Connecticut's next governor will be the last man standing

The next governor of Connecticut will be a white man from Fairfield County or greater Hartford, or, just maybe, from the little town of Chester.

He will have campaigned on a message of job growth and fiscal restraint, on making "tough choices" or "hard decisions," if not both, and on the need to shake up the status quo at the Capitol.

He will have laid out a plan to solve the state's projected $3.5 billion budget deficit and address its glaring inadequacies in education, transportation and physical infrastructure. But he will have made few concrete pledges about which laws he will change, and how exactly he will square the voters' implicit demands for services with their explicit anger at the growing costs of providing them.

For now, we know he will be named Tom or Mike or Dan or Ned or R. Nelson, "Oz" for short.

On Aug. 10, when Democrats and Republicans vote in their primaries, that field will shrink to three.

Republicans Tom Foley, Michael Fedele and R. Nelson "Oz" Griebel and Democrats Ned Lamont and Dan Malloy are storming into the primary in a race tilting toward nastiness, at least by Connecticut standards.

Four years after Malloy's primary battle with New Haven Mayor John DeStefano Jr. was largely overshadowed by Lamont's Senate primary campaign against U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman, the two Democrats have stayed in the spotlight this time around.

Malloy has attacked Lamont's record as a businessman, trying to cast doubt on his rival's claims of job creation, and teased him for refusing to participate in more than one televised debate.

Lamont has hit back hard, accusing Malloy of overseeing a "climate of corruption" in his 14-year tenure as mayor of Stamford, but he has also relented, agreeing late last week to participate in another TV debate with his rival.

Fisticuffs

The fists have flown just as furiously across the aisle, where Foley, a wealthy businessman and former U.S. ambassador, cruised out to an early lead on the strength of ubiquitous TV spots, but nonetheless went to court to try to block Fedele from participating in the state's public campaign financing system.

Foley's court challenge, which Griebel also backed, may have failed when the state Supreme Court rejected his request to block Fedele from receiving just over $2 million in his campaign grant.

But it has also handed him a cudgel with which to whack Fedele, the sitting lieutenant governor and the only gubernatorial candidate other than Malloy who is participating in the public financing system.

Fedele's retorts have aimed for the jugular: references to published reports about Foley's two arrests on motor vehicle-related charges, and a hard-hitting advertisement that shows off the plight of workers at a textile plant, the Bibb Co. in Columbus, Ga., once owned by Foley.

Foley maintained a minority stake in the company when it underwent restructuring and the plant was shut down, putting 1,000 employees out of work.

Griebel, the former president of Bank Boston in Connecticut and best-known at the Capitol as the head of the Metro-Hartford Alliance, has struggled with fundraising and to keep pace in public polling, despite endorsements from some key state lawmakers and members of the Republican party establishment.

Tom Marsh, the first selectman of Chester, dropped out of the Republican primary race, but has petitioned his way onto the November ballot as an independent candidate.

In this corner

Dan Malloy and his advisers huddle around the speakerphone in the upstairs office of the Thames River Greenery on New London's State Street. An automated dialer has helped to churn together a conference call of roughly 5,000 potential voters, all waiting for a chance to ask Malloy a question, but first the candidate gets in another little dig at his opponent, Lamont.

Malloy and Lamont were to have been debating here, on a Tuesday night two weeks before the primary, but Lamont's campaign has refused. Ever since, Malloy and his surrogates have been hammering Lamont for it, in TV ads and in interviews, and eventually convinced Lamont to reverse course and agree to a second televised debate, scheduled for Tuesday.

In his telephone town hall, which occurs just as Lamont is hosting a similar event in Bridgeport, Malloy fields a wide array of questions.

Late in the evening, he hears from Alberta from Waterford.

"I'd like to know how you feel about taxing the rich in the state," she asks.

Malloy responds hesitantly at first, saying he supports progressive income taxation, but eventually answers in Alberta's terms: "I want a system that more reflects what you're saying or what you're advocating than what we currently have."

But, Malloy warns, Connecticut's tax policies must be "benchmarked" to avoid creating a competitive disadvantage with neighboring states.

This is about as frank as any of the candidates in this race will get about the issue of taxes - or at least the possibility of raising them.

Lamont conceded that he did not believe the state could close its entire deficit without raising new revenue by some means, but hastened to add, "I don't lead with that ... We have not earned the right to raise anybody's taxes."

Lamont, whose campaign pitch turns on his business experience and a willingness to stand up to both Democrats and Republicans in Hartford, has repeatedly refused to make spending pledges. In response to Malloy's pledge to commit $15 million to market tourism, Lamont's reply has been, "I suppose I should promise $16 million?" - because he said such promises will inevitably be superseded by the need to close the yawning deficit.

Lamont also sharpened his attacks on Malloy in TV ads, charging him with accepting campaign contributions for his past mayoral and gubernatorial campaigns from contractors doing business with the city of Stamford.

Malloy, Lamont says, fostered a "climate of corruption" that resulted in a state prosecutor's probe into allegations Malloy received improper home improvements from contractors.

What the ad did not disclose was that then-Chief State's Attorney Christopher Morano issued an extraordinary statement in 2005 declaring that there was "no credible evidence" that Malloy broke the law.

Still, Lamont defended the ad.

"You can talk about that any way you want to," an animated Lamont said, after a reporter read part of Morano's statement to him. "It's an issue. Is it an issue I would have brought up? No.

"He hit me," Lamont said of Malloy, whose advertisements have criticized Lamont for overstating job creation at his company Campus Televideo, a charge that was "debunked," Lamont said, when Lieberman made it in 2006.

Even as he steered the conversation toward his ability to find common ground among disparate groups in Hartford, including labor leaders, business executives and academics, Lamont suggested he had learned to hit back since his Senate bid.

"What do I do? Come back with, 'Well, here are facts, and here are facts and here are facts?'" Lamont said. "You lose!"

And in this corner

Even as the Democratic race turned increasingly hard-hitting late last week, the Republicans remained in the lead when it came to intra-party churlishness.

Foley has raced out to huge leads in recent polls by Quinnipiac University's Polling Institute, including a 35-point lead over Fedele even after the Hartford Courant reported his 1981 and 1991 arrests.

But Foley still fought hard, unsuccessfully, to block Fedele from receiving his public campaign grant. And once the lieutenant governor had the funds in hand, he hit back, especially with the advertisement highlighting the plight of the workers from the Bibb Company.

In a debate at the Garde, Fedele denounced Foley, saying he had misled voters about his ownership stake in Bibb, and challenged him repeatedly to make clear further details of his arrests. Foley has said records of the incidents are either already public or no longer exist.

Foley and Griebel, in turn, have criticized Fedele for his participation in the administration of Gov. M. Jodi Rell, including his failure to publicly break with Rell over her compromise with Democrats on a two-year budget.

Foley has insisted he can cut $2 billion from the state's expenditures, and said that instituting his other policies would be enough to help the state economy rebound, revive the long-term revenue picture, and eliminate the deficit.

Fedele, meanwhile, has signed a no-tax pledge and vowed in a recent debate that he would veto any tax increases that cross his desk.

Griebel, notably among Republicans, has refused to rule out taxes entirely, though he has stressed his commitment to cutting spending.

Griebel also has refused to rule out the possibility of electronic tolls on the state's highways, a highly controversial idea that he said must be considered as a long-term solution for supporting investment in the state's transportation infrastructure.

And yet...

In an election year that has turned on reaction to a now two-year-old crisis, there is remarkable unanimity of message.

All five of the major party candidates, at one point or another over the past few months, have raised the possibility of streamlining or refining state environmental permitting, in order to speed the approvals for companies seeking to expand in Connecticut.

Each has said creating jobs will be a primary goal. Each has claimed that a thorough review of existing state agencies and statutes will yield meaningful budgetary savings, in ways that do not raise the specter of onerous budget cuts.

Malloy calls for the elimination of many tax expenditures. Fedele proposes a "business cabinet" of advisers to help guard against policy changes that will irk employers.

Lamont and Foley have both called for cutting the $250 business entity tax as a way to encourage small business growth, while conducting a thorough review of the state budget to find inefficiencies and redundancies that can be eliminated.

Most have claimed they will recover more money from Washington, in the form of previously forgone federal reimbursements.

And Republicans especially promise a changed environment for business owners.

"Business leaders, before they invest somewhere, want two things, low cost and certainty, and we're giving them exactly the opposite," Foley said.

But for now, they are fighting.

As the race neared its final week, Fedele's camp leaked internal polls it said would show him closing quickly on Foley, while Malloy's supporters increasingly said they felt momentum shifting to them and away from Lamont.

For his part, Lamont rued the negative turn of the race while vowing to challenge Malloy in Tuesday's debate.

Malloy and DeStefano were damaged in their 2006 primary, Lamont said, suggesting that the bruises helped Rell cruise to reelection.

"I was doing everything I could to make sure that didn't happen in this race," Lamont said. "And I think I failed."