A Common Sense Guide For The Politically Perplexed

Should Elon Musk have taken over Twitter?

Yes. Since its advent, politicians the world over have learned to twitter-speak, and the media has also spent a good amount of time pouring over witless tweet idiocies in search of eye-catching stories.

“There are only so many hours in the day,” Oscar Wilde once responded when asked why he did not take socialism, much in vogue during his day, more seriously. Media hours, we all know, stretch from here to eternity.

Generally, Twitterdom has had a baneful influence on political discourse. Twitter is the breeding ground of bad manners and sloppy thought. Abraham Lincoln, many debate coaches might agree, is a better rhetorician than say, former President Donald Trump or (former) Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi. If you are a politician and your discourse begins to sound like it was ripped from a bumper sticker or a random tweet, you should be impeached instantly. The fear lately is that Twitterdom has introduced algorithms that put the kibosh on conservative discourse. Someone had to put his foot down on this sort of thing. Why not Musk? He has a big stomp, and he is rich enough to swat off stupid objections.

Do the rich exert an undue influence on American politics?

In a manner of speaking, that has always been the case. In days past, the rich owned newspapers. Now they own politicians and, through them, access to favored treatment in the media. Here in the United States, there are two kinds of rich influencers: the Democrat rich and the Republican rich. These are nicely balanced in terms of political contributions, though Democrats in recent years may be a little ahead of Republicans. If money is the mother’s milk of politics, the Democrat rich and the Republican rich are its milch cows.

Individual politicians, rather than political parties, generate their own campaign funds, and this throws the advantage to incumbent office holders. The way to provide monetary equity in political campaigns is through term limits, not tax payer supported campaigns. There is no reason why eight term U.S. Representative Rosa DeLauro, to take but one example of many, should not be forced, at the end of a reasonable term limit, to surrender her political baton to younger back-bench Connecticut Democrats. At that point, campaign contributors would have to think before they reflexively wrote a check to support the campaigner. Thinking is always a refreshing exercise. The rich rarely think. Instead, they align their unexamined prejudices with what they believe is their self-interest and allow their money to fall into the sinkhole of bad political habits.

Some people in Connecticut, disenchanted with the two major parties, think the creation of a third party might be advisable.

In Connecticut, we already have third and fourth parties. But neither the Independent Party nor the Working People’s Party have taken wing. The two major parties have evolved since the good or bad -- depending on your point of view -- old days of party bosses. John Bailey, the last real Democrat Party boss in Connecticut, was himself a primary system. He and a small coterie of other Democrat Party influencers pointed to former Governor Ella Grasso or former governor Abe Ribicoff and said, “You will run for Governor.” And because he had his hands on the money till, there was little argument. That is no longer the case. Primaries these days determine the slate of challengers for various offices in Connecticut. As a general rule, it is nearly impossible for an untested candidate for office to unseat an incumbent in the parties with which they are affiliated. So then, we are left with a system in which campaign wealthy incumbents rule in both parties, and challengers, some of them promising, are left, so to speak, out in the cold gnawing on frozen knuckles. After a while, party slates become brittle and boring. Political parties tend to expire not from their failures but from their outmoded past successes.  Candidates in third and fourth parties wage campaigns to make a point rather than to win office.

How would you summarize the condition of the media in Connecticut?

Partisan from head to toe. Connecticut has been for many years a one party Democrat state. Reading political reports in the state is like overhearing only one person during a phone conversation. There is little contrarian journalism afoot in the whole of New England. It is as it every journalist in the region woke up one morning and decided to pitch for a job as press secretary to the local politician-for-life.

How does Trump figure in Connecticut politics?

He’s the Democrat Party’s El Cid, the Spanish warrior who rode into battle – dead in the saddle of course – to frighten the opposition.  Historian Victor Davis Hanson is the person who has written most intelligently about Trump in his book The Case For Trump. There’s audacity for you – a book that presents an objective historical view of Trump!  As long as the vultures are pulling at his liver, we will not have a clear view of the man. People in Connecticut, I think, are onto the game. If you have nothing to say – the Biden administration is indefensible – shout loudly from the rooftops and frighten the populace, the very definition of demagoguery. The problem with this is – voters occasionally are smarter than the political manipulators. When politicians begin telling us that grass is blue and the sky red, we justly begin to slide into a skeptical crouch, because there is something in human nature, thank God, that deeply resents political manipulation.

Should Trump or Biden have a second go at it?

No, and no. Vindication is always a suspect motive in human action. But ask me that one later. There are only so many hours in the day, and the political attention span of the average American feasting on Twitter is very short.