Phil D. Republican Grave
Giordano's legacy may be harbinger for GOP
by Alan Bisbort

Nov. 13, 2003 (HARTFORD) -- Waterbury, Connecticut must be the greatest place to live in the United States right now.

Why is that?

Because it is a totally Republican-free zone.

That's right: the results from November 4's election hosed out any of the remaining cooties from the three mayoral terms of the Republican child-raper and US Senate candidate, Philip A. Giordano. The city's governing body -- the 15-seat Board of Aldermen -- no longer has a single Republican on it. And the mayor, Democrat Michael Jarjura, a popular former state representative whose only vice appears to be eating, just won reelection by a wide margin -- this despite the fact that Jarjura's closest competitor was a renegade Democrat who took votes away from him, not from the Republican challenger, who was so far back in the pack you needed a telescope to see him.

Jarjura got 58% of the vote. Lawrence DePillo, the independent and maverick Democrat, got 30%. The Republican, Mark Forte got 11% of the vote.

Look at it this way: Democrats won 88% of the vote. And the coattail-effect of this landslide carried over into every single other office in the city of Waterbury. No Republicans to be seen within blocks of City Hall. All minority party slots are filled by independents.

In short, the GOP is dead and buried in the Brass City.

Waterbury's current situation would make a good case study for those who fret about the future of the Democratic Party. The city, desperate for any uplift back in the late 1980s, fell for Republican bromides. The result was the thinnest of mayoral election edges for a Republican, Joe Santopietro, whose 1986 coattails brought some Republicans along with him to the Board of Aldermen. Santopietro barely got through his second two-year term before the federal government elected him to a 15-year term in prison, after finding him guilty on 18 of 21 counts of receiving or soliciting money in exchange for approving development projects in Waterbury. (He got out of prison last year and promptly announced his intention to run for office again!) Five of Santopietro's Republican associates were also found guilty and sent to prison.

The voters fell again for the Republican bromides in 1996, this time in the person of Philip A. Giordano, a slick young lawyer who favored nicely tailored suits and ran on a family values platform. He was the lucky beneficiary of a then-popular Republican governor, John Rowland, who also happened to be from Waterbury, the coattail effect bringing Giordano to this city's doorstep. It was during an FBI investigation of Giordano for corruption similar to Santopietro's that horrified agents discovered the Republican mayor and US Senate candidate was regularly having sex with children aged 8 and 10. They cut the corruption probe short and arrested his slick and sick ass.

Giordano is already serving a 38-year sentence in the federal pen and still faces a state court trial (in his hometown, no less!). Meanwhile, 3-term Republican governor John Rowland is in a whole heap of trouble of his own. Putting aside his approval ratings (dipping into the 30s), it's only a matter of time before he's dragged into a courtroom for his role in brokering an illegal deal with an Enron subsidiary that bilked the state taxpayers of $224 million. The state's attorney general Richard Blumenthal (remember that name: he will be state governor or US Senator soon) called Rowland's "deal" what it was: "an illegal no-interest loan". He vows to get the money back and send those criminals responsible to prison, even if that includes the man whom George W. Bush fondly calls "Johnny Boy" (shades of "Kenny Boy" Lay).

Waterbury was, prior to taking a regrettable turn toward Republican candidates, a Democratic stronghold dating back to the 1930s, when the brass factories were booming and the unions were strong. Typical of this city's former "weathervane" political status was the 11th-hour visit of John F. Kennedy just prior to the 1960 presidential election. On his way back to Boston, Kennedy decided to make one last stopover in Waterbury. The tumultuous gathering on the Waterbury Green, spilling into the streets and standing on tops of buildings, is still spoken of in hushed tones by city residents. Theodore H. White, in The Making of the President 1960, credits this Sunday rally with vaulting Kennedy's momentum over the top in the close election with Nixon. The green was packed similarly for Humphrey in 1968, McGovern in 1972, and even in 1984, when McGovern made another gallant and now nearly forgotten run for the White House.

The latter campaign, which could be instructive to the insurgent Howard Dean, is detailed in an excellent new book by Waterbury native Richard Marano: Vote Your Conscience: The Last Campaign of George McGovern (Praeger). In addition to its usefulness to historians, Marano's book also reveals a hidden secret waiting for the Democratic Party to exploit to its advantage nationwide. That is, that all those former Democrats who voted for Republicans did not become dyed in the wool Republicans. They are still Democrats at heart, as witnessed by this remarkable 88% vote in 2003.

The Republicans in Waterbury , Marano said, got their past strength from "disenchanted Democrats, and to some degree, a strong Republican-leaning daily newspaper [Republican-American, which endorsed Giordano in all three campaigns]."

Now, mostly because of Giordano's travails but also due to the GOP's inability to deliver on promises, the Republicans can't get decent candidates to run for city offices. "The Republican Party ought to apologize for their past two corrupt administrations [including the Santopietro administration]," said Marano. "Many people, I believe, still hold the corrupt administrations against their two recent nominees. Giordano's pending criminal case sure doesn't help, either."

Taking a larger view, Connecticut-the Bush family's ancestral home-has no fondness for the little man who squats in the White House. In the Republican primary of 2000, John McCain won handily and Al Gore did likewise in the general election.

So, when the totality of the corruption of the Bush Regime is shared with the American people, the results may not be nearly as wonderfully dramatic-a wiping out of all Republican representation in Washington, D.C.-but it will have a dramatic effect. It will send those disenchanted Democrats back to the party that is really in their blood.

One might even, at that point, see a regime change in America.

Alan Bisbort lives, sans wealth, in blue-blooded Connecticut, where he's a columnist for the Hartford Advocate. His most recent publication is "What Happened Here? New York City" (Pomegranate Communications).