Lamont makes his case as a businessman

New London - Ned Lamont keeps interrupting. He cannot help himself.

Standing in the doorway of the pilot house of one of the high-speed passenger ferries owned by Cross Sound Ferry, the Democratic candidate for governor is peppering the company's owner and staff with questions, sometimes so quickly he seems barely able to wait for the answers.

How has the economic downturn hurt business?

What's your arrangement with the nearby casinos?

What would help trigger more work at struggling State Pier, just in front of the ferry's bow?

How much commercial traffic are you pulling off the highways and onto ferries bound to Long Island?

And finally, repeatedly, most importantly, this one: What do you need from me?

Lamont, the 2006 candidate for the U.S. Senate, is now locked in a competitive race for the Democratic nomination for governor. Like most of his rivals, he is eager to demonstrate his affinity for businesses, and an aptitude for creating and preserving jobs in a time of high unemployment and even higher unease among voters.

So employment was the focus for Lamont as he toured southeastern Connecticut Thursday. Lamont met John Wronowski, the owner and president of Cross Sound Ferry and its family of maritime businesses, in the pilot house of one of the company's two high-speed vessels, and bombarded him with questions about the company's current outlook.

The candidate also dropped in on Cable Components Group in Pawcatuck, before traveling up the road to Norwich, where the Lamont campaign was celebrating the opening of a new field office.

Lamont seemed eager on the campaign trail Thursday, even as, it seemed, he had not yet mastered some of its cadences.

The candidate, in an interview at City News on State Street, answered policy questions in streaking run-on sentences, occasionally seeming to talk to the point of breathlessness.

Where conversations at campaign stops with local business often sound rote, Lamont seemed the enthusiastic interrogator of Wronowski and Richard MacMurray, Cross Sound's general manager.

Wronowski said his company has rebounded somewhat from the beginning of the current recession, but is still coping with cutbacks by the state and major traffic drivers, like Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods.

"We've seen things kind of level right now, and we're hoping this summer we'll see a little improvement," said Wronowski, who arrived a few minutes after Lamont from the Thames River Shipyard, where the company president, shirttail untucked and hands lined with dust, was helping complete a three-month-long maintenance project on the ferry Cape Henlopen. (The ship is decades old, Wronowski noted proudly, and was used as a landing vessel at the invasion of Normandy.)

It is "absolutely critical," Wronowski told Lamont, that the state restore the tourism promotion spending that was eliminated in recent budget cuts.

"Look what they did with the (tourism) budget for southeastern Connecticut," he said. "It's one of the biggest industries around here, and they just chopped it. Nothing. Zero. How could you do that?"

Wronowski said he hoped Lamont could use his background in business - the candidate founded a company, Lamont Digital Systems, that does cable and telecommunications installations on college and corporate campuses - to improve the climate for employers. Cross Sound Ferry and the Wronowski family's booming shipyard business, which just received a $1.4 million federal grant to assist its expansion, employ around 400 people.

"One of the worst states in terms of business-friendly is Connecticut, and one of the worst cities at being business friendly in Connecticut, from my point of view, is New London," Wronowski said, in a reference to a fitful history of conflict with the municipal government here.

"So," he added, "we hope you win."

This is precisely the message Lamont has used in courting Democratic primary voters, who are hoping to choose a nominee who can appeal to business-minded voters in November, and bring the party its first gubernatorial win since 1986.

For Lamont, however, that appeal to business-minded cost-cutting - "tighten your belt and move forward," as he put it in an interview - has its limits.

"What the business community's got to understand is when the going gets tough, there's a lot more for the state of Connecticut to do," Lamont said. "There's more people looking at HUSKY. There's more people on unemployment. So it's the opposite of the business impression of a recession."

Pressed on whether he would shrink the state payroll, as Republicans have urged, Lamont said, "Yeah, but not through layoffs. That's a lousy way to do it in a recession."

Instead, Lamont calls for reducing health insurance spending, in part by reviving a Democratic effort to allow municipal governments to join a health insurance purchasing pool intended to lower costs.

And this will not be a campaign, Lamont said, that turns on proposals to reform the local property tax, a perennial issue in recent gubernatorial cycles.

"I am not making big promises about property tax reform in the near term," he said. "You know, the state is broke. I can't ... solve everything at once.

"What I can do is put together a budget that deals with the structural deficit, is honest, and put in place a strategy that gives us the best chance to start growing jobs again," he said. "And then when we get the wind at our back" use new tax revenues to reform the property tax system.

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The Lamont campaign office in Norwich was steamy and crowded as the candidate was introduced by his daughter, Emily.

"I don't want to outshine you," Emily Lamont told her father as she relinquished the floor.

Campaign aides urged people to sign up for text message alerts about campaign events in the 2nd Congressional District. Handmade paper signs on the wall outlined the number of days until the primary (48) and "10 Reasons to Love Lamont." (No. 1: Lamont will get Connecticut "back on offense." The same pledge is printed on the orange foam miniature basketballs that sit in a crate on the pamphlet table.)

His primary opponent, Daniel Malloy, is down in the polls now, but that will change, Lamont acknowledges. The former Stamford mayor, buoyed by the receipt of a $2.2 million public campaign grant, has released two TV spots intended to introduce him to primary voters and boost his name recognition, though Lamont's staff scoffed at the size of the advertising buy.

Still, Lamont said, with Malloy's commercial's running regularly, he will "probably start closing the name recognition gap."

"But these are not normal times," Lamont said. "If it was a more traditional time, people would probably say, 'Hey, maybe a mayor or a legislator would be able to make some incremental changes and move forward.' But I think this is a time when people know that you really need somebody who's not afraid to go up there and challenge the old way of doing things. I think it's a good time to be an outsider."

Still, neither Lamont nor Malloy has an easy answer to the question raised by the Democratic critique of more than a quarter-century of state policy set by non-Democratic governors. Voters may say they are dissatisfied, but the approval ratings for departing Gov. M. Jodi Rell remain above 60 percent in recent public polls - lower than Rell's stratospheric highs, but still very strong for a governor who has just overseen two years of fiscal crisis and legislative controversy.

A few minutes later, Ernie Cohen walked down the steps of the campaign office, onto the sidewalk of Broadway.

Cohen is a registered Republican, but ran for state representative twice in the early 1990s on the ticket of Gov. Lowell P. Weicker Jr.'s A Connecticut Party. Clutching one of the foam basketballs, with a Lamont sticker on his chest, Cohen said he was impressed by the candidate, and liked his chances.

"I think a Democrat's got a good chance this time, a very good chance," Cohen said. "Governor Rell, she's very likable, but I think she just held it together. She didn't get any innovation in there."

Still, Cohen's not totally sold yet.

"I'm sure he knows something about the economy being a businessman," Cohen said. "But Malloy is no fool. He's a smart man, too."