the theme music of “Requiem for a Dream.”
After the video, Frank Ricci was invited to give a speech. The firefighter spoke eloquently, though it was hard to hear him. The whole convention seemed bent on continuing conversations, producing a sound not unlike a loud nest of hornets.
“This election,” Ricci shouted into the microphone, “is not just about the economy! This election is about our way of life. One more liberal judge in the Supreme Court, and we’ll see the death of the individual.”
Ricci knows about Supreme Court justices. He was the name plaintiff in the firefighters’ class-action lawsuit against the City of New Haven for alleged reverse racial discrimination in hiring. The case made it to the U.S. Supreme Court. It caused a national conversation about revisiting affirmative action. And Ricci won.
When Ricci finished at the stage, he ceded the microphone to state Sen. John McKinney, who took pride in the fact that he had always voted against increasing the minimum wage. After McKinney came the different congressional nominees, including Winsley.
“Free at last! Free at last!” repeated Winsley, a former comedian. Again the delegates roared.
The vote for the nomination began after more than an hour of preliminaries. It took more than three hours.
At first Elser and the New Haven Five took heart. It seemed that Chris Shays had an advantage. But not for long; McMahon, who could be seen roaming the room in a bright pink suit, soon overtook him. The faces of the New Haven delegation (pictured) grew more and more somber as it became evident that their candidate was going to lose by a large margin, though Shays qualified for the ballot in the August GOP primary.
Final score: 730 – 389. Another defeat for the Grand Old Party of Elser’s past. Another window of opportunity to keep fighting.
“Well,” said Elser when the convention nominated McMahon little after 11 p.m., “at least Shays made it to the primaries. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m too much of a partisan to stay and hear what she has to say.”
The Long Way Home
After more than 12 hours at the convention, Elser’s expression again seemed tired. I asked him why he doesn’t become an independent or a conservative Democrat, if he is so frustrated with the Republican Party.
“I would be lying if I said I hadn’t thought about that,” he said softly as he headed home, “but I’ve always registered a Republican. I would be a hypocrite if I changed parties just for the sake of expediency.
“And, realistically,” he went on, “the Republican Party needs to adapt. It will only represent moderates if moderates continue to be a part of the party and to speak up.”
About ten minutes before we arrived in New Haven, he told me that the single issue that sets him the most apart from the G.O.P. at large is same-sex marriage.
“If they really wanted to protect marriage,” he said,” they should be fighting divorce. And if the federal government really wanted to leave it up to the states, [it] should simply say that any legal union of two adults shall be treated equally under the law. It’s that simple. The state of Connecticut has decided that my partner and I could get married if we wanted to. The federal government should recognize the right of the states to make that decision, and recognize that marriage.”
For now, if the majority of the people of his party had it their way, he and his partner probably could not get married anywhere in the country. For Elser and New Haven’s dwindling band of Republicans, that fight continues another day.