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Taking the Fifth
GOP pins hope on a ‘movement' conservative
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Business New Haven
11/17/1997
By: Laurence D. Cohen
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Of all the potential political primaries that Connecticut Republicans anticipated next year, none gave them the heebie-jeebies more than the anticipated congressional bout between State Sen. Mark Neilson of Danbury and Waterbury State Sen. Tim Upson.
Upson is one of those born-in-Waterbury guys who, Republican affiliation forgiven, has gotten himself elected to the state senate for seven straight terms - serving in ten zillion of those “whip” and “deputy” posts that a political party can offer someone in the General Assembly. He is generally lovable and moderate and well-liked and low-key, in a rumpled kind of way.
Neilson is more of an odd duck in GOP circles: a real “movement” conservative who soaks up and spews out the privatizing, deregulating, tax-whacking, welfare-reforming stuff that the Republicans applaud at think-tank dinners, but have less of a taste for in the murky middle ground of Connecticut electoral politics.
It was Neilson several years ago who sued himself - that is, the General Assembly - for failure to implement the “spending cap” amendment to the state constitution. It was Neilson who stood virtually alone in the state senate, opposing the “welfare reform” package that he said had enough loopholes to drive an unemployed welfare cheat through.
He writes rambunctious conservative op-ed essays for the Wall Street Journal editorial page; his name pops up on occasion in the National Review, the Grande Dame of conservative journals; and he turns for moral support to David Boomer, the former gubernatorial and legislative staffer in Connecticut least likely to have the UConn School of Social Work name a building after him.
All the blood-thirsty rhetoric aside, the young lawyer and two-term senator doesn't seem to scare away too many Democrats - at least not the kind of conservative Democrats thought to populate the Fifth Congressional District. Neilson is the first Republican state senator to be elected from the Danbury-area Bermuda Triangle since the 1960s.
Despite the track record, some in the GOP leadership thought Upson (no slouch at getting Democrats to vote for a Republican) would have a better chance attracting Democrats, while drinking beer in Waterbury, than Neilson would have while sipping scotch with the buttoned-down crowd in Weston. Those party leaders thought Neilson would have an easier time raising big bucks appealing to GOP strongholds in the ritzy parts of the district.
The sighs of relief when Upson withdrew from the congressional race bounced around the walls at Republican State Central like Bill Clinton's thighs during an early-morning jog. The Waterbury-Danbury-Naugatuck Valley area is seen as John Rowland country - and in a year when he's going up against Barbara Kennelly and her Hartford-area strength, the GOP didn't want any Fifth District bickering distracting the party.
Derby Mayor Alan Schlesinger is still in the running for the GOP nomination, but Neilson is clearly the frontrunner. And if Neilson wins the nomination at the convention, Schlesinger will be locked in a barrel of caustic chemicals, buried in a Naugatuck landfill and not let out until he agrees not to primary.
The eventual target, of course, is former State Sen. James Maloney, who took the congressional seat last year from Republican incumbent Gary Franks, who ran the kind of campaign that Saturday Night Live would have rejected because it was too unbelievable.
Maloney has been a good boy, coming home on weekends for the Rotary Club lunches and the parades and barbecues. And he has crafted just enough of a “moderate” voting record to reduce Neilson to calling him a phony conservative, as opposed to a wild-eyed, liberal left-wing tax-and-spender.
Neilson is not running for Congress in Idaho - and he understands the difference. He's quick to explain that he's pro-choice on abortion (except for the “partial birth” variety) and he's generally supportive of gun-control initiatives. But he's not afraid to dabble in a bit of rhetoric about the declining “social fabric” and concerns of parents about passing out condoms in elementary schools.
This is going to be an interesting race to watch - not only because the GOP hopes to regain a seat from a vulnerable one-term incumbent, but also because it will test whether a rip-snorting, pawing-the-ground, kind of GOP conservative can reclaim a piece of Northeastern turf. BNH
Laurence D. Cohen is a senior fellow of the Yankee Institute for Public Policy Institute.
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