DeStefano Says Rell Fails To See Connecticut's major Problems

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DeStefano Says Rell Fails To See Connecticut's major Problems

New London Day: By Ted Mann October 18, 2006

Challenger Presses Claim that Governor Lacks Vision

New London - There were exactly three weeks left until Election Day when John DeStefano, the Democrat who would be governor, got the line just right - his core critique of Gov. M. Jodi Rell's leadership of the state that he hopes might propel him into office. "You can't fix what you don't see," DeStefano said late Tuesday afternoon, almost sighing, near the end of a meeting with the editorial board of The Day.

As his campaign struggles to gain ground on the Republican incumbent, DeStefano has seized on what he calls a lack of vision and leadership in the Rell administration.

DeStefano, the mayor of New Haven, calls himself the candidate of "big ideas." He took to the airwaves this week with a new commercial mocking Rell for failing to answer in a recent debate when she was asked what her biggest mistake as governor has been.

"I was actually trying to think of the worst thing that possibly could have happened, and I have to tell you, I don't see it," Rell responded during the debate at the Garde Arts Center in New London.

DeStefano, as he has maintained for the nearly two years since he began campaigning in earnest, says he can see it, pointing to stagnant job growth, an estimated 77,000 children without health insurance, and rising energy prices as evidence that all is not well in Connecticut.

And then, what DeStefano hopes will be a damaging example of a Rell mistake - her endorsement in 2002 of then-Gov. John G. Rowland as "the greatest governor Connecticut has ever had."

In a revealing exchange with The Day's editorial board, DeStefano said the mistake ad is fundamentally intended to rally those already in his camp.

"Frankly, that's about energizing the base," he said.

And the campaign has other plans, intended to cut into a Rell lead in public opinion polls that has seemed daunting, albeit diminished in the days after the Oct. 9 debate.

"The bad news is the Senate race took a lot of the air out of the room," DeStefano said, referring to the campaign between Democratic nominee Ned Lamont and the incumbent, Sen. Joe Lieberman, now petitioning as an independent. "The good news is a lot of people are going to vote. ... I've just got to let them know they've got a choice."

For voters in southwestern Connecticut - home turf of Lamont and Lieberman, and also of the red-hot race between Rep. Chris Shays, R-4th District, and Democrat Diane Farrell - that's going to mean as much attention as the DeStefano campaign can afford to give them.

"We're going to mail the hell out of them," he said.

In the meantime, the campaign is raising funds full-time, hoping to keep its television ads up through the election, and hoping to find the telling detail that can dent Rell's image the way corruption tarnished that of her one-time running mate, Rowland.

"I always felt that what made John Rowland's stuff real for people was the hot tub," DeStefano said, referring to the gift from state employees - which the disgraced governor had at first insisted he purchased himself - that surfaced in most news accounts of Rowland's corruption scandal. He eventually pleaded guilty to a single corruption charge related to the bid-rigging enterprise operated out of his office, and served 10 months in federal prison.

Seeking a similarly gripping metaphor for the failings he sees in Rell, DeStefano said he heard it in the governor's own admission that she "didn't see" a misstep and preferred to focus on the positive aspects of her record.

"We're going to use Jodi's words," DeStefano said. "She doesn't see it."