Wow, now that’s a headline you don’t want to see about your Governor: “49 Governors Meet on Health Care, Education, Economy; Rell Stays Home.”
In other news, “Connecticut leaves 120 blanks in Race to the Top application.”
In Rell’s defense, maybe she didn’t miss the meeting, but instead simply turned back when she realized she’d look rude for arriving at a meeting with the President several days after it ended.
I was talking with a political friend yesterday, someone who was involved in the original fight to establish public campaign financing in Connecticut. To him, Lamont’s decision to forego the CEP is momentous; to me, not so much. But the conversation is foregrounding the fact that, for a statewide race with over 800,000 eligible voters, the primary grant ($1.25 million) is simply not very much money.
On its own, the grant would probably pay for about 7 mailings to the households where eligible voters live. But staff, office expenses, consultant fees, and the like will eat into that — take a look at Malloy’s January filing. The campaign had 3 staffers for most of the fall quarter, and took on another two in December. Their fundraising operation brought in $71,000, but the campaign spent $162,000 over the same period. Operating expenses would at least double in the heat of the summer campaign, so we’re now talking about a campaign that optimistically has $900,000 to communicate with voters. At best, 5 mailings with no TV advertising and no intensive field operation. Rough.
But the bigger problem, I think, is that this grant of public money won’t even become available until candidates get nominated at the end of May. At the current rate, Malloy will run out of money near the end of March. And that’s assuming that he never actually declares as a candidate (about half of the funds he’s raised are “non-qualifying” dollars, which are the portion of any large donation above the $100 limit that declared, participating candidates can raise). If he had declared as a candidate on January 1st, the money would have run out by the middle of last week. Just when the campaign will need to ramp up (the weeks leading up to the convention), the well will run dry, the staff either sent home (problematic) or working on spec and IOUs (probably illegal). Any qualifying funds over $250,000 that a candidate raises will have to go right back to the Citizen’s Election Program as soon as the candidate applies for the grant. That is, simply put, not an acceptable or sustainable program for operating statewide campaigns.
One way to correct this problem, assuming that the CEP is allowed to stand by the courts and is fixed by the legislature, would be to move the convention dates way up. Unfortunately, that would raise real hurdles for candidates that announce in the same year as the election: a March 1 convention would make it nearly impossible for someone like Glassman (who announced recently) or Marconi and Figueroa (who don’t have strong statewide profiles) to get 2500 donations in just a few months.
Maybe the way to fix it would be to untether the candidate qualification process from the conventions entirely. The process right now is divided: qualifying as a candidate requires that you get 15% of the delegates at a convention or 5% of the voters in the district to sign a nominating petition, but the finance laws are an entirely separate set of regulations. A closer integration of the candidate laws and finance laws might recognize a candidate’s qualification for a primary from the date they submit a completed application for public financing or receive the required number of delegate votes or voter signatures. That would make them eligible for the full grant immediately; making them wait around for a formality doesn’t accomplish much apart from making it harder to participate in the program.
For candidates that have qualified, declaring someone an official candidate at the point of their successful qualification for the CEP would put an end to the ridiculous “exploring candidate” tap-dance that they’re forced to perform to keep their campaigns from completely folding in the months before the convention. Conventions would still decide who was the endorsed candidate, and could nominate candidates who hadn’t finished their fundraising.
A fix like this wouldn’t solve the “too little” problem, but it would have the double benefit of keeping the program relevant in the doldrums before the conventions while changing the law to recognize that someone (at any level) who can meet the public financing is, in fact, a real candidate. 300 donations are easily worth 1500 signatures. Let’s hope that the law (if it remains on the books after the Second Circuit rules) continues to evolve to reflect the realities of modern campaigns. Even though we’re just now seeing it in action for the first time in statewide races, it’s clear that the rules are already well behind the times.
Has anyone read Bysiewicz’ Ella Grasso book?
From a pre-Parker Brothers edition of Monopoly comes this brilliant description:
“Statement of General Theory - Monopoly is designed to show the evil resulting from the institution of private property. At the start of the game every player is provided with the same amount of capital and presumably has exactly the same chance of success as every other player. The game ends with one person in possession of all the money. What accounts for the failure of the rest, and what one factor can be singled out to explain the obviously ill-adjusted distributions of the community’s wealth which this situation represents? Those who win will answer ’skill.’ Those who lose will answer ‘luck.’ But maybe there will be some, and these, while admitting the elements of skill and luck, will answer with Scott Nearing ‘private property’.”
“Those who win will answer ’skill.’ Those who lose will answer ‘luck.’” Awesome.
Contrast this with the current rules in the game:
“The idea of the games to buy and rent or sell property so profitably that one becomes the wealthiest player and eventually monopolist.”
The previous incarnation of the site – the “News Wire” – was an exciting idea that proved too big and complex to get going all at once. Still, I’ve missed active blogging, and despite the privilege of taking part in a successful group blog for the last two years, I’ve really been looking for an outlet with a narrower and more focused mission, and so ctprogressive.net is back for a second (and more modest) run.
I’m a progressive Democrat, and I’m interested in grassroots political organizing – especially field (canvassing, voter files/data), media (letter-writing, rapid response), and institution building.
This week has been a strange time to start a site like this. On the one hand, President Obama was just sworn in, and his campaign has been very willing to credit organizers and volunteers with his victory in public. On the other, progress towards a more grassroots-friendly, decentralized Democratic Party looks to be receding with the rolling-back of Howard Dean’s 50-State Strategy, and the seeming triumph of progressive politics in the state represented by Chris Donovan’s ascension to Speaker of the House soured by the tone-deaf and bone-headed decision to hire the notoriously conservative Jim Amann as a policy advisor.
Of course, after a media uproar and a fair amount of negative feedback, Donovan and Amann called it off – but the situation highlights a few issues that contrast the relationship progressives have with the Democratic Party and the one conservatives have with the Republicans. First, the elected Democratic leadership obviously wasn’t in touch with anybody on the ground in the run-up to that decision being made. This is an echo of party leaders trying to keep Lieberman in the fold after a high-participation whooping in the 2006 primary – word from the grassroots doesn’t seem to be reaching our leadership no matter how clear the message.
In contrast, Republicans, from the legislative leadership to their state party to the letter-writing activists sprung into action simultaneously, and while I wish progressives could claim credit for putting the brakes on the Amann pick, I don’t think that’s very realistic. Coordination counts, and we largely lack it.
Finally, newspapers around the state immediately panned the pick, which is something that happens with alarming frequency to Democrats. As former Speaker, Amann is certainly qualified for a senior advisor position, and the caucuses have a staffing budget that gets spent regardless of whether the money goes to one guy or a raft of legislative aides, so the unanimity of the response was remarkable, especially since the legislative Republicans gave a similar golden umbrella to fallen politician David Cappiello just days earlier. That reflexive posture towards Democrats is the result of years of sustained conservative pressure on the media – attacking the relatively conservative Courant as being too liberal, along with practically every other newspaper and media outlet in the country. It illustrates the value of a sustained long-term strategy to shape the political environment, and as the roll-up of the “50 State Strategy” illustrates, we too rarely maintain even successful strategies over here on the left.
So, that should give you a sense of what “beats” I’d like to cover here – looking at the way both “the party” and “the movement” function and relate to one another, learning lessons from worthwhile and/or effective strategies wherever they come from geographically or ideologically, and seeing how we can use those lessons learned to be better advocates for our political interests. Plus, of course, some tidbits on the day to day goings-on of politics in the state. It should be a blast.