As a Connecticut resident, I have absolutely no illusions that Romney will get more than 30% of the Nutmeg state vote. Just as I knew when I voted in the Republican primary (for Santorum) that Romney was almost guaranteed to be the winner in Connecticut. Connecticut is a dead loss for conservatives. Not so every other state. I'm not willing to simply sit and pout about how awful the Republican leadership is. That accomplishes nothing.
If the senate does end up with a Republican majority it's up to the people to hold their newly-elected Republicans accountable and not abdicate their responsibility just because 'we won'. I'm well aware that Washington is corrupt and the Republican 'leadership' is an integral part of that systemic corruption. However, I'm not willing to wallow in cynicism. Change will never come as long as 'good men do nothing'. If, indeed, change doesn't come, at least I won't have simply stood by and watched it happen, assuming that my cynicism reflects political sophistication.
That is the reality. Wallow in reality for a while instead of taking the automatic hangdog defeatist attitude that is the hallmark of RINOs everywhere. When they send their little Muffies and Skippers off to finishing school before letting them enjoy their trust funds down at the polo club, yacht club or Junior League or Planned Barrenhood meetings, they see to it that Muffy and Skipper are well-trained as junior social revolutionaries to understand that Muffy's abortions and Skipper's desire to "marry" Lance are no one's business but their own.
In the late 1960's, the Connecticut GOP State Chairman was a Danbury-area airhead by the name of A. Searle Pinney (no one in my gritty blue collar New Haven neighborhood ever grew up with a name like "A. Searle Pinney." This ridiculous windtunnel of inherited wealth refused to place advertisements in Clayt Gengras's gubernatorial campaign in 1966 on Sunday NFL broadcasts because "No one would see them since everyone plays polo on Sundays." He actually SAID that in public. He actually believed it. No one is imaginative enough to invent the sort of idiots who have infested GOP politics in Connecticut as a television satire. The real imbeciles exceed even the wildest imaginations of the most talented and creative cynics.
In 1971, the otherwise superb GOP Governor Tom Meskill who had been Mayor of decidedly blue collar New Britain, had been elected governor. The working class private sector labor union Democrats were reeling from the Obama-class spending habits of genial John Dempsey, an early version of Dannell Malloy except that Dempsey had a son who was a priest which I feel sure Dannell does not and John's parents could also spell as Dannell's could not and John would execute murderers like Joseph Taborsky as Dannell will not-just wait and see on Komisarjevsky and Hayes, can you spell commutation? Those Democrat voters were also horrified to learn of the evils associated with the Demonrat candidate of 1970, Hartford Congressman Emilio Q. "Mim" Daddario. Mr. Daddario, it seems, had worked for the OSS in Italy during World War II and, in that capacity had turned over non-Marxist public officials to indigenous Italian communist firing squads for summary executions. There was also the little policy indiscretion by Comrade Daddario that he openly campaigned in favor of enacting a state personal income tax on wages and salaries, a long time Connecticut taboo. Daddario sank beneath the waves on the income tax issue. What the public did not know was that Meskill intended to enact such a state income tax as well to give him scads of money to hire loads of Republicans onto the public payroll and cement a Republican dynasty machine while otherwise being sufficiently conservative to earn the nickname "Reagan East."
I was a graduate student at the time and a group of us who were Young Republicans, College Republicans and Young Americans for Freedom approached Meskill's boyhood friend and campaign manager to inquire as to his positions on abortion and state income tax. We were told that half of his children were adopted and we would never have to worry on the abortion issue BUT, on that state income tax, they would be enacting one to hire their friends. Would we like to be their friends? The answer was: No, we would not. We will support him when he is right and oppose him when he is wrong. On everything but income tax we supported him.
When the state income tax was illegally passed at 3 AM on the day AFTER the General Assembly was constitutionally REQUIRED to adjourn, we fought Meskill and the GOP and their left-wing (on this question) Democrat allies, caused a small rally at the State Capitol lawn of 5,000 people, mostly enraged Democrat blue collar factory workers, enjoyed the support of the New Haven Register and Waterbury Republican-American, intimidated the hell out of the politicians responsible, were cursed in the governor's office (according to friends on his staff), burned some legislators in effigy on their front lawns and forced the repeal of the tax. The 1971 state income tax was repealed in July long before it was to take effect on October 1, 1971. If you earned a living in Connecticut between October, 1971, and October 1, 1991, you did not have to pay a state income tax on your wages or salary because of that colorful and successful rebellion.
In 1991, after we took Weicker's Senate seat away for his accumulated record of perfidy, he came back as an Independent and sought and won the governorship, knowing he was utterly finished in the GOP (most of which had been successfully urged to vote for Joe Lieberman including my old 1971 friends and associates and a newer generation of conservatives), promised NEVER to enact a state income tax, got elected and immediately proceeded to buy and bribe his way (the habits of privilieged lifetimes are soooo hard to break) to enactment of your current state income tax. LoLo dished out so many bribes that even the Tom Scott led rally of 60,000 on the State Capitol Lawn did not succeed at gaining repeal. That rally was fully supported by the Teamsters Union with its Bridgeport Local's "War Wagon," funded by the United Food and Commercial Workers' Union, and heavily supported by the members of the Electrical Workers' Union, the Postal Workers' Unions (Carriers and Clerks), the State Police Union, International Association of Machinists, defense workers and many, many others. In short, the people that the GOP snobbycrats despise and socially snub and are just yearning for the GOP to show real leadership for a change instead of its usual Muffy and Skipper face.
Another example of the desire of many Democrats to defect if the GOP would just earn the defection was a man named Tom Gillin, who was the Democrat Majority Leader of the New Haven Board of Aldermen (then heavily ethnic and Catholic). He had succeeded New Haven Mayor Richard Lee on the Board of Alderman and ben Dick Lee's campaign manager on several occasions. In 1964, he resigned as Majority Leader, as an Alderman, from the Democratic Party and became a Republican, announcing all that at a Board of Aldermen meeting and explaining that Goldwater was making too much sense for Tom to remain as a Democrat. To this day, the Connecticut GOP has NEVER made an effort to seek the very substantial and conservative Knights of Columbus vote in Connecticut.
In 1994, former five-term State Senator Tom Scott (from what had been the swing district, the 14th in Milford, Orange, Derby and West Haven which is now held by leftist Gayle Schlossberg long after Tom's retirement to run a close race in 1990 for Congress in New Haven's heavily Demonrat Third District) ran as an Independent for governor with the usual lack of funding that conservatives suffer since they will not stroke the corrupt major money interests by dialing for dollars. Again, Tom, who had been the single most conservative State Senator in CT's recent history (elected at 21 years old in 1980 to the State Senate, pro-lifer, anti-sexual perversion, anti-income tax leader, restored the death penalty, killed the highway tolls over Billy O'Neill's nearly dead body, waged war for English as the official state language and gaining wide Hispanic support for that effort against LULAC, turned his swing district into a reliably Republican one even for a while after he retired, etc., etc.) ran for governor as a petitioning candidate (it took four days to circulate the necessary petitions and get a multiple of the required signatures). He got something like 15% of the vote which, without much money, is not bad in Connecticut. Instead, Jailbird John Rowland was elected, promising to repeal the state income tax (he never tried because he was too busy lining his pockets with taxpayers' money while selling out the pro-life vote that had supported him in every Congressional and state legislative election. When jailed, he was replaced by pro-abort Jodi Rell of the, ummm, upper Fairfield County Rells. So much for any likelihood of EVER getting labor votes or Catholic voters like the very sizable Knights of Columbus constituency. The Connecticut GOP gives such groups absolutely NO reason to consider voting Republican on a state or local level.
The only bright spots in Connecticut are the return of veteran State Senator Joe Markley to his old seat in the Southington/Waterbury District after he had spent some time out of state, and the incredible upset victory of State Senator Len Suzio in a by-election in the verrrry Demonratic Meriden/Middletown/Middlebury/Cheshire Senate District (engineered by Tom Scott as Len's campaign manager) where the Democrats tend not to munch brie or guzzle chablis in their Meriden and Middletown strongholds.
For CT Republicans, outside Markley's and Suzio's districts, cynicism IS sophistication. Anything less than cynicism is Pollyannaism. Do you really, really, really want to be principled and sophisticated as a Connecticut Republican???? Then I challenge you to find out what REALLY happened in Connecticut while the GOP slept and ignored Connecticut's socially conservative and anti-income tax blue collar workers, yearning to breathe free, as it were. See what you can find out from people who actually know what they are talking about as to a charming little group named LEAP. That's short for the Legislative Electoral Action Project. An ultra-wealthy young ultra-leftist couple who were Minnesotans and cereal fortune heirs, came to Connecticut with their fat checkbooks some time in the 1970s determined to politically destroy the influence of socially conservative and mainly Catholic mill workers in the state's Demonratic Party, a very successful sort of McGovernization project (with gobs of money, money, money as is traditional). Six years after arriving, they left Connecticut having turned the socially conservative Democrat faction into a smoking and rejected ruin in favor of the Muffies and the Skippers and the Blumenthals and the Lawlors and the DeLauros and the Bysewiczes and the Donovans and others of their ilk. If a book is ever written, I will read it avidly and recommend it to others regardless of state of residence. LEAP (not to be confused with some more recent public school propaganda group) was a nuclear success of Biblical proportions.
Until you understand what LEAP accomplished against what odds and by what methods, you will NEVER be able to actually act effectively no matter how hard you work to convince yourself that you are a good fellow "doing SOMETHING." If you do not understand where you have been and where you are and where you intend to go, how and why, you are not doing anything. Voting Romney is rewarding the enemy as Connecticut and Massachusetts and Vermont and Maine and Rhode Island Republicans have more reason to know than those in many other states.
You are in Connecticut? I was born there, grew up there, got every bit of my formal education there, worked there, raised hell there, ran for office there, was an activist there, was a party official there and got thoroughly fed up with what passed for a Republican Party there. A bit more than ten years ago, I retired, sold my house and fled Connecticut (for Illannoy: go ahead call me a masochist, I confess!) and joined my wife and kids in going to America.
Do not pretend that I do not know what I am talking about or that I do not understand Connecticut's political history of the last 50 years, or the utter perfidy of what passes for its GOP nowadays.
You may well be a decent, hard-working GOP and even conservative activist but, unless you understand the history, analyze the status quo, and understand and apply necessary tactics, you cannot succeed. Electing Romney is not one of those tactics. He is a nuclear disaster for the GOP and for America working as hard as he knows how to happen. Don't let him. That is not cynicism. That is reality.
As to holding GOP legislators (and Democrats too) accountable, I have done that on numerous occasions and I'll wager you have not on a state or federal level. In DC, if, God forbid, Mittwit becomes POTUS, the GOP legislators will mostly "assume the position" and be brain-dead monarchist lapdogs for Robamney and his leftist agenda, just as they might actually filibuster and resist Obozo as an exercise in Party uber alles. If Robamney becomes POTUS, there will be no good results only the death of the GOP as an effective resistance. If and when that happens, to which country do you plan to flee?