Author, Doctor, Speaker, Joseph Bentivegna

Doctor Bentivegna is an ophthalmologist living in Connecticut. He has written numerous op-ed pieces for The Hartford Courant and The New York Times regarding health care, tort reform, and the political situation in Haiti.

Analyzing the Republican Candidates for Governor

July 12, 2018

       Connecticut Republicans will choose their nominee on August 14 and no candidate has emerged as the front runner. As there are few ideological differences, most voters are trying to determine the strongest candidate to take on the probable Democratic nominee – Greenwich multimillionaire Ned Lamont. I have not decided yet, but below is my impression of the strengths and weaknesses of each.

      Mark Boughton. It is hard to speak to Mark Boughton and not develop an immediate fondness for the guy. Cordial and receptive, he is an accomplished politician who has governed Danbury as mayor for nine terms and continuously wins reelection easily, even though Democrats outnumber Republicans by a 2-1 margin. He is a former public school teacher, state assemblyman and served our country in the military. He has a plan to eliminate the state income tax and said he would “lie down on Route 84” before allowing tolls. He is the endorsed candidate, meaning he won the majority of the delegates at the Republican Convention. Ironically, his main weakness is his success. With the state in such financial distress, many voters may feel that such an accomplished politician may be too willing to make deal with the Democrats, rather than take the brutal steps necessary to turn Connecticut around.

      Tim Herbst. Tim has been plotting his path to Pennsylvania Avenue since he started emitting brain waves while in utero. A political prodigy and self-described “student of the game,” Herbst won his first election at age 19 when he became a member of Trumbull’s Planning and Zoning Commission. Ten years later, he upset the Democratic incumbent and became the First Selectman. He reduced the number of political appointees and decreased pension and health costs of town employees. He can be abrasive at times, but this may be what it takes to get the state in order. Nobody works harder than Herbst and if he is the nominee, he will be cleaning the toilets of voters who are on the fence. He is attracting the more conservative elements of the Republican Party and has the endorsement of the FIC (Family Institute of Connecticut), a socially conservative group skeptical of abortion and gay rights. He also has the endorsement of the CCDL (Connecticut Citizens Defense League), a group that defends gun owners’ rights. This may help him in the primary but in Deep Blue Connecticut, you can be sure the Democrats will pounce on him for these associations should he be our nominee.

      Steve Obsitnik. Steve surprised the political class when he received enough delegate support at the Republican convention to qualify for the primary. He has run for Congress in Fairfield County, losing to the popular Jim Himes in 2012. A Westport resident, he graduated from Annapolis and the Wharton School of Business and was part of the team that developed the voice-recognition software of Siri. He is a fiscal conservative and social moderate and well-positioned ideologically should he be the nominee. His main weakness is that at the time of this writing, he has not received the funds for the Connecticut’s Citizen Election Program while his opponents are already on the airwaves. But the van he is riding while touring the state is receiving great publicity and with a little luck, he should soon have the funds to compete.

      Bob Stefanowski. A political newcomer, Stefanowski decided to bypass being nominated at the Republican Convention and qualified for the primary by gathering signatures. He was the first candidate to hit the airwaves and thus has a head start in name recognition. A denizen of Madison, he has an impressive business resume. His greatest asset is that he is an outsider and when one hears him speak, he gives the impression that he has the testicular fortitude to veto any bill that does not restore fiscal sanity, even if it means his popularity sinks to single digits. Other candidates from the political class may balk in a similar scenario. His opponent for the outsider mantle, Dave Stemerman, appears to have access to more cash (both men have mostly self-financed and are not participating in the Citizens Election Program) and this may place him at a disadvantage not only in the primary, but in the general election.

      Dave Stemerman. Another political newcomer, Stemerman is an alternative to Stefanowski for voters who believe only a political outsider can clean up the fiscal mess in Hartford. A graduate of both Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School, the Greenwich resident made a fortune running a hedge fund. He is the only candidate at this point who is specific about where the cuts must be made to restore fiscal sanity and has the intellectual honesty to admit that the state income tax cannot be repealed. He has already lent $10,000,000 to his campaign and appears to have the limitless resources that will be needed to fight another Greenwich plutocrat, Ned Lamont. The downside of his candidacy is that Tom Foley and Linda McMahon – both Greenwich plutocrats – did not do well in state wide elections when nominated.

      As there are little ideological differences between the candidates, this campaign could get ugly and personal very quickly. Expect to see attack ads any day now. If this happens, the losers and their supporters should get over it immediately and unite behind our nominee the day after the primary. We cannot afford to sulk and lick our wounds. If the Democrats win again, those who choose to stay in our beautiful state will soon be paying outrageous tolls to support forty-year vacations for the burgeoning retiring class of state and municipal workers along with the freeloading Democratic political cronies.

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President Trump Versus the Ruling Class

June 3, 2018

      Every society has a Ruling Class. In the United States, it is the super wealthy and those with Ivy League educations – especially those with degrees from Harvard or Yale. The leaders of our bureaucracies, major newspapers, opinion journals, think tanks, courts, corporations, universities, media conglomerates and political class come from one of these two groups – or ambitious individuals who have ingratiated themselves with these groups.

      This was not necessarily a bad thing, as long as our Ruling Class was competent. But in the mid-twentieth century, the value system of our Ruling Class began to deviate with that of the ruled. Our Ruling Class became for more hedonistic, greedy, cowardly and arrogant. It became socially acceptable for powerful men to dump their wives for younger more nubile women. Judicial decisions that bypassed democratic process removed God from public schools, allowed pornography to proliferate and legalized abortion. The media portrayed those with conservative family values as sexist buffoons.

      Drug use became fashionable among the Ruling Class. Harvard professor Timothy Leary became a media darling in the sixties by promoting LSD use. Marijuana and cocaine were staples at fashionable Manhattan parties. In fact, when President Nixon initiated the so-called War on Drugs, it had to be curtailed because so many elite scions were being arrested.

      Our Ruling Class still wanted to make the world safe for democracy, but didn’t desire to be killed or maimed doing so. Thus, protests against the Viet Nam War began at elite universities and culminated with the abolishment of the draft and an all-volunteer army that consisted mostly of minorities and lower middle-class whites.

      Tax cuts on the superrich by President Reagan created the incentive for a new class of robber barons to raid corporations and strip workers of their health care and pensions while moving their jobs overseas. Wall Street was able to speculate with impunity and get bailed out while the ruled got the bill and foreclosure notices.

      This Ruling Class incompetence first decimated the jobs and family structure of urban minorities. African-Americans returned in disproportionately high numbers in body bags from Viet Nam, while the crack epidemic of the eighties turned their neighborhoods in to warzones. The Ruling Class yawned. But then the same phenomenon happened in white rural America – family destruction, joblessness, opioid overdose deaths and body bags from Iraq and Afghanistan.

      But rural white American did something that black America did not. It started leaning Republican and then supported a man for president that the Ruling Class considered to be a crude joke – Donald Trump. Meanwhile, the main spokesperson for the Ruling Class, Hillary Clinton, ridiculed Trump’s supporters at a tony Manhattan fundraiser hosted by Barbra Streisand while an inaccurate CNN poll had her ahead of Trump by 14 points.

      In what historians will record as the greatest political gaffe in modern history, she ridiculed Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables,” screeching “[they are] racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it” to the cheers of her Ruling Class crowd.

      Then Trump committed his first real crime – he won. Our Ruling Class has not taken this well and remains determined to remove Trump from office. But then Trump committed his second crime – he governed competently. A combination of tax cuts and deregulation has the economy roaring. The crack down on illegal immigration has resulted in the lowest unemployment levels of blacks and Hispanics since statistics have been collected. For the first time in recent memory, the wages for the working poor are increasing. Slow progress is being made on many difficult foreign policy issues.

      But the Ruling Class will not give up, insisting that Trump colluded with the Russians in spite of no obvious evidence. But with Trump presiding over peace and prosperity, the Ruling Class is forced to put all their marbles into Robert Mueller’s investigation – as it appears less likely they can defeat Trump at the ballot box. Thus, expect Trump to subpoenaed or indicted by a grand jury in the near future.

      How this will end is beyond me. But our Ruling Class seems to keep asking itself, “Why did the country but this joker in power?” What they should be asking is “How did we rule so incompetently that the desperate voters saw Trump as their only recourse?”

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Fallout from Republican Gubernatorial Race May End the Convention System

May 9, 2018

       A major reason for Connecticut’s political dysfunction is that it remains a Convention state. In most states, prospective candidates are only required to gather a reasonable number of signatures to have their name placed on the ballot. Not in Connecticut.

       Every town has a Democratic and Republican Town Committee. These committees chose delegates to attend conventions that pick candidates. To win the party nomination, a candidate must receive over fifty percent of the delegates’ votes. To earn the right to primary, a candidate must receive fifteen percent of the vote. Thus, prospective candidates spend their evenings addressing town committees, weekends going to dried-out ziti fundraisers and every other waking hour meeting delegates individually in order to secure their support. This is a tedious and time-consuming process and also a colossal waste of time; as it does little to increase the candidate’s profile with the vast majority of prospective voters.

       Political outsiders who attempt to run are only welcome if they can self-finance and pay Party Insiders high consulting fees to help garner delegates. But this changed once Connecticut passed the Citizens’ Election Program, which enables candidates to raise small amounts of money from many citizens to qualify for large amounts of public financing.

       Now, those seeking the gubernatorial nomination must raise $250,000 from contributions that do not exceed $100. This too is a tedious and time-consuming process, but at the time of this writing, seven Republican candidates have done so. All of these candidates are now in a position to each receive over $1.3 million dollars to run a primary and the winner will receive six million dollars for the general election.

       The problem is that none of these candidates are political outsiders. Mark Boughton is a former state representative and has been mayor of Danbury for seven terms. Tim Herbst is the former First Selectman of Trumbull. David Walker is a former US Comptroller. Mark Lauretti has been mayor of Shelton for over twenty years. Prasad Srinivasen is a state representative from Glastonbury. Steve Obsitnik is a member of the Westport Town Committee and a former Fourth District Congressional candidate. Peter Lumaj has run for both U.S. Senate and Secretary of the State. Erin Stewart, the young and charismatic mayor of New Britain, will probably raise the requisite funds in the near future.

       Unless there are multiple Convention votes, it will be difficult for all these candidates to receive 15% of the delegates, meaning after working fourteen-hour days for the past year, not only will their political views never be heard; they will not even be on the ballot. And the ones who do not qualify will be quite upset.

       They will have the option of petitioning their way on the ballot, but this is not easy. To do so requires collecting 9,500 signatures (2% of registered Republicans) in about a month – a daunting task. But two self-financing Republicans, Bob Stefanowski and David Stemerman are both bypassing the Convention and doing so.

       Thus, the Party Insiders who control the delegates will try to do what they have so miserably failed at in the past – pick the strongest candidate while not alienating the various factions of the Republican Party.

       But how are they going to do this? If they manipulate the Convention to keep the pro-Trump social conservative Peter Lumaj off the ballot, will they anger the Republican base? Remember, Trump won the Connecticut primary in 2016 by a whopping 58%. The Party Insider’s favorite, John Kasich came in a dismal second with 27%. Yet Lumaj could easily win a multi-ballot primary but lose the general election if upper middle-class women – the swing vote in Connecticut – refuse to vote for him.

       How about if the Party Insiders keep the eminently-electable Erin Stewart off the ballot because she is too young and entered the race late? How will Dave Walker, who has dedicated his life to public service, feel when delegates pledged to him switch or abandon him on the second ballot. Will Prasad Srinivasen, who has resorted to banging or delegates’ doors since they will not answer their phones or e-mails, believe he has been treated fairly?

       My bet is that the Republican Convention will nominate Tim Herbst and Mark Boughton will qualify to primary him. But keep in mind that I also predicted that my alma mater, St. Francis University would beat the UConn women. We lost by 88 points (a ref job of course).

       Unfortunately, we are stuck with this archaic system. Whatever the outcome of this election, both Democrats and Republicans should go to direct primaries. Prospective candidates should be required to garner 1% of their Party’s membership by January of the election year and the primary should be held in May. This will give the winning candidate enough time to consolidate his or her base, and face their opponent. It is simply unfair to have candidates work so hard to get permission to get on the ballot, especially since these Party Insiders are basically useless the second the Convention is over.

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