Gov. Dannel P. Malloy remains as combative as ever as he nears the end of his eight years in office. In a far-ranging, hourlong interview on Monday, Malloy embraced his low approval rankings as evidence that he was committed to saying and doing the right and hard thing, not the politically expedient one.

“The idea that I came into office desiring to be popular is a mischaracterization of what I devoted my public service to,” Malloy said. “I wasn’t looking to be popular. I was looking to make change.”

In his second term, polls have shown Malloy’s approval ratings generally in the mid-20s, but as low as 14.6 percent in a pre-election Sacred Heart University/Hearst Connecticut Media survey.

But there is no arguing he was an agent of change.

Under Malloy’s progressive leadership, the General Assembly repealed the death penalty, decriminalized marijuana, approved a massive education bill, passed substantial criminal justice reforms and enacted some of the toughest gun-control laws in the country.

He persuaded a state Supreme Court justice, Joette Katz, to leave the bench to head up the Department of Children and Families. She pursued a dramatic change in direction, working to keep children placed in the system because of family dysfunction with extended relatives, rather than moving them into foster or institutional care, often out of state.

“We used to have hundreds of children taken from our state and placed in facilities in other states. That doesn’t happen anymore,” Malloy said.

These progressive reforms did not always go smoothly. Some criminals taking advantage of the early release programs committed violent crimes. Some children placed with extended families were abused.

“There will always be those one or two or three cases in which someone, given these opportunities, goes and does something heinous and in the end the entire underpinning gets attacked. In those cases most governors fold,” Malloy said. “I don’t fold.”

Indeed, Malloy stuck by Katz in the face of reports of abusive behavior by personnel at the Juvenile Training School in Middletown, which closed in April, and during cases such as the one in Groton in 2015 in which a toddler placed with an aunt suffered terrible neglect. Katz stayed in place for the entire eight years of Malloy’s terms, rare for the leader of a child welfare agency, where high turnover rates are typical.

“Although bad things happen — and they are going to happen — fewer bad things happen as a result of the systemic changes that have been brought about as a result of her leadership,” he said.

Such loyalty to his top administrators was typical of the Malloy years. His populist policies on child welfare, criminal-justice reform and homelessness earned Malloy more acclaim outside of Connecticut than they did in his home state.

“Oh, I'm very popular out of state,” he said with a wry smile.

Fiscal crisis

In Connecticut, the out-going governor may be best known for signing into law two of the largest income tax increases in state history. The first and largest was contained in the budget passed to address a massive projected deficit Malloy faced upon entering office in 2011. The second came after his 2014 election, a campaign during which Malloy had said the budget could be managed without more tax increases.

Despite the tax increases, two rounds of concessions negotiated with state labor unions and substantial workforce reductions, the fiscal problems continued throughout Malloy’s time as governor. It was, as budget director Ben Barnes said in a moment of candor, "a period of permanent fiscal crisis in state and local government."

Barnes, whose official title is secretary of the Office of Policy and Management, is another top administration official who remained in place for Malloy’s entire tenure.

Malloy attributed the continuing fiscal struggles in large part to his administration insisting on honest accounting. Unlike predecessors, he said, he was not willing to mask for political expediency the reality that state worker and teacher pension plans had been grossly underfunded for decades or try to push off expenses incurred in one year onto the balance sheets of another.

The governor was prepared to take other measures to reduce state spending — including a proposal to force municipalities to pick up some share of funding teacher pensions and requiring wealthier towns to fund education with little or no state aid. Lawmakers balked.

While crediting the legislature for passing some tough fiscal reforms, he criticized it for failing in its last session to address the teachers’ pension deficit. Republicans, he suggested, were not true to their ideology of fiscal discipline.

“They knew they needed to do something but they refused to do it,” he said of the legislature. “And I think that was a great failure. It was a great bipartisan failure. Republicans gave Democrats an excuse not to do anything.”

In his second term, Malloy tried to generate broad political support for a massive program to fix the state’s neglected transportation system. While he had modest success, lawmakers did not share his sense of urgency.

Malloy said he was “disappointed … that people say they want change but then you show them what change is, they’re no longer sure that they want it.”

Asked if anything surprised him about the job, Malloy pointed to the amount of time his administration devoted to health care, both in implementing the provisions of the Affordable Care Act and locking horns with the hospitals over issues of taxation and Medicaid reimbursements.

“It ate up a lot of time,” he said

Defending his record

In Connecticut, the Great Recession hit later and lingered longer. Job recovery in the state lagged behind neighboring states.

Yet the governor argues that his administration’s achievements have largely gone unreported. About 124,000 jobs have been added since the recession. Unemployment, at 9.3 percent the month after Malloy’s election, is now 4.4 percent, close to national unemployment numbers. Connecticut had 11 Fortune 500 companies when Malloy took office. Today it has 17.

Largely through attrition and consolidation of departments and agencies, the executive branch shrank by 3,700 workers, or 13 percent, during Malloy’s two terms. And though Connecticut still has much catching up to do, the state did pay the full actuarially required pension payments each year from 2011 to 2018.

To make state pension obligations manageable, the legislature approved the administration’s plan to refinance them. And Malloy, through negotiations with state labor unions, won agreements to place new hires in hybrid pension/401(k)-type plans that should be sustainable long-term, unlike the under-funded Cadillac pension plans provided earlier generations of state workers.

A pension stress test recently conducted by The Pew Charitable Trust concluded that the changes made should effectively insulate the system from sudden collapse even in an economic downtown — if the state makes the required payments, which account for about 10 percent of state spending.

The Rainy Day Fund, empty when Malloy entered office, is projected to reach $2 billion in 2019.

To get the pension concessions, Malloy agreed — and Democrats in the legislature approved — extending the benefits’ contract with the labor unions to 2027 and providing union members hired before July 1, 2017 with job protection through June 30, 2021.

Asked if these provisions have tied the hands of his successor, Democrat Ned Lamont, Malloy pointed to the 8,000 nonunion or recent-hire jobs Lamont could eliminate.

The deal he renegotiated, Malloy said, “doesn't stop anybody from doing anything except it stops governors and legislators from doing stupid things, which is what they spent decades doing.”

Still upset

Among the bitterest fights of Malloy’s time in office was his attempt to promote state Supreme Court Justice Andrew McDonald to chief justice. The move required the confirmation of a Senate that was split 18-18.

McDonald had worked as legal counsel for Malloy both during his time as mayor of Stamford and in his first term as governor. They are friends. McDonald’s initial appointment to the high court had sailed through the Senate. But his elevation to chief justice faced immediate opposition.

Malloy saw the promotion as having historic significance in terms of diversity. McDonald would have been the first openly gay man to become a chief justice of any state. Senate Republicans, voting in unity to block his nomination, pointed to McDonald’s pivotal vote in striking down what little was left of the death penalty. The repeal bill Malloy negotiated, while McDonald was his legal counsel, had kept executions in place for those already on death row.

The governor pointed to a more sinister motivation for rejecting McDonald — prejudice.

“A person doesn’t need to use homophobic slurs in order for their actions to be homophobic. In fact, a person doesn’t even need to consciously know they are acting with bias at all,” the governor said at the time.

During the recent interview, Malloy did not back off.

“There were five Republican senators who lost their Senate seats this year and every one of them probably would have been re-elected but for that vote (against McDonald). People are smart, they know a bigot when they see one,” Malloy said. “And, quite frankly, I'm happy.”

No other political analysts have attributed the Republican losses to the McDonald vote. The Senate will be controlled 23-13 by Democrats in 2019.

Malloy’s next choice for chief justice, Associate Justice Richard A. Robinson, an African-American, sailed through the confirmation process.

Own worst enemy

The governor’s sometimes harsh rhetoric and acerbic personality have been cited as contributing to his low approval ratings.

“So much of it is due to personality, the way he presents himself,’’ Gary Rose, a political science professor at Sacred Heart University, told the Hartford Courant in October after another poll showing low approval numbers. “He hasn’t done himself any favors in terms of his style. He’s very dismissive of other people.’’

Yet Malloy’s greatest achievements were arguably altruistic — giving criminals second chances, expanding affordable housing, aggressively attacking homelessness. In 2016 he received the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award for welcoming Middle Eastern refugees to Connecticut when other governors were closing their state’s borders.

Malloy received generally high marks for leading the state through multiple disasters — Hurricane Sandy in 2012, Hurricane Irene in 2011 and a freak Halloween snowstorm that hit western Connecticut that same year. But his most difficult task had to be telling the parents of 20 first-graders murdered in the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School on Dec. 14, 2012, that their kids would not be coming home.

“My commitment to the gun issue was clearly hardened by what I experienced at the Sandy Hook School and firehouse particularly,” said Malloy, referring to the place parents had gathered. “And I think Connecticut passed a great law.”

Asked if he had ever considered defending his record in a third run for office, Malloy said definitely not. He has accepted a position to teach law at Boston College, his alma mater.

“I didn't think I was going to have a second term, quite frankly,” Malloy said. “Doing the tough (first-term) work of recasting Connecticut not on a short-term basis but a long-term basis was hard work. And nobody was more surprised that I got re-elected than me.”

p.choiniere@theday.com