Republican Amnesia

The big story in Waterbury politics is the disintegration of the Republican party. Now at third party status right behind the independent party it has lost yet another election and in grand fashion. What happened?

Let's eliminate the obvious. The last two Republican mayors ended up in prison. That they were Italian ought to be and is irrelevant but not when yet another Italian runs this time around. Anthony D'ameilo as far as we're concerned is a good man, successful, intelligent and serves his community well in Hartford. But unless he could give the electorate a reason to vote for him, a platform that transcends stereotypes and party affiliation he would be dead in the water and he was.

But barring the ethnic factor or even if D'ameilo didn't run altogether and the party had Dennis Odle instead it's not likely that we would have seen the party win against the incumbent. The Republican party in the last 27 years has won the important debates nationwide in the all areas of domestic policy from favoring free markets, low taxation, an understanding of welfare and regulatory shortcomings and the importance of family and individual virtue. On the foreign policy side there was the recognition that the Soviet Union was not just a different system but an evil one and nothing short of defeat of that system was acceptable. Almost nothing in the platform of either D'ameilo or Odle ran on principles that put Republicans in office ie: conservative. Odle's plan of a strict accounting system seemed to him to do just fine but on the growth side a weak plan of marketing the town to business and a revamping, from what we can tell, of a hapless quasi-government development corporation and the ever so bad idea of tax abatement is just not enough. D'ameilo's platform, if we can call it that, was far worse advocating a stronger lobbying structure in Hartford for state funds to do whatever. Have these candidates any awareness of just what makes Republicans win in the first place?

Waterbury is not an ideological town, politically. Just like it doesn't have firebrand conservatives it also doesn't have strident liberalism as well and perhaps in some way we could count ourselves lucky. We place religious symbols in the town green on Christmas with no objections, there aren't groups looking to institute school prayer and the like. Indeed there is no liberal/conservative solution to fixing pot holes and getting rid of trash. But there is some efficacy to the argument of economic growth, why it's a good thing and how it's achieved. The destruction of the welfare system on its recipients and the town as a whole. It's in these areas that Waterbury needs solutions and ideas. It used to come from Republicans and if they don't produce them good riddance to them and for whatever it is they stand for, if anything at all, in its place.