A Candid Exchange of Views. Fedele Denies Foley’s Bibb Ad Charge.

Republican primary voters would profit from watching or listening to today’s Republican gubernatorial debate sponsored by WFSB and Connecticut Public Broadcasting.  It provided more substantive answers than this kind of forum usually elicits from candidates.

Their strengths and weaknesses were on display.  They continue to improve, which is not to say that each one is a now a skillful debater.

Mike Fedele relies on vague generalities about collaboration.  That word has more than one implication and the collaborations of the last 4 years have been disastrous for the state.  He continues to stumble over the lexicon of politics and government.  I think I heard him say, “The electoral elects us.”  He indulges in the gobble-de-gook of government speak.  What does it mean to be “paralleling needs”?  He gives flashes of knowing about how government works.  Now and then he shows a command of some details, but overall, he loses his way in cliches and repetition.  The nightmare debate of this campaign would be a Fedele-Glassman encounter.

He’s wrong about campaign finance.  The old system wasn’t rigged for self-funders.  This one is.  He’s right, however, that accurate negative ads serve a purpose.

Foley is also right that it should be no hindrance to have served the nation abroad.  To criticize him for being out of Connecticut because he was representing the United States in Iraq and Ireland is parochial in the extreme.

Foley has improved the most on his feet.  He’s mastered a fair amount of information about state government.  Foley lobbed one at Fedele when he claimed that no one in Fedele’s Bibb ads was an employee of the company.  “They were treated to a sumptuous lunch and handed a script,”  according to Foley.  I asked the Fedele campaign about the charge and spokesman Chris Cooper says all were former employees.  No was given lunch or a script, Cooper said in an email late this afternoon.

Don’t know why Foley would declare, “Leadership requires truthfulness.”  That’s his most serious flaw.

Oz Griebel was the most straightforward of the three in setting out his stall and explaining the challenges the next governor will face.  He negated his funny appeal (in an otherwise humorless hour) for Governor M. Jodi Rell’s endorsement in his closer when he said (reading, which did not bolster his claim to intellectual horsepower) that his election would bring a “clean break from the Rell-Fedele administration.”  That’s a cry unlikely to stir Mrs. Rell to his side.

With some money he probably would have been a contender.

Foley is right that there is a very clear choice, but that’s not the same as a good choice.