Tom Foley’s Calamity and Dan Malloy’s Bad Week.
It may be too late for this book to save Tom Foley.
Tom Foley was supposed to implode in September of 2014, not 2013. It’s been a brutal week for the Greenwich Republican businessman who launched his second campaign for governor ten days ago. Foley blundered out of the starting gate with a jaw-dropping appearance with Dennis House on WFSB’s “Face the State” that was broadcast on Sunday, September 15th.
Foley crowed four times that he had the goods on unethical conduct in Democratic and Working Families Governor Dannel P. Malloy’s administration. Two claims were already in the public record. The other two were not. Foley has presented no evidence that Malloy had a business relationship with his commissioner of the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, Daniel Esty, or that a favorite Malloy law firm is winning municipal bond work with by threatening towns with the loss of state funds if they don’t play ball with Malloy’s friends.
As the week ends, Foley’s nascent campaign is a crippled mess. The Bibb’s in better shape than Foley’s exploratory campaign.
This week’s gobsmacking reversal of fortune upends Malloy’s expectations of running against an edgy Thurston Howell III. Malloy needs an opponent he can portray as more unlikable than the first term Democrat. In the field of prospective opponents the chilly former ambassador to Ireland has considerable potential to fulfill that requirement. The other three Republican hopefuls–Toni Boucher, Mark Boughton, and John McKinney–do not. Each is an experienced candidate with on-the-ground campaign skills and accessible personalities. Malloy would face a very different campaign against any one of them than he would with Foley as his opponent.
You can spend your adult life in politics and never get the kind of break that Boucher, Boughton, and McKinney got last Sunday morning. All they have to do to turn it into something more than a chance is raise $250,000 in small donations. Foley’s blunder, and those that are likely to follow, ought to make that a little easier.