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Does She Or Doesn’t She?
Will Kennelly trade a can't-lose present
for a hard-to-win future?
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Business New Haven
9/22/1997
By: Laurence D. Cohen
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It was 1978, when Bill Cotter decided to give his sleepy re-election team a little challenge.
Democrat Cotter was running for re-election to Congress in the Hartford area's First District. Was he in any danger of losing? That's like asking if a fish is in danger of drowning if you throw it in a pond. And the staff knew it.
The Republicans had decided to try something a little different. Their candidate: Ben Andrews. He was Republican, he was black, he was head of the state NAACP.
The scenario: Andrews retains all seven Republican votes in the First District, and unleashes a flood of minority voters and guilty white liberals who think Cotter is boring, to throw off lifetime habits and give the GOP 45 percent of the vote.
Yeah, sure.
Cotter sensed his team was getting fat and lazy, so he offered them up a mission: Let's win Glastonbury.
Ah, Glastonbury - the only town east of the river with enough pretension and Republican registration to muster a majority every two years for the Republican congressional candidate.
They're running a black guy against me, for God's sake, he told the troops. Let's work really hard to win Glastonbury this year.
Cotter troops swept into town like mosquitoes at a Democratic town committee picnic. They had their mission. Nothing was more important than winning Glastonbury. Andrews won by a few hundred votes. But Cotter had energized the team.
That's the heritage of the First District. The Democratic incumbent sleepwalks through another massacre, while the GOP challenger borrows $300 from the kids' college fund to print a two-color brochure and six bumper stickers.
A “safe seat.” That's what they call it. And Barbara Kennelly owns it. It's not a bad gig. She sits on the super-secret House Intelligence Committee, helping to decide whether nuclear missiles should be aimed at Monaco, home to casinos that compete with our Indians. And she sits on the powerful Ways & Means Committee, protecting our insurance industry from the slings and arrows of the IRS.
The campaign donations fly through the door with embarrassing ease. Will she get 70 percent of the vote? Will she get 73 percent of the vote? Who cares?
The comfortable sinecure in Washington is one explanation for Kennelly's odd little tap-dance on the road to the governor's race. Her Yes-I-would-like-to-be-governor, kinda, but not necessarily, exudes an air of someone going to grandma's house for Thanksgiving - not for the turkey, but to fulfill an obligation.
One also suspects that the chore of actually having to run, rather than stroll, for office, against a popular governor, is not appealing to her - and that the indignity of having to primary Bill Curry and his 47 million union/activist munchkins is beyond the pale.
More interesting than whether she will or she won't is: What will she say if she decides to take on Rowland? Her career has not exactly been marked by padlocking herself to the gates of the South African embassy, or huffing and puffing her way onto page 1 of the Washington Post, a la Lowell Weicker or Toby Moffett.
Compare her to Bill Curry, who could die of thirst holding a glass of water, while explaining the metaphysics of the molecules.
It is the philosophical blank slate of Kennelly that has the Rowland folks worried, not the lefty musings of a Curry. Rowland's poll numbers are good, but hidden in those numbers is the reality that many of those pro-Rowland voters wouldn't necessarily lay down their lives for him, or march in torchlight parades to guarantee his re-election.
It is the “unaffiliated,” or loosely affiliated, voters who are often “undecided” - and they are essential for a Republican candidate for governor. Political wisdom suggests that undecided voters usually are the least interested in issues - and the most interested in personality and presence. On the lovability scale, Kennelly is a good matchup.
Would her billboards say, “I Want To Be Governor, But Not Very Much”? No, she's do better in a low-key, issue-less sort of way. Something about “compassion” or “fiscal prudence with a heart.” Take that, you ol' welfare-cutting, union-bashing John Rowland.
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