Third-party voices:
'What the hell did you guys do with all the money?'
The state's last independent governor, Lowell Weicker, sees two-party politics at work as he ponders the fate of the tax bounty he left behind.
By Gregory N. Stone - More Articles
Published on 08/11/2002
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The American third-party movement that helped elect him governor of Connecticut and kept afloat his dreams to be president of the United States is a twisted wreck today. He's 71, and he says quite frankly he's lost his interest in running for office. But Lowell P. Weicker Jr., has not lost his passion for needling the political establishment.
The subject he's discussing is a deal he engineered as governor with the Mashantucket Pequot tribe that ushered in big-time Indian gambling into Connecticut in return for 25 percent of the slot-machine revenues for the state treasury. As governor, Weicker also had led in the enactment of an income tax in the state in 1991 over the kicking and screaming of Republicans and Democrats.
Just where'd all the money go, he roared?
“The thing I have to ask, having left office in 1995 with the state in the black, and with sources of revenue that were unparalleled, 'What the hell did you guys do with all the money?' There's a hole of what, about $800 million? And we're getting how much, more than $300 million off the top from the Indians plus the income tax revenue? How did you do this?”
Then he answers his own question.
“Nothing speaks more for a third party than what's happened here in the intervening seven years, nothing. You can put this right on the doorstep of the Republicans and Democrats. All they did was bounce the money back and forth. The governor (John G. Rowland, Weicker's Republican successor) got his projects, and the Democrats in the legislature got their projects. And all the while, the money gets sucked out, and the public is left holding the bag.”
While he was governor from 1991 to 1995, Connecticut faced a $1 billion budget shortfall and mounting debt from nearly a decade of overspending. It was the state's worst fiscal crisis since the Great Depression and companies like Pfizer Inc. were threatening to leave the state. Resistance to enacting an income tax was a matter of dogma in both parties, but the parties begrudgingly capitulated when Weicker convinced them no other option was practical. For his role in that episode in history, the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation awarded Weicker its 1992 Profiles in Courage Award.
Weicker again made history when, faced with a federal court decision that forced Indian casino gambling on the state, he negotiated a compact with the Mashantuckets that gave the Indians a slot machine monopoly in return for 25 percent of the annual profits.
Weicker shakes his head and repeats himself.
“How could this happen in seven years of unparalleled revenues, during good times for everybody?”
Not only did the two parties drive the state into debt again, he continues. They failed to use the reliable stream of fresh revenues to solve the state's most basic and nagging problems: the failures of its public schools and over-reliance on local property taxes.
Weicker, who leads a Century Foundation task force looking at promoting quality and integration in public schools, says the state should pay the full bill for its public schools rather than leave the burden with local property taxpayers. Today, Connecticut pays for less than half the costs of the public schools, and has one of the highest property-tax burdens in the nation. Weicker says this is unfair because the cities and towns have such disparities in their tax bases.
The task force hasn't released its report yet, but Weicker said one of the recommendations will be to promote public school choice.
Later in his term as governor, Weicker pointed to the problem of racial isolation in Connecticut in a speech to the General Assembly that described “two Connecticuts,” one boasting some of the nation's greatest wealth, and another housing several of America's poorest cities. He said he started a public dialogue to deal with these disparities, which were also under the scrutiny of the courts in the school desegregation case of Sheff vs. O'Neill.
Weicker said both the middle class and the poor are being cheated by the public school system in Connecticut, which isolates races in the schools.
“It's a two-way street. Would you want to send your child into the world without having a close association with all the different people? That's not the real world.”
He can't understand why the state has taken the adversarial position in the Sheff case, and hasn't led in solving the problem.
“Why is (state Attorney General Richard) Blumenthal on the other side. I was for the plaintiffs? The whole state hierarchy should be getting this resolved.”
But the solution is a “political time bomb,” he says. Politicians are too timid to take principled stands on the issue.
“That's what politics has become,” he says, returning to his favorite subject.
“The purpose of politics now is strictly to get elected and re-elected, not governing,” he added.
“You can dink around with campaign finance reform but you're only nibbling around the edges of the problem. Competition is what counts, and we've effectively excluded that for a long time. If I didn't already have a name for myself, I probably would have been swamped (in his 1991 race for governor as an independent).”
Having taken that risk and succeeded, he said, he was able to resolve an issue the two parties hadn't been able to be address honestly “because they were afraid of the consequences.”
But he paid a price. To get things done, he had to work with both parties, and that didn't leave him with an opportunity to build his party. If he had spent the time building the new party, he probably wouldn't have gotten anything done, he said. Eunice Groark, his lieutenant governor, was swamped in the next election when she sought to be governor under the Connecticut Party banner.
Weicker was delighted with the recent rulings by U.S. District Court Judge Peter C. Dorsey invalidating the state's restrictive challenge-primary law, enabling practically any registered Democrat or Republican to run in the September primaries for state offices, including governor. State officials have challenged the latest ruling. As a U.S. senator, Weicker sponsored Dorsey when former President Ronald Reagan nominated him to the federal bench to replace T. Emmet Clarie in 1983. Dorsey is a native of New London and was the federal judge who sat on the Mashantucket casino case.
“Their (the parties) arrogance,” he exclaimed. “It's the same damned arrogance (they display) when even as a ticket holder, Ralph Nader, couldn't enter the debate in Boston during the last presidential campaign. The arrogance is monumental. There's nothing in the Constitution about the two parties. Nothing. They have to take their chances along with everyone else. You know as well as I do that in economics, when you have a monopoly, you get high prices and a bad product. In politics, you get bad ideas and bad candidates when you have a monopoly. And that's what you've got. And it's the system that suffers, as you see continually with voter participation going down. Where's the excitement? I'm proud of Peter (Dorsey).” 