CT Blue

My wife and I get three newspapers every morning, the execrable New London Day, which I rarely read, the New York Times, because I need my dose of Paul Krugman, and the Boston Globe.

As a result I’m somewhat up on Massachusetts politics. The tendency of the folks in Massachusetts to elect Republican governors has always somewhat mystified me, though I have to admit that maybe the corrupt Massachusetts Democrats do need some counterbalance. Specifically, I’ve always been amazed at the popularity of their governor, Charlie Baker, who has always seemed a mediocrity to me. Baker, though, is fairly good at making sure he is perceived in a positive light, i.e., good at self promotion.

Lately, Baker’s popularity has taken a bit of a hit, due to his administration’s fairly disastrous vaccine rollout, which followed a fairly poor record on dealing with the pandemic in the first place.

Consider also, the fact that until recently Andrew Cuomo was a pandemic golden boy, more out of his ability to be a self promoter than his actual accomplishments.

And that brings me to the whole point of this little piece. It is a sad fact of life that a politician can thrive more as a result of self promotion than on the merits of his or her performance.

Consider our governor, who entered the pandemic with one of the lowest approval ratings in the country. What had he done to deserve such low ratings? His job and nothing but his job. If he has a horn, he doesn’t toot it.

His ratings have improved somewhat since COVID, but my guess is that he’s still lagging both Baker and Cuomo. From the start, his inability to engage in self promotion has been his most obvious flaw, and that is certainly the case in the midst of this pandemic.

A week ago the Globe ran an article about Baker’s fairly disastrous vaccine rollout, which included this graphic:

Connecticut was number 6 so far as effectiveness was concerned, and appeared to be first among the densely populated states. It may have slipped a bit since then, but we’re still doing pretty well. During his daily press conferences Lamont comes across as totally earnest, doing his best to do his job, but in such a low key way that he fails to earn the plaudits that were heaped on Cuomo, who even got a boost from Randy Rainbow.

From a political point of view it is almost better to be a loud and pandering non-achiever or obstructionist than a low key achiever. Consider the state Senator from my district, Heather Somers, who spends her time on Facebook firing up the anti-vaxxers. She’ll probably get more political return for that than Lamont will for doing his job well. Or consider Greg Abbott, who is very much responsible for the disaster in Texas, who will probably skate to re-election, as quite likely, will Ron DeSantis in Florida, who has been steering vaccinations to his wealthy supporters.

It seems like the state Democrats should step up and start talking up Lamont’s response to this crisis, but Connecticut Democrats are like their federal brethren. Republicans will all repeat the latest lie, but Democrats will never pound away at the truth.