Democratic Town Committee of New Canaan, CT

Sunday, Sept. 12th

4pm to 7pm
Kiwanis Park
Old Norwalk Road, New Canaan
Adults $30 (children free),
with proceeds helping the DTC help candidates win!

Email us at bluecanaan@gmail.com and we will get the tickets to you or answer your questions.

Many candidates coming, stay tuned for more details…

The campaign for the 26th state senate district is now fully underway.  John Hartwell had a good day today.  First, he got the news that he qualified for the Clean Elections Program.  And he had an op-ed published in New Canaan’s Patch, in which he called for this campaign to focus on the seriousness of the challenges the next senate will face, not the name-calling and playground politics that we’ve become accostomed to from Hartford incumbents like Toni Boucher.

It’s often said that people get the government they deserve, but I believe we deserve much, much better than this. We deserve a legislature that can set aside differences and work together with the governor on our most pressing challenge—creating jobs in Connecticut.

He’s right.  Hartford partisanship helps no one.  It’s all well and good for Toni Boucher to try (and fail) to say “no” ad infinium, but do we really have a voice if our senator isn’t even at the negotiating  table?  Hartwell will bring his impressive personal experience and a real understanding of how government ought to function in the best interest of all his constituents to the next session and finally ensure that this part of Fairfield County is truly represented.

The 26th district includes part of New Canaan, along with all or part of Wilton, Westport, Weston, Redding, Ridgefield, and Bethel.

The other part of New Canaan sits in the 36th state senate district, where Nancy Barton is running to better represent us and oust another partisan Republican.

With the primaries behind us and Labor Day approaching, it’s time to move on to the Main Event: November 2nd. On that day, voters in the seventeen towns of Connecticut’s Fourth District will decide whether Jim Himes or Dan Debicella have better ideas and better represent us. A lot will depend on exactly which voters show up to vote. But those that do need to understand two things about Dan Debicella: He is one of the most partisan members of the state’s legislature where he has backed some very extreme measures, and in this campaign he has offered some bizarre proposals, which are impossible to implement.

In a previous post, I critiqued (debunked? exposed?) his proposal to repeal the unspent stimulus and replace it with a tax cut. Two problems:

1. There isn’t much unspent stimulus money left to repeal, yet his proposal costs $350 billion.
2. And the tax cut proposal, while very expensive (and deficit financed, see 1. above) has little stimulative effect and is likely to produce significantly higher long-term deficits (according to the CBO).

Does anyone else remember that the Bush administration tried a tax rebate stimulus in 2008? Checks went out in March and April of 2008. Let’s see the private-sector job growth we experienced since (note: this is private-sector jobs only, since Republicans never seem to think public employees have real jobs):

Oh boy. Let’s do that Bush idea again.  Even the highest-ranked Republican member of the House Budget Committee, Rep. Paul Ryan (R, WI) dismisses Debicella’s idea. When asked “So do Republicans have any demand-side solutions, even if they’re just tax cuts? Is there talk of a payroll tax holiday, or anything similar?” he said “Temporary stuff doesn’t work. These short-term stimulative things like [tax] rebates don’t work.”  If there’s a Debicella vs. Ryan debate, I will get my popcorn ready.

I could go on and on about the successes of the stimulus and the foolishness of repeal (just ask my wife – thank heaven she puts up with me). But I’ve more or less done that already. Heck, even our town’s staunchly Republican state representative, John Hetherington, agrees.

Now I want to go on and on about Debicella’s other big idea: capping federal spending at 20% of GDP. Debicella’s proposal is to “take [spending decisions] out of the politicians’ hands and create a federal spending cap that would allow the federal government to be no more than 20% of GDP.” He then proposes to “let it grow at inflation plus population growth” Debicella suggests that this would be a magic budget bullet because “you are not allowed to spend more… it’ll force politicians of both parties, all the incumbents, to make trade-offs so they can’t just pass out pork spending.”

This is ridiculous on its face. I can’t believe he said it. Congress would “not be allowed” to authorize a spending bill? Allowed? My questions are:

• Whose hands should the spending decisions be in? Because Article I of the US Constitution is pretty clear on this.
• Is Debicella proposing a Constitutional Amendment? If it’s just a public law, there are big problems (spelled out below).
• What is the enforcement mechanism? Who pays a fine or goes to jail?
• When do you calculate GDP? Because it’s now typically done on a quarterly basis after the fact, while a great deal of the spending is approved about a year ahead of time. You don’t know GDP until after the spending has taken place. So if projections are off by a bit, it could trigger the enforcement and send someone to jail (the president who signed the spending bill into law? The chair of the appropriations committee? All 435 reps? Just those who voted yes?), unless there is no penalty.
• Is there a single economist anywhere on the planet who thinks that, as a general policy, it’s wise to “allow” government to spend more as the economy grows and not “allow” it to spend at the same levels when the economy retracts?  I mean one person with any credentials who has argued that government spending should mimic the trends in the GDP for some reason.  Maybe they’re out there, but I doubt it. It’s exactly the opposite of responsible.
• If the incremental increases are tied to inflation and population growth, when are these calculated and how? You have the same problem — spending is approved in advance; the inflation rate is only known afterward. Population growth is estimated by the Census bureau in years ending in anything but a zero.  Can you imagine the conspiracy theorists attacking the Census bureau even more than they do now?  Also, for what it’s worth, the Fed has as much (or more) authority as any other entity to effect inflation. Does this vest spending authority in the Fed now? Again, that pesky Constitution seems to get in the way if the answer is “yes.”

If Debicella is proposing a Constitutional Amendment, does he really think 2/3 of each chamber and the legislatures of 38 states will agree (those same state legislatures that received stimulus aid of $314 billion in 2009 and at least $90 billion in 2010)? I think I can list thirteen states that would say no.

Assuming he’s not proposing a Constitutional Amendment, Debicella is not the first person to suggest that the government limit spending by enacting a public law. Remember Section 7 of Public Law #95-435? Yeah, me neither. Passed in 1978, it states “beginning with fiscal year 1981, the total budget outlays of the Federal Government shall not exceed its receipts.” See, wasn’t that easy?!? But it has no sanction, no penalty, and has clearly been ignored by Presidents since, with the exception of Bill Clinton (the other three were Republicans, by the way, none of whom ever produced a balanced budget). Making something a public law with no penalty is not a serious proposal to solve a pressing problem. It is a gimmick — as is the law already on the books “mandating” a balanced budget.

I concede that Debicella is not proposing to balance the budget. He is talking only about the spending side. So the existence of the 1978 law is not the same idea, but I think its existence and complete futility are instructive. What sanction does Debicella propose? Again, who goes to jail or pays a fine if spending reaches 20.00001% of GDP in a year (or is it quarterly)? And what happens when GDP is revised, given new data? Since spending is approved a year or so before it takes place, what happens if there’s an economic downturn after that?

I assume Debicella is talking about all spending, the sum across the approved budget and all subsequent appropriations in the fiscal year. So, for example, during the Bush presidency, the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were not in the budget. Those costs were paid though supplemental appropriations. There are significant supplemental appropriations. With GDP and the inflation rate fluctuating and subject to revision (and population growth unknown, simply estimated), would Congress be “allowed” to act and appropriate money — you know, do its job?

I will give Debicella the benefit of the doubt and guess that he would not object to true emergency spending that exceeded his impossible-to-calculate-or-impose-and-probably-unconstitutional cap. As one recent example, five years ago this week Congress provided $10.5 billion as emergency spending for relief following Hurricane Katrina. That sort of thing is clearly emergency spending. Other cases are not so clear. Will Congress avoid the temptation to label every supplemental appropriation “emergency” spending once the Debicella-Solution-to-Everything-by-Doing-Nothing plan is in place? Even without such a “mandatory” cap on spending, this year’s Supplemental Appropriations bill included $60 billion in “emergency” spending. Some of that was related to natural disasters. But over $13 billion went to Veterans’ Affairs “for disability compensation to Vietnam veterans” when the VA chose to “expand the number of illnesses presumed to be related to exposure to Agent Orange.” Is that an emergency?

My point is: there are literally thousands (tens of thousands? could it hit a hundred thousand?) of specific appropriations, some in the budget, others done though supplementals. Does Debicella really think that an arbitrary “mandatory” spending law with no enforcement mechanism and no penalty for anyone will affect a single one of these appropriations? Does he really think his toothless proposal will “force” elected representatives and senators to make “trade-offs” that result in a balanced budget and low taxes for everyone (hooray!)? If he does, he is dangerously näive.

Or does it just feel good to say there is a magic trick that will fundamentally alter the primary job of the most powerful legislature the world has ever seen? I ask anyone considering a vote for this guy: does it feel good to pretend this is a real policy? Because it isn’t. Both of Debicella’s proposals — on stimulus and on the very nature of budgeting — are radically wrong for this nation.

What is it about the end of August that fosters the suspension of common sense in New Canaan?  A year ago, President Obama’s exhortation to the nation’s school children to work harder and take personal responsibility for their education was denounced as a secret plot to indoctrinate our kids into godless communism, or worse, I guess, Muslim socialism.  This year, the willingness of the Board of Education to even consider how a new technology might be used within schools is suddenly the equivalent of tattooing ID numbers on students’ arms and turning our schools into tools of a totalitarian state.

For the record, at its last meeting August 18th, the New Canaan Board of Education was asked by a local technology firm if it might be interested in participating in a National Science Foundation-funded project to investigate how a new technology might be used by school districts. This technology is a new, longer range radio frequency (RF) identification chip.  Such a chip might be imbedded in ID cards; it could also be attached to assets like library books, laptop computers, and video cameras.  This new RF technology (referred to as “Dash 7”) has a range of up to 1,000 meters inside buildings, and up to 2,000 meters outdoors.

As the Board’s discussion (which, as is every other regular meeting of the Board of Ed, was broadcast live on Channel 78 and is replayed on Thursdays and Mondays) quickly revealed, Board members immediately grasped the privacy risks associated with the deployment of such a technology.  We also recognized some potential benefits this technology might bring: cutting down on theft (a non-trivial issue in our schools,) the ability to quickly locate a special needs student in an emergency, and helping maintain the integrity of the High School’s open campus policy were among examples cited.  And as the dad of three NCHS graduates whose kids have all participated in nationally-funded research at the universities they have attended, I opined that regardless of whether or not anything practical or commercially viable came out of the effort, the opportunity for students to participate in an “official” research project could be a worthwhile learning experience in its own right.

At the conclusion of its discussion, the Board decided that there might indeed be some possible utility in this new technology for school districts in general and New Canaan in particular, and gave its permission for the administration to  -are you ready? – have further discussions about applying for a grant that would at no cost to the school district be used to test potential applications of this new technology in schools in ways that would need the subsequent approval of the board before proceeding.  Call me naïve, but to me it seems like this is still pretty far away from instituting a policy requiring the mandatory subcutaneous injection of ID chips into all kindergarteners.

New Canaan Public Schools is a high-achieving school district, one of the best performing districts in the state and in the country.  In my opinion (and not speaking for the Board here), we get to stay that way by exercising leadership in all aspects of our district’s performance: pushing the envelope, not being satisfied with the status quo, celebrating our successes while always probing how we can do better.  You don’t get to demonstrate leadership by waiting on the sidelines watching what other people do and then trying to copy them.  This applies to our administration, and it applies to our board.  Not every idea discussed is a good one; Board members don’t always agree,   and even after careful discussion we might not always get it 100% correct (elementary school district redistricting back in 2000 comes to mind.)  But we have to be able to identify, evaluate and test different ways to improve, do things better, and do new things, even if they are unvetted and potentially controversial.  Last I checked, that’s how progress gets made.

I have no issue with people having opinions on such things; indeed I think I and other board members welcome hearing from people about their opinons and concerns.  What is a little disappointing is how quickly otherwise rational people are ready to suspend disbelief and assume the worst based on a 15 second clip in a blog posted somewhere (the Drudge Report? Come on.)   We live here.  Our kids go, or went, to school here.  We broadcast our meetings live on TV.  Our phone numbers are in the student directories.   Our emails are posted on the district web site (www.newcanaan.k12.ct.us).  If you hear or read something that doesn’t quite make sense, instead of sounding the alarm and raising the militia, maybe you could just give one of us a call?

(Jim Kucharczyk is serving his third term on the New Canaan Board of Education.  The opinions expressed herein are his own and not necessarily reflective of the New Canaan Board of Education.)

The forum held at New Canaan High August 12 is currently being shown in it’s entirety on CT-N, the state information network, www.ctn.state.ct.us the ‘recent on demand’ section.

Direct link: http://ct-n.com/ondemand.asp?ID=5723

This is the first publicly released poll I’ve seen on the Himes v. Debicella race. It comes from an outfit called the American Action Forum. Its findings?

Despite challenger Dan Debicella having just 35 percent name recognition compared to Rep. Jim Himes’s 93 percent name recognition, Himes leads by a slim 46 to 42 percent margin.

That’s weird.

The AAF polled a number of congressional races around the country and found the GOP candidates doing well. The methodology, as reported, does not seem too peculiar:

All respondents were selected randomly from a list of registered voters in the district, and indicated they are likely to vote in the elections for Congress this fall, and interviews were conducted by live interviewers. Quotas in each district… were set by gender, age, and county consistent with past participation in the district. Each district included 400 interviews.

But without cross-tabs, it’s difficult to see just how representative this sample is. I notice party affiliation is not one of the quotas listed. I’m no expert on polling, but I would assume that’s the single biggest variable in poll results, so it seem to me that a truly representative sample ought to reflect party enrollment district-wide. Then again, if they truly sampled 400 randomly off the voter registration list, I think the sample should be pretty proportional to the general population. That would be true of gender or age as well, so why stipulate that those are representative by design but omit party affiliation? Hmmm.

I am skeptical because I don’t believe that only 12% of voters in our district are undecided. I also don’t believe 42% are going for Debicella yet. Plus, the fivethirtyeight.com pollster ratings don’t even list AAF, so I figured they must be brand-new. Indeed, they are. Brand new and GOP-branded. From a NY Times article announcing the formation of AAF last February, in an article titled “Republican Group to Promote Conservative Ideas”:

A group of prominent Republicans is forming an organization to develop and market conservative ideas, copying a successful Democratic model and hoping to capitalize on the fund-raising and electioneering possibilities opened up by a recent Supreme Court ruling.

Republicans who are donors, board members or both include Haley Barbour, the governor of Mississippi; Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida; Ed Gillespie, like Mr. Barbour a former chairman of the Republican Party; Fred Malek, an investor and official in the Nixon and first Bush administrations; Robert K. Steel, a former executive of Wachovia and Goldman Sachs who was a Treasury official in the second Bush administration, and Kenneth G. Langone, a founder of Home Depot and a former director of the New York Stock Exchange.

Maybe their polling is not suspect. Maybe they aren’t trying to advance a narrative or manipulate coverage of the race. And maybe people in CT-04 know the names of all the state senators in the district (quick — who represents Oxford in state senate? Yeah, I don’t know either) and feel like they have enough information to cast a ballot. Or maybe this poll is garbage, being promoted by a right-wing outfit through right-wing media to give Debicella a fundraising talking point.

I can’t really tell.

Update: A reader sent me the cross-tabs! Turns out they are available online here if you care to flip through 104 pages of questions and responses. If I’m reading it correctly, the poll included 22% Republicans, 30% Democrats, 44.5% unaffiliated, and a handful of non-responders or minor party respondents. Yet, by “ideology” 39.5% identified as Conservative, 24% Liberal, and 33.5% Moderate (the remainder must not have responded or chose something else).

And, notably, 44% of those polled expressed support for the Tea Party. I don’t believe 44% of likely voters in our district support the Tea Party. No way.

From CPTV, here is the full debate between Dan Malloy and Ned Lamont that took place on August 3rd.

Yesterday, Governor Rell vetoed the legislature’s attempt to bring Connecticut’s public campaign financing law into compliance with a recently-issued order from the US Supreme Court. That order arose in an Arizona case, and the Court essentially said you can’t have public campaign grants designed to match the spending of other candidates (if I understand it correctly). The Connecticut legislature decided to bring our plan into complicance by raising the initial grants to candidates. In the case of governor — from $3 million to $6 million. They also changed the restrictions on lobbyist contributions to candidates, but that’s not my immediate concern. I’m worried about a scenario under which Rell’s veto stands, the matching grants are disallowed in a court, and the Democratic nominee for governor has half the funding he was expecting, finding himself at a 3- or 4-to-1 spending disadvantage in the general election.

After Tuesday’s primary, we will know the nominees of each party for governor. I do not think a Fedele win is very likely on the Republican side; Tom Foley will be the GOP nominee. I admit that I have a very poor read on the horse race on our side. I am assuming Ned Lamont is still leading, but I haven’t seen any valid polls lately, so I have a hard time assessing changes in the race as the election approaches. Dan Malloy could very well pull out a late rally win. And if he does, I think we face the potential for a very, very bad fall campaign.

If Rell’s veto is not overridden, Malloy would be campaigning in the general on $3 million. I believe Foley will spend many multiples of that. If Malloy applies for a matching grant, Foley will sue. He already sued to block the grant to his primary opponent, a guy he was beating by 25 or 35 points at the time. Of course he will sue Malloy, who would be well ahead of Foley on August 11 if both are the nominees. I don’t see how the court ignores the US Supreme Court’s order in the Arizona case. Maybe there is some significant difference between their law and ours, but from what I’ve read it seems clear that there will be no matching grant. From WTNH’s story on the topic: “If Democrat Dan Malloy wins their primary and faces millionaire Tom Foley in the final election, Malloy won’t get any extra public funds to be competitive.”

How likely is an override? A post at MLN makes the case that it is pretty unlikely. In the House, 75 Democrats (and no Republicans) voted for the bill. Twenty-one were absent. Let’s say all 21 now vote for the override. You’d have 96 votes. That falls six short. So you need six of the eighteen Democratic “no” votes to switch (and run the table on all 21 who didn’t vote originally), assuming no Republican votes “yes” to double Malloy’s campaign funding.

So here’s the nightmare scenario: The legislature can’t override the veto. Malloy and Foley prevail in the primaries. Foley sues Malloy to block the matching grant. Malloy’s strategy goes out the window, because he now has half the money he was planning on. Foley can define Malloy with ads questioning Stamford’s success and misrepresenting any little thing in Malloy’s lengthy public record. Our governor candidate can’t fund his own Get Out the Vote effort statewide. Meanwhile, Linda McMahon is funding one. An electorate already inclined to vote Republican for governor shows up and does so again, and we have Governor Foley. Not incidentally, those voters don’t vote for Himes, Courtney or Murphy while they’re there.

This whole business of arguing over whether public campaign financing SHOULD be able to offset independent expenditures is not really important, in my opinion, now. Yes, it is an important issue. But not now. We have twelve weeks to elect a new governor. I have yet to see really compelling differences between Lamont and Malloy on policy. Transportation, education, taxation and budgeting, social services, etc… they are much more alike than different (I really think that even if you’re 100% happy with candidate X, candidate Y should make you at least 88% happy, too).

I see three cases where the nightmare scenario doesn’t come to pass: 1) Fedele is the GOP nominee 2) The legislature overrides the veto or 3) Lamont is our nominee. Items 1) and 2) don’t seem likely. Only 3) is within our power. We haven’t won a gubernatorial election in twenty-four years. What do you say we end that streak now.

Spotted on Facebook today, from the Division of Obvious Things:

In case you don’t know, Bob is a blogger from, well, Milford. “CT Bob” contains a lot of great coverage of state politics, including an archive of videos of most candidates discussing their positions and backgrounds, many of which I use in posts here.

Congressman Jim Himes appeared on Fox News to discuss his Deficit Reduction Working Group. In case you missed it, here it is. At the end, the anchor tells him to “stay strong.” Got that right.

It’s awfully easy to say you favor reducing the deficit. The hard question is “how?” How do you do that?

We’ve said we’re willing to stand behind a bunch of cuts, some of which will not be popular, and if you disagree… come to the table with specific proposals.

- Jim Himes