Chris Powell: Will real party competition ever return to Connecticut?
Blue places went Democratic in varying degrees, red ones Republican in Connecticut’s gubernatorial race.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
With the Democratic sweep in the Nov. 8 election, Connecticut remains pretty much a one-party state, which promises excess and even corruption more than good government. Changing the situation requires trying to understand what contributed to the election results.
Of course the controversies over former President Donald Trump and abortion were especially big advantages for Connecticut Democrats. Even the most pro-choice Republicans, such as gubernatorial nominee Bob Stefanowski, couldn't get past the abortion issue as his adversaries misrepresented his position.
Indeed, Stefanowski's campaign this year was far better than his campaign four years ago, which didn't go much beyond an unrealistic ambition to repeal the state income tax. This year Stefanowski addressed many issues specifically, drawing clear distinctions with Gov. Ned Lamont. But this time Stefanowski lost by more than three times as many votes as last time. The tide was against him and this time he was running against an incumbent.
The governor shamelessly exploited the advantages of incumbency, distributing during his campaign more state government financial patronage than any Connecticut governor in modern times had done. With $6 billion in state surplus funds, courtesy of "emergency" federal aid, the governor could camouflage state government's shaky finances and deflect concerns about higher taxes ahead, as with the return of the state gas tax in a few days.
The governor and Stefanowski both financed their own campaigns, but the governor, with huge inherited wealth, appears to have spent at least twice as much as his Republican challenger. Unlike the governor, Stefanowski had to work for the money he spent on his campaign.
With the exception of the nominee for U.S. representative in the 5th District, George Logan, the Republican underticket was weak, which may have been inevitable, since the minority party doesn't have much of a bench.
Leora Levy's challenge to U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal was an embarrassment, as she won the Republican primary as a Trump devotee who would outlaw abortion only to try to shed both poses in the general election campaign.
Polls suggested that Blumenthal, having been in elective office for almost 40 years, was growing tiresome and vulnerable, and his age showed during his debate with Levy. But he would not be beaten by an imposter.
xxx
The scope of the Republican failure in Connecticut may be best illustrated by the party's defeat in rich and traditionally Republican towns like Weston and in Fairfield County generally. Especially there Republicans should be asking themselves what future they have with Trump.
Indeed, if the party's failure to meet election expectations nationally this week is tied to Trump and the candidates he induced the party to nominate, and thus prompts Republicans to start jettisoning him as a gross liability, it may be a blessing in disguise.
xxx
Governor Lamont and the renewed Democratic majority in the General Assembly have won a great mandate that will feed desires for more government programs that only employ more Democrats, erode the private sector, and make more people dependent on government.
Republican leaders sometimes like to talk about the need to rebuild their party in the cities, which produce Connecticut's huge Democratic pluralities. But as government programs proliferate, the cities grow even more dependent on government and less open to political competition. Connecticut Democrats are proficient at merging government and party. Republicans are proficient at being quiet about it in the hope that the government employee unions won't campaign against them as much. Government's growth may already have locked Connecticut into being a one-party state.
xxx
But mandate elections can undermine themselves by fostering arrogance, and Governor Lamont may be hard pressed to resist the arrogance that will suffuse his party's legislative majorities despite the economic recession that has already begun.
In any case, if political competition in Connecticut is to be restored, it will have to begin with the Republicans who remain in the legislature. They will need to have something important to say and the courage to say it.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester. Connecticut. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)
Storyline of the left behind
“Aerie”, by Natick Mass., artist Roberta McGee Tuck, at the current group show “Shared Earth Habitat,’’ at Atlantic Wharf Gallery, Boston.
She says on her Web site:
“I am a fiber sculptor and a collector of lost objects. My work is inspired by the bits and fragments of land and sea debris that I gathers. Every object that I pick up has energy like an emotional artifact, containing a relation to an action, a person or an intriguing unknown. The depth and textures that are built up through sculptural experiments, become a layered narrative. On the surface, the objects within may only be unwanted debris, but the sculptural outcome that is composed is a multilayered storyline of what was left behind.’’
Natick Center. The Boston suburb has a very active arts community.
Photo by Rames1651
Physical reminders
Boston’s Old South Church, a United Church of Christ (Congregational) congregation organized in 1669
— Photo by GearedBull
“I mean to say that Boston is what she is today because the past is physically as well as traditionally a part of her modern life.”
David McCord (1897-1997), American poet and college fundraiser
Sermons behind the door
“That long fall,
when the voices stopped
in the tweed mouth
of his radio, and sermons
stood behind the door
of his study in files
no one would ever again inspect….’’
— “The Minister’s Death,’’ by Wesley McNair (born 1941), American poet, writer, editor and professor. He lives in Mercer, Maine.
The Mercer Union Meetinghouse, a historic church in the center of town, which is in the interior of The Pine Tree State.
‘A few incisive mornings’
— Photo by Peter.shaman
Besides the autumn poets sing,
A few prosaic days
A little this side of the snow
And that side of the haze.
A few incisive mornings,
A few ascetic eyes, —
Gone Mr. Bryant's golden-rod,
And Mr. Thomson's sheaves.
Still is the bustle in the brook,
Sealed are the spicy valves;
Mesmeric fingers softly touch
The eyes of many elves.
Perhaps a squirrel may remain,
My sentiments to share.
Grant me, O Lord, a sunny mind,
Thy windy will to bear!
—"November,’’ by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
Stock up now!
The Providence Art Club’s famous “Little Pictures Show” is underway, its 118th. It runs through Dec. 23.
The highly anticipated yearly exhibition will feature more than 600 works of art from the club’s own members and staff, all priced at $350 and under. This is the time to find the newest additions to your local-art collection, pick up some holiday gifts or just browse for inspiration. With a rotating inventory, works purchased from this exhibition are strictly "pay and take away" on the day of purchase.
Small-town presidential politics
Cohasset Town Common, with Congregational church in the center background and the Unitarian church partly obscured by trees at left.
—Photo by Wwoods
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
I rather fuzzily remember a flag-filled, informal motorcade in Cohasset, Mass., in 1956 for “Eisenhower for President’’. It was a fresh late-October day, with a northwest wind pulling the remaining red and orange leaves off the maples and the muted yellow ones off the hour-glass-shaped elms, of which we still had many, although Dutch elm disease was rapidly killing them off. Kids and their young parents applauded alongside the road.
We proceeded in our station wagon over a little bridge near the harbor and headed toward the classic town common (you can see it in The Witches of Eastwick), with the little pond with a fountain on a rock island in the middle of it. At the common, I recall, a generally genteel GOP campaign rally took place.
On two sides of the common were the two very white (in two senses of the word) Unitarian and Congregational churches. Nearby, on top of a granite outcropping, presided the neo-Gothic St. Stephen’s Church, a monument of the WASP upper-middle and upper class in the rather WASPY town. The local clan who owned much of Dow Jones & Co. had financed much of its building. See picture below of St. Stephen’s aristocratically looming over Cohasset’s downtown, next to the common.
The old line about the Episcopalians was “the Republican Party at prayer.’’ No more.
The town’s Catholic church, St. Anthony, was a few blocks away, in that still majority Protestant town. Its parishioners were generally of Irish, Italian and Portuguese background. We Protestants felt sorry for the Catholic kids because they had to go to catechism and confession (gulp!) and couldn’t eat meat on Fridays. The last rule, however, provided very good business for the local fishing fleet.
The more liberal and, for that time, “Bohemian,’’ folks attended the Unitarian Church – for which the joke motto was “the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man and the neighborhood of Boston.’’ The Unitarians removed as much as they could assertions about the divinity of Jesus from their hymns and liturgies. As the years passed, even references to God diminished. General, diffuse celebrations of the glories of nature and plugs for the Civil Rights Movement replaced them. The minister had the lovely name of the Rev. Roscoe Trueblood.
The Congregational (aka “Congo”) church in Cohasset was only vaguely Trinitarian. The Congos were more or less the direct descendants of the Puritans, the Unitarians less directly so.
There also was, and still is, a Hindu temple in town!
Back to the campaign motorcade. Some kids sang “Whistle while you work, Stevenson is a jerk,’’ of course a play on the song “Whistle While You Work,’’ from the Disney movie Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which all the children had seen.
It already seemed to me that politics was harsh.
Is it politically incorrect now to refer to “dwarfs’’?
The town and most of the rest of America went heavily for Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969) over a former Democratic governor of Illinois, Adlai E. Stevenson (1900-1965). But the Republican Party was a very different creature from its current version, and Ike was a good, middle-of-the road president, supporting incremental improvements in federal domestic programs and warding off war. Both Eisenhower and Stevenson were notably dignified.
You can understand why a few years later, soon before his death, a very tired Stevenson, then U.S. ambassador to the U.N., would say that “All I really wanted was to sit in the shade with a glass of wine and watch the dancers.” I’m pretty sure that many of us, tired of the increasing toxicity and tumult of public life, would sometimes want to declare a separate peace and maybe flee, with no forwarding address, and certainly no social media, to some remote, Arcadian place. One thinks of the phrase “a separate peace’’ in Hemingway’s World War I novel A Farewell to Arms and John Knowles’s boarding-school novel, set in World War II, A Separate Peace.
In the Cohasset air was the aroma from piles of raked up (not blown!) leaves being burned – an activity now banned, mostly for public health reasons. Many of us of a certain age still miss that sweet smell, now replaced in too many neighborhoods by the aroma of gasoline from shrieking leaf blowers. Before their parents burned the leaves, small children loved to burrow into big piles of them.
Ah, youth! I remember with a pang the town’s scenic shores and the material comfort available to so many of its residents, along with dark scenes out of a Eugene O’Neill play.
Buck up before signing up
Statue of Nobel Prize-winning playwright Eugene O'Neil (1888-1953) as a boy, overlooking the harbor of New London, Conn., where his family had a summer place and where some of his plays were based. As a young adult, he spent several years working in the merchant marine.
“The sea hates a coward.’’
—From the O’Neill play Mourning Becomes Electra
‘Mystery of life and death’
“Squirrel” (Iris print), by Vaughn Sills, a photographer based in Cambridge, Mass., and Prince Edward Island, at Anna Maria College, Paxton, Mass.
She says in her artist statement:
“I have chosen objects from nature one by one, found them, dug them, preserved them – a squirrel’s skeleton, poplar saplings that sprout from one long root, broken egg shells lying on the forest floor. I have taken them, or been given them, from the land on Prince Edward Island where my grandparents visited each summer, where I now have a cottage. I chose these things because of their extraordinary beauty – and because they seem to hold the mystery of life and death.’’”
Church in center of Paxton, Mass.
Stephen J. Nelson: Painful lessons in college leadership: Dartmouth College and the University of Florida
Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse, soon to be president of the University of Florida, speaking at the 2015 Conservative Political Action Conference, a right-wing Republican event.
From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)
In April 1981, David McLaughlin was named the 14th president of Dartmouth College. Though separated by four decades, there are striking similarities between Dartmouth’s appointment of McLaughlin and the University of Florida’s selection last week of its next president, Ben Sasse. If the past is prologue, Sasse and Florida are in for a rough ride.
McLaughlin was an alumnus of Dartmouth, both as an undergraduate and subsequently with an MBA from the Tuck School. While not from the Senatorial arena of Sasse, McLaughlin was a highly political animal. Dartmouth’s choice of him as president came at a moment for the college when disaffected conservative alumni were outraged about racial diversity and the opening of their male bastion to women. McLaughlin’s conservative politics and his purported fiscal belt-tightening reputation and presumed budgetary savvy as a corporate CEO at Champion Paper and Toro Corporation were thought by supporters to be great assets.
The conservative student newspaper, the Dartmouth Review, was about a year old. Conservative alumni, led by monied outside supporters, were opening their wallets and clamoring for more of the contentious voice of the Review. McLaughlin was expected to appease those forces. He promised reinstating ROTC, which had sat dormant for over a decade dating to when the faculty, in the heat of the Vietnam War, cut Dartmouth’s academic ties to the program. Conservative alumni and students cheered his arrival. McLaughlin was to be the fixer for conservative complaints about a new progressive Dartmouth—minorities, women and other changes—that they could not stand.
Sasse carries into his presidential tenure similar conservative baggage. His supporters have grand hopes that he will use the cudgels for which he is famous in the world of politics—decrying gay marriage, advocating overthrow of the Affordable Care Act, and being against abortion—to instill his social brand and edge into the culture of the university. He claims that will not be the case. But given his undeniable high-profile public positions on gay and lesbian issues and rights, abortion, healthcare, affirmative action and the MAGA agenda, the idea that Sasse will change his stripes and that his conservative political bent will now somehow disappear strains credulity and credibility.
As part of his welcome to the campus, the University of Florida faculty have already voted no confidence in the board’s selection process, a tantamount rejection of how and why Sasse was appointed in the first place. Again, if the Dartmouth experience with McLaughlin is any gauge, this vote is only the first salvo in what will be a continuing debate about Sasse as a university president.
From the outset of McLaughlin’s appointment, the Dartmouth faculty, like their Florida counterparts, voiced immense skepticism about the board’s process that resulted in his selection. In the introductory open public faculty meeting that April 1981—I was in the room, then a student affairs administrator—McLaughlin was greeted by pointed criticism from Dartmouth professors. They questioned his capacity to lead in a college and academic culture that was the antithesis of his exclusive corporate sector autocratic and top-down experience. Several faculty members railed to his face about his glaring lack of academic credentials—an MBA, but no Ph.D.—about having no experience teaching and leading a college, bringing only business experience that would never translate to being Dartmouth’s voice in the presidential pulpit.
There was no vote of no confidence in the trustees at the time of their decision. That came four years later dressed in the garb of the unprecedented impaneling of a committee to review McLaughlin’s performance as president. But the Dartmouth faculty restiveness and fear was unmistakable. Their misgivings and judgment that day were born out in a tumultuous, contentious and divisive presidential tenure marked by aggressive, vindicative grudge-based senior administrative turnover, duplicitous leadership, e.g., saying one thing to one group or individual and then the direct opposite to someone else, and a divide-and-conquer style that pitted campus constituencies against each.
For many observers, the Sasse and McLaughlin appointments are sadly only grasped as institutional overreach designed to satisfy certain constituents, rather than aspiring to the greater good of the entire university. McLaughlin lacked fundamental leadership abilities in a president of a college or university. As Sasse assumes the presidency of the University of Florida, there are eerie parallels to Dartmouth’s experience more than 40 years ago. This reality dictates that the Florida faculty must be robust in their scrutiny of how Sasse carries himself, the decisions and actions he takes and his leadership of their university community and its culture. Based on the experience of McLaughlin at Dartmouth, that means the Florida faculty must be vigilantly tuned in to what goes on in the who’s and why’s of senior leadership turnover and new appointments and to kneejerk tendencies to favor conservative causes and to support conservative over liberal professors, student groups and leaders. They must also be attentive to any fiscal and fundraising sleight-of-hand and abuse of the books to make the president look successful.
What is always essential in the leadership of America’s colleges and universities is the naming of presidents who possess critical capacities and commitments: moral grounding, the broad center of understanding and the intellectual gravitas essential in the quest to engage academic communities in the forthright pursuit of intellectual inquiry, freedom of ideas and discourse, and the common good.
Worthy and great college presidents are not accidents or the result of luck. Ill-fitted, ill-suited presidents can do great damage. Early glimmers of what is in the offing reveal what the path might be. Sasse, his faculty and all the constituencies of the University of Florida are on a precipice.
They should look at what happened at Dartmouth in the 1980s, when pressures for conservative, return to a bygone era leadership overwhelmed common sense calling for an academically, intellectually and balanced credible presidential appointment, one truly fit for the complexities and diverse voices in a university community. At Dartmouth, McLaughlin’s selection sorely damaged the esprit de corps of administrative staff, eroded \ the stature and public image of the college and caused a corrosive cynicism in the campus community about its culture. The realities of such presidencies should make all wary indeed.
Stephen J. Nelson is professor of educational leadership at Bridgewater State University and Senior Scholar with the Leadership Alliance at Brown University. He is the author of the recently released book, John G. Kemeny and Dartmouth College: The Man, the Times, and the College Presidency. His forthcoming book, Searching the Soul of the College and University in America: Religious and Democratic Covenants and Controversies, will be released in 2023. Nelson served on the student-affairs staff at Dartmouth College from 1978 to 1987.
Nimbys vs. more housing
Rockport’s inner harbor showing lobster fleet and Motif #1 (red building), one of the most painted buildings in America.
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Just how hard it is to build more housing (except for mansions and McMansions) in New England can be seen in Rockport, Mass., the affluent town on the tip of Cape Ann. It’s both a Boston suburb and a summer-resort town, with many second homes.
There, a bunch of Nimbys seek to block a state plan to put multi-family housing near the town’s train station. The project is aimed at slowing soaring housing costs by increasing supply and getting more people out of their cars and into environmentally friendly public transit.
Rockport, with its famous ‘’quaint’’ harbor (“Motif #1, beloved by Sunday painters!), is a major tourist destination but the people who work in its restaurants, inns and bars increasingly can’t afford to live there. This has helped to cause severe labor problems in the local and heavily taxpaying hospitality sector – leading to shortened hours and outright closures.
This sort of opposition has cropped up in other rich towns, such as Newton. The Rockport project is driven by the new rules of the administration of outgoing Republican Gov. Charlie Baker aimed at increasing multi-family housing, especially for low-income people, in the 175 cities and towns served by the MBTA.
I hope that the commonwealth continues to enforce these rules. If not, Massachusetts, like the other New England states, will lose many more jobs to the South and West where more, and more affordable, housing is available. It’s a social and economic imperative for our region to build much more housing.
Swimmers’ delight: Babson Farm granite quarry, at Halibut Point State Park, in Rockport.
Chris Powell: The Red Guards raid city hall; hypocrisy makes the world go round
Propaganda poster for China’s Red Guards in the late 1960s.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Connecticut now may have its equivalent of Chairman Mao's Red Guards, consisting of Central Connecticut State University students and members of the Connecticut Citizen Action Group who, according to news reports, pretended to purge racism from the office of the Republican registrar of voters at City Hall in New Britain.
Having gone to the registrar's office to obtain voter registration cards, the president of Central's Social Work Club, Taina Manick, sighted a tiny Confederate flag in a stand of four other tiny flags among some knickknacks. She was immediately triggered. She returned the next day with her colleagues and cameras to record them scolding the registrar, Peter Gostin, and asking him if he is a racist.
Gostin denied racism and confessed he had not given much thought to the flags and knickknacks, which had been sitting on a shelf in his office, unremarked, for 14 years. The Red Guards asked Gostin if he would surrender the offending flag and he quickly agreed, whereupon they lifted it in triumph, photographed it, dropped it in a trash can, laughed, and departed.
Afterward Gostin said he was glad to be rid of the source of offense but did not understand why his visitors needed to "make a big show" about it and question his character.
But of course making a big show -- displaying self-righteousness -- is the point of today's indignation industry, of which the new Red Guards may be the shock troops, and the smaller the offense, the bigger the show must be to gain attention.
Ironically, as the Red Guards were bullying the hapless registrar, the National Assessment of Educational Progress was announcing that the huge and infamous racial-performance gap in Connecticut's schools has persisted for another three years. The gap is worse in cities like New Britain. So is violent crime, which also affects racial minorities disproportionately.
Indeed, Connecticut suffers many other distressing racial disparities. None has been caused or sustained by the tiny and long-overlooked flag in the New Britain registrar's office.
But maybe the Red Guards can keep scouring Connecticut for other things from which they can claim to have taken offense. Maybe someday they will find one more relevant to social justice than their comic self-righteousness is.
xxx
A few weeks ago as the campaign of the anti-abortion Republican candidate for U.S. senator in Georgia, former football star Herschel Walker, was rocked by allegations he had paid for the abortions of former girlfriends, Democrats scorned Republicans for sticking with their candidate despite his likely hypocrisy. Republicans, Democrats sneered, cared about nothing beyond gaining a majority in the Senate.
Last week, after weeks of insisting that he had recovered from a stroke and should remain the Democratic nominee for U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman participated in a televised debate with the Republican candidate, Mehmet Oz, the television talk-show doctor. Because Fetterman now has trouble understanding spoken words, he was granted use of video equipment to caption the questions.
Nevertheless, even Democrats acknowledged that their candidate's performance was painful to watch. As the debate began, Fetterman's first words were, "Hi. Good night, everybody." At times he was incoherent and contradicted himself.
But, of course, Democrats are sticking with Fetterman. though elected officials need at least normal communication skills, which their candidate now lacks. Like the Republicans, the Democrats figure that nothing matters except taking control of the Senate.
And both sides have good reasons.
Republicans figure that Walker, while an ignoramus, at least will be able to take instructions from the party's Senate leadership to prevent President Biden's appointment to the Supreme Court of another judge who, to placate the Democratic Party's crazy left wing, professes not to know what a woman is.
Democrats figure that, impaired as Fetterman is, he at least will be able to take instructions from the party's Senate leadership to prevent a Republican attempt to placate the party's crazy right wing by impeaching the president for what some see as his own worsening dementia.
Politics, thy name is hypocrisy. Get used to it.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.
David Warsh: About ‘The Untold Story of Russiagate’
Trump campaign manager and pro-Russia operator at the 2016 Republican National Convention.
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
In the summer of 2016, somebody, perhaps Vladimir Putin himself, sketched a peace plan for Ukraine. The provenance of the proposal remains deliberately vague. Had the suggestion been accepted, it would have avoided Russia’s war on its neighbor five years later. The so-called “Mariupol plan,” named for eastern Ukraine’s largest industrial city, would have split off four prosperous Donbass counties to form an autonomous republic, to be led by Viktor Yanukovych, the deposed president of Ukraine who had fled Kyiv for Russia two years before. In effect: East and West Ukraine
The trouble is, the proposal was conveyed, via intermediaries, amid elaborate secrecy, to just one man, U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump. Rival candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, the former secretary of state, would certainly reject the plan were she to be elected. So the loosely worded proffer was said to be enhanced by a sweetener: Russia would take a hand in the American election, denigrating Clinton through a massive hacking campaign.
That’s the burden of a Sunday magazine article in Nov. 6 The New York Times Magazine: “The Untold Story of ‘Russiagate’ and the Road to War in Ukraine,” by reporter Jim Rutenberg. It is a long and complicated tale, and sticks closely the NYT’s editorial position: that Russia’s war was unprovoked by NATO expansion.
In fact, the story of the “Grand Havana Room meeting,” atop 666 Fifth Ave. in Manhattan, between Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort , and Konstantin Kilimnik, manager of Manafort’s international consulting office in Kyiv, has been told before, though never as concisely as has Rutenberg: by the Mueller Report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, the thousand-page Senate Intelligence Committee report, and by The Atlantic’s George Packer in his review of Andrew Weissmann’s book about his service as a top aide to former FBI director Robert Mueller, Where the Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation.
Ruteberg drew on these accounts, and on his own reporting, in a mostly successful attempt to connect two narratives. “Thrumming below the whole (U.S.) election saga was another story – about Ukraine’s efforts to establish a modern democracy….”
From the platform battles of the Republican National Convention to the turmoil of the transition to the first impeachment, the main business of the Trump presidency all had to do with Ukraine. “Even now” he writes, “some influential voices in American politics, mostly but not entirely on the right, are suggesting that Ukraine make concessions of sovereignty similar to those contained in Kilimnik’s plan, which the nation’s leaders categorically reject.”
I was especially struck when I came across this passage:
As [Paul] Manafort rose to become Trump’s campaign chairman – and as Russian operatives were hacking Democratic Party servers – the candidate took stances on the region that were advantageous to Putin’s ambitions for Ukraine. Ahead of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in July, Trump shocked the American foreign-policy establishment by voicing only tepid support for NATO. He also told aides that he didn’t believe it was worth risking “World War III” to defend Ukraine against Russia, according to the Senate intelligence report released in the summer of 2020.
That was, I thought, Trump in a nutshell. Candid, shrewd, perhaps even wise… and profoundly dishonest. After all, Manafort was a veteran political operative, who had served in the Reagan administration until leaving to form a foreign-relations consulting firm with his friend Roger Stone. He had been deeply involved in Ukrainian politics, mostly with pro-Russian factions, for more than a decade. What in the world was he doing suddenly showing up as Trump’s campaign manager barely two months before the election?
Three weeks after the convention, Manafort was forced to resign, after his name turned up on a suspicious Ukrainian payroll ledger. Starting in 2017, he was charged with multiple felonies, and convicted of many of them, Trump pardoned him in December 2020.
Rutenberg’s story reinforced my conviction that the endless harping of the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal on “the Steele dossier” and Special Counsel John Durham’s lengthy investigation of FBI methods in dealing with it were red herrings of the first order. The investigations that began even before Trump took office had almost nothing to do with the discredited campaign documents. The various probes were motivated by suspicions of extensive conflicts of interest, and the fact that his campaign and presidency were chock-full of persons who had done business with Russia.
It matters because, not for the only time, Trump’s political instincts were canny, reflecting the unarticulated preferences of many American voters, perhaps a majority, to live in a peaceful, if imperfect world. Had Trump been able to do a deal with Putin along the lines of the Mariupol plan, many Ukrainian and Russian lives would have been saved. Trump almost certainly would have been re-elected, American democracy would have been further damaged, perhaps irreparably. Things turned out as they should have, at least until Russia invaded Ukraine. .
That is emphatically not to say that peace negotiations shouldn’t be pursued in this dreadful war. Republican opposition to continuing high levels of aid to Ukraine is growing, according to recent polls. Fifty-seven Republican congressmen and eleven senators voted against Biden’s $40 billion aid package earlier this year. New positions in both parties will take shape after the mid-term elections.
Meanwhile, Axios reports that Trump is eager to announce a third run for the presidency. Bring it on! American democracy learned a great deal about its weaknesses and strengths during the five years it was enrolled in Trump University. The experience produced a close call, but dangerous times make for lasting lessons. Two or three years of post-graduate education will produce still more insight into the inner workings of a strong democracy.
David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this essay originated.
University of New England med school will move to Portland
Maine Medical Center, in Portland, close to where the University of New England’s medical school will move.
Edited from a New England Council (newenglandcouncil.com) report
“The University of New England, will move its osteopathic medical school from Biddeford, Maine, to Portland. This new location will allow the university to expand the size of its facilities to accommodate more students, which will provide relief to the ongoing workforce problem in the health-care industry.
“This move will fast-track Portland (home of the Maine Medical Center) to be a regional hub for biotechnology and medicine. The university could break ground on this new construction in a month thanks to the Portland Planning Board’s unanimous approval of the plans. The construction will feature a 112,000 square-foot four-story central building to hold all the university’s health-care programs, including dentistry, nursing and the medical school itself.
UNE’s new facility will advance the college’s efforts in inter-professional education, an approach to training in which students are taught in a team-based, multidisciplinary setting. The new location will increase the number of students that the medical program can accommodate by 20 percent, raising the classes from 165 to 200 students. Additionally, the new facility will allow Maine Medical Center doctors to easily engage with UNE students because of the proximity to their facilities. This opens the doors to mentorship, teaching and continuing education in a lab setting for students.
UNE President James Herbert said, ‘We are the workforce engine for the health-care workforce in the state. I want UNE to be the national model for how you do IPE in rural settings’’’.
Frank Carini: Navy worried about rising seas at Naval Station Newport
View of Naval Station Newport (aka Newport Navy Base), which includes parts of Newport and Middletown.
From ecoRI News (ecori.org)
The U.S. Department of Defense has concerns about sea-level rise and other climate-change impacts on Naval Station Newport, along the shores of Aquidneck Island.
“Since 2010, the Department of Defense has acknowledged that the planet’s changing climate has a dramatic effect on our missions, plans and installations,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III said last year. “The department will immediately take appropriate policy actions to prioritize climate change considerations in our activities and risk assessments to mitigate this driver of insecurity.”
The Aquidneck Island Climate Caucus, led by Rep. Terri Cortvriend, D-Portsmouth, recently hosted a discussion about resiliency plans for the Naval station.
The Oct. 23 online event, titled “Newport Naval Station Resilience: What’s the Plan?” featured Cornelia Mueller, community planning liaison officer at Naval Station Newport, and Pam Rubinoff, a coastal resilience expert at the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography.
Mueller said the climate crisis is a serious problem for the military training installation and the three municipalities — Portsmouth, Middletown, and Newport — that share space on Aquidneck Island. She noted it’s both an economic and safety issue for the largest island in Narragansett Bay.
To address the local challenges presented by the climate crisis, the Navy worked with the University of Rhode Island, municipal officials, and local stakeholders, such as the Aquidneck Land Trust and the Eastern Rhode Island Conservation District, to create a Military Installation Resilience Review for short-term preparedness and long-term planning. Much of the recently completed review is not available for public consumption, but a 12-page outline can be found here.
The review’s researchers ran 12 scenarios with 1 foot, 3 feet, and 5 feet of sea-level rise against modeled weather events. The modeling also included “significant” expansion planned for Naval Station Newport during the next 10 years, which will include more National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ships and a larger Coast Guard presence, according to Mueller.
The work noted the Navy and other Aquidneck Island entities share concerns. For example, the Navy relies on the Newport Water Division for drinking water and on the Long Wharf Pump Station, owned by the city of Newport, for its wastewater treatment.
The kind of climate work Austin spoke about during his 2021 visit to Virginia’s Naval Station Norfolk is taking place at Navy Region Mid-Atlantic installations, including Naval Station Newport.
The Navy’s response to the climate crisis has included natural solutions, such as dune restoration and better protecting coastal marshes and shoreline vegetation. Man-made solutions have included berms and flood walls.
Mueller said Naval Station Newport is hoping to restore Elizabeth Brook. The waterway, which begins in Middletown and empties near Gate 2 in Newport, is causing flooding problems for both municipalities and the Navy. She also noted there are plans to build buffers, create green space, and use man-made structures to address the increased flooding being experienced on Aquidneck Island.
The review found 152 “assets of concern,” such as generators, wastewater treatment facilities, and communications, energy, and transportation infrastructure. The review also found it would take 14 hours to evacuate Aquidneck Island during clear skies.
Rubinoff said there are significant concerns that need to be addressed and the solutions will require island-wide collaboration.
The Department of Defense (DOD) has identified climate change as a critical national security issue. The crisis will continue to amplify operational demands on the force, degrade installations and infrastructure, increase health risks to service members, and require modifications to existing and planned equipment needs.
The agency has noted that the past decade, 2011-2020, was the warmest on record. It has said the increase in thermal energy trapped in the atmosphere is having enormous consequences around the globe.
The DOD’s 2022 Climate Adaptation Report assesses climate exposure related to eight hazards: coastal flooding, riverine flooding, heat, drought, energy demand, land degradation, wildfire, and historical extreme weather events. It also notes that the agency is working to incorporate environmental justice into the implementation of its evolving Climate Adaptation Plan.
“Rising temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, and more frequent, extreme, and unpredictable weather conditions caused by climate change are worsening existing security risks and creating new challenges,” according to the latest version of the report. “Climate change is increasing the demand and scope for military operations at home and around the world. At the same time, it is undermining military readiness and imposing increasingly unsustainable costs on the Department of Defense.”
The Aquidneck Island Climate Caucus is planning additional discussions to be held over the winter, on topics including updates on federal legislation, 2023 state legislative goals, ocean health, offshore wind turbines are coming, “Act on Climate: What are the immediate steps?” and “Where are we going with fossil fuels?”
Frank Carini is co-founder and senior reporter of ecoRI News.
Time to reflect
“Lemon Fair River (Vermont) November” (oil on panel), by New England painter Ellen Granter at Edgewater Gallery, Middlebury, Vt., through Nov. 15.
Temporary housing
“Tent Mama” (oil on canvas), by Karen Seapker, on view through Feb. 12 at the Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, N.H.
News media should be willing to be offensive in pursuit of truth
Benjamin Bradlee at a Larry King party in Washington in 1999.
“Diogenes Searching for an Honest Man,’’ attributed to J. H. W. Tischbein (c. 1780)
“As long as a journalist tells the truth, in conscience and fairness, it is not his job to worry about consequences. The truth is never as dangerous as a lie in the long run. I truly believe the truth sets men free.”
"Where lies the truth? That's the question that pulled us into this business, as it propelled Diogenes through the streets of Athens looking for an honest man.’’
"The more aggressive our search for truth, the more people are offended by the press. The more complicated are the issues and the more sophisticated are the ways to disguise the truth, the more aggressive our search for truth must be, and the more offensive we are sure to become to some."
— Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee (1921-2014), longtime executive editor of The Washington Post, most famously during the Watergate scandal. He came from a Boston Brahmin nuclear family that lost most of its wealth as a result of the 1929 crash but other relatives chipped in to help send him to the elite St. Mark’s School, in Southboro, Mass., and then to Harvard. He worked for a few years as a reporter for The New Hampshire Sunday News, in Manchester.
Falling into a brown study
— Photo by Maciej Boryna
Chrysanthemums can survive well into mild Novembers.
A prince of November
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
November is a gray and brown time, making it the winner in the saddest-month-of-the year contest for many. Still, it can sometimes have a placid, mellow, misty, soothing quality, or it can energize us with a stirring nor’easter.
You might be tempted these days to pick up a rotting apple on the ground in an orchard and taste it, and you have to admire a Norway maple that hasn’t yet dropped its leaves as mild weather seems to last later and later in the fall. You notice the beautiful patterns on bark, painted with lichen, more than you had a couple of months ago, when you were distracted by the vivid colors of many growing plants.
November is also prime time for gatherings of crows, those highly intelligent and social birds that seem to take over as we head closer to winter. You often see them on streets feasting on dead squirrels killed by cars as they try to collect acorns. But they’re also adept at splatting your car with revolting off-white poop. Do they do it on purpose?
'Unraveling and rebuilding a life'
The gallery says:
“‘THEN + NOW’ is Jane Maxwell’s exploration of a major life transition. Her new solo show was created over the past year and a half as a way to process, grieve, accept and ultimately grow, from the end of a thirty-year marriage. The work reflects her fragility and strength during this difficult time, while embracing a reverence and tenderness for the past.
“For more than twenty years, Jane Maxwell’s artistic practice was driven by an examination of personal issues related to the pressures of society’s feminine ideals. In her early years, Maxwell used vintage crate labels and movie posters to deconstruct silhouettes, to comment on the deluge of body image messaging. In recent years, Maxwell has layered peeling billboard papers from Paris and Los Angeles to create silhouettes of women in moments of confidence, power and, just as importantly, in repose.
“With this new exhibition, Maxwell takes a deeper dive into her own psyche by mining a personal and vast trove of ephemera she has accumulated and stored for decades; from vintage dolls, ledger books, old boxes, three-dimensional letters and numbers to unique antique objects that have caught her eye over the years. Sorting and integrating these collectibles allowed Maxwell to create a body of work that represents both the unraveling and rebuilding of a life.’’