When Susan Bysiewicz talks about the chances of Democrats winning their first gubernatorial election in 24 years, she thinks back to watching John DeStefano debate M. Jodi Rell.
The year was 2006. DeStefano was the Democratic challenger to the Republican incumbent governor. By most accounts — including those of some Rell partisans — DeStefano destroyed Rell in the debate. Politely, of course. One candidate, DeStefano, emerged conversant with issues and determined to tackle them. One, Rell, looked lost.
Connecticut yawned. The Democrats went on to lose the gubernatorial election, as they have time and again since their last victory in 1986.
Two Democrats who tried and failed to earn a spot on that stage in 2006 are back at it now: Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz and Stamford Mayor Dannel Malloy. They’ve formed “exploratory” committees to seek the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. Along with another Democratic hopeful, former House Speaker Jim Amann, Bysiewicz and Malloy are criss-crossing the state making their case, including recent stops at the New Haven Independent‘s office.
In separate interviews, they offered similar critiques of the governor. They offered similar overall themes of reversing the state’s job losses: 30,000 disappeared in 2008 alone, with another 60,000 to 90,000 predicted for this year.
They presented somewhat different visions of how to offer an alternative — and of how to view that lopsided 2006 DeStefano-Rell debate.
DeStefano’s advisers had impressed on him the need that night to avoid looking mean, or angry, or hostile in any way to the popular incumbent with the grandmotherly image. A combative approach might pay off in most campaign debates. But it would backfire here.
If she gets the chance to go toe-to-toe with Rell in 2010, Susan Bysiewicz is confident she won’t hold back. If Rell runs for reelection — and the conventional wisdom right now is that she plans to — the Democrats will need a tough standard-bearer, Bysiewicz’s partisans say.
Bysiewicz, who’s 47, has taken on an insider-favored female challenge before. She left the white gloves at home. In 1998 she wrested the nomination for secretary of the state through tireless campaigning and with a slash-and-burn TV ad basically accusing her female opponent of supporting child molesters. Bysiewicz has served as secretary of the state ever since, awaiting her moment to occupy the chair once filled by her role model, the late Gov. Ella Grasso. She leads the pack so far in early polling on potential Democratic gubernatorial candidates.
“I was very impressed with his performance during the debate,” Bysiewicz said of Destefano. But “you almost got the sense that he was holding back. He didn’t want to be seen as attacking ‘grandma.’”
“I don’t think,” Bysiewicz added, “that dynamic will be true if I’m the candidate.”
To Dan Malloy, any candidate would have faced an “impossible” situation in that debate. It was impossible to turn people’s attention to the governor’s race: The economy was strong; Rell’s low-key manner offered relief from the scandals of her predecessor, Gov. John Rowland; and a different campaign, for U.S. Senate, had captured the attention of the state.
Malloy, who’s 53 and retiring this year after 14 years as Stamford’s mayor, argued that in 2010 he’ll be able to convince people to tune in by capitalizing on a crisis atmosphere in Connecticut.
“At some point people are going to make a connection between what’s wrong with Connecticut,” he insisted, “and the person who’s been leading it as number one or number two [lieutenant] for the past 16 years.”
Can We Talk?
To guide them toward that connection, the Democratic candidate will need to force “honest conversation” on the state about the depth of the state’s financial troubles and the need for tough decisions, Malloy said. He claimed he has been a lonely voice doing that so far this political season.
He identifies not just Rell, but “the mainstream media” and his fellow Democrats as culprits.
Malloy’s Exhibit A: Rell’s Feb. 4 budget address.
Rell, sounding very much like a candidate wanting to brand her opponents as tax-and-spend liberals, presented a budget with no tax increases. But it assumed a projected $6 billion budget gap over the following two years. Her own budget adviser had already put the gap at $8 billion. Other analysts put it higher.
In the legislative chamber where Rell delivered the address, Malloy immediately blasted it as phony. Meanwhile, he noted, his fellow Democratic mayors were praising Rell’s budget. Then “every major editorial board in the state endorsed what she said — and none of them did the math. Now we’ve got a lot of people with egg on their face.”
And they still won’t admit the obvious, in Malloy’s view: that taxes need to rise.
He wasn’t willing in the interview to commit to supporting a so-called “millionaire’s tax” on highest-income earners. But he said the state needs to institute a “progressive” income-tax hike.
“We can’t cut our way out of a $5 billion gap [projected for 2012]. We can’t cut our way out of a $10 billion gap [over the next two years,” Malloy insisted.
The state will need painful budget cuts, too, he said. He offered no specifics beyond eliminating general “non-civil service middle management” positions that have ballooned in agencies like the Department of Motor Vehicles.
Like Susan Bysiewicz, Malloy also criticized Rell for not offering a long-term vision for the state or hands-on management. Both “exploratory” Democratic candidates vowed to conduct a thorough review of how all state agencies operate day-to-day in order to restructure them.
Despite the need for tighter budgets, the state needs to restart the economy by making strategic investments that help businesses grow, both Malloy and Bysiewicz said. They identified different priorities for that investment. Malloy’s top four: transportation, education, housing, and economic development programs.
“Sustinet” Supporters
Bysiewicz identified two different issues as top priorities: health care and energy costs.
Those two costs alone most of all are driving people out of business or preventing them from opening new ones, Bysiewicz said. Her office, which collects statistics on state businesses, recorded a record 13,400 closings in 2008.
Bysiewicz embraced the notion of forming larger pools of people eligible to join state-negotiated health care insurance plans as a way both to lower costs and to move toward covering the 10 percent of Connecticut currently uninsured. She in particular endorsed the Universal Health Care Foundation’s “Sustinet” proposal. (Read about that here.) She spoke of the 700 to 800 people from all backgrounds who attended a Hartford rally to support the plan’s unveiling. That showed the state’s ready to support a universal plan, she argued.
Malloy also supports Sustinet, his campaign staff later clarified.
Bysiewicz has toured the state pushing the idea of larger insurance pools. (Click video to watch.) The Democrats passed one such plan last year; Gov. Rell vetoed it based on controversial estimates by insurance companies whose profit margins were threatened by the plan; they claimed it would end up raising rather than lower costs.
“The reason we’re talking about pooling is, it’s been successful in 25 other states,” Bysiewicz said. “The more clients you service,” the lower the rates that can be negotiated.
Any successful job-creation strategy must focus on businesses with three to nine employees, Bysiewicz argued. They constitute 75 percent Connecticut’s businesses. Those are the companies often unable to meet either health insurance premiums or electric bills.
She scored Rell for a pound-foolish proposed cut in the latter area. The governor wants to remove $10 million from a clean energy fund that helps homeowners and business owners make their buildings more energy efficient. Like health care investment, that fund more than pays for itself in the long run, Bysiewicz argued. She also argued that Rell is responsible for the Department of Utility Control’s inability to rein in rates, because she names its members.
Unlike Malloy, Bysiewicz wasn’t ready to support the idea of raising taxes. “There are a couple of things we have to do before talking” about that, she said, such as “eliminating corporate tax loopholes.”
“Warmed Over”
Rell’s office declined comment, referring calls to Republican State Chairman Chris Healy (pictured). He dismissed Malloy’s and Bysiewicz’s vision as “the same old warmed-over cliches about job creation.” Rell has indeed made tough choices that Democrats aren’t willing to make, he said.
Case in point: That Clean Energy Fund.
“Everyone’s program has value,” Healy said. “Clean energy fund, yeah it’s a great program. But you know what? The free market can respond to that problem in different ways. Right now we’re talking about people’s survival — their fear that they will not be able to provide basics to their family.
“Tell someone who lost their job, who’s up against keeping their house, that we have to keep the Clean Energy Fund. It’s not that easy.”
State government needs to focus on basic services, Healy argued. It can’t afford a lot of the programs Democrats endorse, or some of the commissions Rell has proposed eliminating, such as the Latino Puerto Rican Affairs Commission
Healy also disagreed with the critique that Rell has been a hands-off governor uninterested in reexamining government agencies’ mission. Her budget reflects that she is indeed rethinking the state’s role, he argued.
“Gov. Rell knows exactly what’s going on in the state,” Haley maintained. “This is a small state. Her management style is hers, and it has been effective. That’s why her popularity is high. People believe she is asking those questions.”