Colin McEnroe: How CT’s governor put on a mask and became a superhero

I was wrong.

I have been operating on the assumption that Ned Lamont would not seek a second term

During the 2018 campaign, Lamont made it clear to donors that his goal was to fix our wheezy state finances and that he was willing to make the kind of hard, unpopular choices that could limit him to one term.

Then, in 2019, Lamont did not seem especially good at being governor or especially fond of the job. (The two go hand-in-hand.) Being a governor is nothing like being a U.S. senator. Being a senator is like being Mickey Mouse at Disney World. You can choose your own workload. You can cut lines. It is nearly impossibly to fire you.

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Being a governor is like being the manager of the New York Mets. Most of the people watching at home think they can do the job better than you. The option of screaming horrible terms related to your hygiene and sex habits is understood to be baked into the ticket price.

Lamont had spent his life in a rarefied world of the New England rich, the American equivalent of a barony. Almost nobody ever tells you to go frack yourself when you’re the baron of a barony.

This new, unsettling experience gave him a permanently startled look, which sat on top of his normal mien, that of a prep school junior. Here is how the handbook at Ned’s alma mater, Phillips Exeter Academy, describes junior year.

“Your transformation from adolescent to young adult begins here. Working together with your parents (and Max Reiss), you will learn to refine your goals and interests while developing a balanced (legislative priority) list that meets the needs of the unique individual that you are.”

When you look at Lamont now, after guiding our state roughly half of the way through a treacherous pandemic crisis, he looks … I don’t know how to say this … he looks … I don’t know if I can say this … he looks … kind of hot.

The soft blankness has been replaced by a resting Kennedy face that appears to mean business. He has done stuff. He is fixing to do more stuff. He has a license to govern.

“Lamont. Edward Lamont.”

This should not be taken as either an endorsement or, for the matter, a marriage proposal. A poll conducted in October by the Sacred Heart institute of Public Policy found that 53.5 percent of residents approve of Lamont as governor. That might not seem overwhelming until you consider that, a little more than a year ago, the number was 24.1.

He more than doubled his approval rating in 13 months. You don’t see that a lot. The fishhook that pulled him up from underwater was COVID-19. The same poll said 71.2 percent of residents like the way he has communicated during the pandemic.

It’s a mistake to over-interpret polls, but the disparity of nearly 20 percent could be an eventual cause for concern. One of these happy days, Lamont is going to be a mostly-post-COVID governor.

He has been to the Nestle Clinic and kicked his toll house problem. He has a lot of capital gains-related income pouring into the state right now, but one thing I did not know, because I refuse to do any of the hard or boring parts of political journalism, is that in Connecticut, because of a recent covenant or possibly a witch’s spell, tax revenue from investment earnings can only flow into the rainy day fund. When it overflows the cap on the fund it has to spill into pension obligation reduction.

So you can’t just, you know, spend it. Unless you can obtain a cow as white as milk, a cape as red as blood, hair as yellow as corn and the slipper Themis Klarides left on the steps of the Prescott Bush Dinner in 2018.

So Lamont and the Legislature are going to have to figure out other revenue sources, and he refuses to raise taxes on the rich.

So, we’ll see how that goes.

Meanwhile, as reported by Mark Pazniokas of the Connecticut Mirror, Lamont is acting like a candidate, right down to scheduling lunches with state legislators and local pols. When you are eating a number of lunches you don’t want to have that exceeds the number of lunches you do want to have, then, grasshopper, you are a politician.

Lamont told Pazniokas: “I love the job. I think you can sort of sense that. But I hate the politics. I’ve had a little bit of an opportunity here with COVID to be above the politics.”

The job is not really severable from politics. Lamont reminds me of a center for the Phoenix Suns, Neal Walk, which is like being a football player named Bob Offsides. Walk changed his name to Josh Hawk after a mushroom experience, but the important thing is that he once said basketball should be more like ballet, and they shouldn’t keep score,

But they do, and they always will.

Colin McEnroe’s column appears every Sunday, his newsletter comes out every Thursday and you can hear his radio show every weekday on WNPR 90.5. Email him at colin@ctpublic.org. Sign up for his newsletter at http://bit.ly/colinmcenroe.