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Jim Amann visits

Well, if Groton is any indication, Amann is not much of a draw. Granted, our Town Committee attendance is often dreadful, but we pretty much hit rock bottom tonight. I believe we had about 11 people in attendance, not counting Amann and his retainers. Even I sort of felt sorry for the guy wasting his time to come speak to a handful of people.

I did “ask” him about the Lieberman issue. I use the quote marks because this particular issue gets me somewhat hot under the collar. I had to struggle to contain myself, and I’m sure there are some who would say that I failed. Anyway, his justification is that Lieberman had done him a lot of favors, so he owed him his support out of personal loyalty. On the other hand, he assures us that he would never do it again, nor would he have done it if he could ever possibly have imagined that the future would play out the way it did. No one could possibly have imagined that Lieberman would betray the Democratic party and back the Republican presidential candidate, excepting for us stupid bloggers, of course, and who listens to us? What about the fact that back in 2006 Lieberman was neutral about whether it would be a good idea for the Democrats to become the majority party? He “must have missed that”.

One thing I didn’t ask him about, because, quite frankly, I wanted to go home, was his backing for another Joe-Joe Gentile. He was the scam artist to whom the town of Preston almost gave the rights to develop the old Norwich Hospital grounds. Even after the town saw the error of its ways, Amann was pushing to try to keep Gentile in play. On that issue, there are two possibilities, neither of which is very flattering for Amann. First, he may actually have believed in Gentile, in which case he’s such a shockingly bad judge of people that he has no business being a governor. The other is that he was fully aware that Amann was a con artist, but he backed him in order to curry favor with the unions, to whom Gentile had promised the world (as he had to everyone else). In that case, the guy is both incredibly cynical and incredibly short sighted, because had Gentile ever gotten control of that property the unions would have been just as much victims of the con as everyone else.

One last observation. He apparently really does believe that Rell is not going to run, and that he will win a cakewalk election against the current lieutenant governor, whose name I of course cannot recall and refuse to take the time to Google. I suppose a lieutenant governor has gotten the nomination to succeed the sitting governor at some point in Connecticut’s storied history, though I can’t think of any examples. I.e, it’s not impossible, but it hardly seems like it makes sense to count on it.


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