Hopkins-Cavanagh could channel national discontent into a victory

Lori Hopkins-Cavanagh, the Republican running for the U.S. House in eastern Connecticut's sprawling 2nd District, could unleash a thunderbolt against supporters of President Barack Obama, such as her opponent, Rep. Joe Courtney, who wrested the seat from Republican Rob Simmons in 2006.

Simmons lost to Courtney by a heart thumping 91 votes of more than 242,000 cast. Simmons is now chairman of the fiscally conservative Yankee Institute for Public Policy. He was also recently appointed selectman in his hometown of Stonington, filling a vacancy.

The 2nd District, not yet gerrymandered, has tossed aside both Republican and Democratic representatives with equal fervor. Acreage-wise, the 2nd is the Ponderosa of Connecticut's U.S. congressional districts. An aerial view of Connecticut would show the 2nd covering nearly half the state. It contains the northeast portion of Connecticut called " The Quiet Corner." The district is rapturously the sort of place in which "throw the bums out" signs might gaily sprout on every lawn, if the folk who live there were not quite so quiet and safely removed geographically from the hurly-burly of Hartford politics. A "throw the bums out" mood can only help Republican congressional delegation challengers, since the entire delegation is Democratic, and progressive - and tied to the apron strings of a president whose foreign policy is a wreck from without, while his domestic policy is a wreck from within.

On the continuing mortgage crisis, Hopkins-Cavanaugh speaks authoritatively. She has been for years a licensed real estate broker and owner of a successful real estate brokerage company in New London.

During their recent debate in New London, Courtney damned with faint praise the efforts of the Obama administration to bring the nation out of its housing mortgage death spiral; he remarked that the real estate market was showing "signs of life." If Obama had during his first term in office devoted his energy to settling the mortgage crisis that had caused the national financial collapse at the tail end of the Bush administration, he would today be sitting in fields of clover, impervious to nagging Republican criticisms. Instead, Obama reached for an old progressive brass ring - health care nationalization. The new way of nationalizing an industry in America is through excessive regulation. In November, shortly after the election, insurance companies, attempting to satisfy the requirements of Obamacare, will be dumping millions of people from their rolls, as the housing recovery limps into the future.

"Eight years after the housing bubble burst," Hopkins-Cavanagh noted following the New London debate, "the 64 towns and cities in the 2nd Congressional District have yet to see a housing recovery, and that is indefensible. The housing market in the district is dire. Pending sales statistics, underwater homes and foreclosed inventory paints a gloomy picture for the long-term. All six counties in the 2nd District were relatively flat instead of declining only because the federal government withheld a sizable inventory of foreclosed homes during the summer in order to stabilize the declining market. This is not 'a sign of life.'"

She produced a Zillow interactive map showing the percentage of homes in the district that were "in negative equity"; the value or equity in such homes is less than the total mortgage owned by the householder, not the happiest of circumstances. These are real lashes felt on the backs of Courtney's constituents. "Mr. Courtney," said Mrs. Hopkins-Cavanagh, through his support of defective presidential programs, relentlessly continues "to destroy the American Dream in Connecticut."

The distress is more profound in the District's inner cities. All over Connecticut, cities get the flu when the suburbs have the sniffles.

Hopkins-Cavanagh is at least as energetic, and far less a bully, than that fiery ball of misplaced energy, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy. Within the 2nd District, she very well may be yet another Claire Booth Luce, the 4th District Republican congresswoman whom Franklin Roosevelt once dismissed as "a sharp-tongued glamor girl of 40." The witty Luce, rarely at a loss for words, returned fire, characterizing Roosevelt as "the only American president who ever lied us into a war because he did not have the political courage to lead us into it," a shoe that very well may fit the foot of a more recent president.

Don Pesci writes about Connecticut politics. He lives in Vernon