GOP rally in Fairfield part of disruptive culture
We like to think that we in genteel Connecticut are above the sort of uncivilized political fray unfolding in other states, the shouting and ugly comments. We are not. An event in Fairfield over the weekend serves as one illustration.
On Sunday afternoon, Fairfield Democrats held a get-out-the-vote rally featuring Gov. Ned Lamont, Sen. Richard Blumenthal and Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz, among other elected officials. The action moved indoors at the Dems’ headquarters on the Post Road because of rain.
Republicans, seeing a chance to confront Lamont, organized a counter-rally. Originally planned for Sherman Green – the pre-rain location of the Dems’ gathering – the GOP rally moved down the road to the sidewalk outside the Democrats’ headquarters, a former restaurant location.
There, Republicans, largely led by an elected member of the Representative Town Meeting on a bullhorn, created a loud din with a snare drum, fake sirens and protest chants, carrying placards. Police stood by.
One person at the rally, holding a smaller bullhorn, shouted that Lamont is a liar and promotes racists. Organizers later said he was not part of the Fairfield group.
All of that is visible in a 26-minute video the Democrats showed me. Several Democrats also said the Republicans verbally harassed people coming and going.
“They were trying to drown us out,” Steven Sheinberg, the Democratic Town Chairman, told me Monday. “The police had to keep them back and make a path for our Democrats to get into our Democratic headquarters.”
As Sheinberg recounts the event — to me and on a Facebook post documenting the clashing rallies — the Republican activists shouted “brainwashed” and “stupid” at Democrats, including high school volunteers. A former elected official who is Black and does not live in Fairfield was called “a Black slave to the Democratic Party,” Sheinberg and another Democrat told me.
The former elected official declined to come forward publicly and I have not corroborated the accusation, nor the alleged harassment of youths, but a Republican on a Facebook discussion said the guy who made the racial slur “was not one of us.”
Karen McCormack, the rally leader on the bullhorn, not the one alleged to have made the racial slur, held a sign that said “taxed to death” with a skull, and stood, at some points, next to a person holding a professionally printed sign that read, “Make the Nuremberg Code Great Again.”
That is a reference to the post World War II principles on human medical experimentation, established in the Nazi war crimes trials. Translation: Vaccine mandates, a main issue raised by the GOP ralliers, are equivalent to Nazi torture of Jews and others.
These Republicans were perfectly allowed to gather peacefully as they did, on a public sidewalk. We all honor that First Amendment right.
“As far as I’m concerned it was a successful day in terms of being heard by Gov. Lamont,” McCormack, a local lawyer in her second term on the town meeting (a legislative body that votes on major town questions such as the annual budget) told me late Monday. She said she was aware of no incidents of harassment. “I’m sorry their noses are out of joint,” she said of the Democrats.
McCormack named an armload of gripes about Dems’ control over the state, including lack of parental control, inflation and rampant crime.
Was this part of civilized politics? Or was it part of the nasty, name-calling culture of the Trump era – led by the former president – that’s miring the nation in political quicksand?
State Rep. Jennifer Leeper, D-Fairfield, recounted her view on Facebook, “watching my 70 year-old parents with my 6 year-old son needing a police escort to get through.”
Republicans said they did not aim to intimidate anyone, only to send a message to Lamont and Blumenthal.
“Everyone’s entitled to have their own rally. It’s not a big deal. I don’t see what the problem is. There is no problem,” said Sarah Matthews, chair of the Fairfield Republican Town Committee, which organized the counter-rally.
Matthews was not at the event because she was out of state. She added, “I think it’s completely civil when it’s the governor coming to our town and people are hoping for a change.”
I disagree that this was civil – and it goes way beyond the borders of Fairfield. Holding a rally that follows the other party’s rally to a rain location, with the obvious goal of disrupting, is not useful political discourse.
Their target was not a meeting of government officials doing government business. It was not a protest against Lamont on his home turf, as we saw by liberal Democrats at the governor’s mansion during the pandemic, over treatment of prison inmates in COVID. No, it was another party’s election rally.
The Sunday events in Fairfield unfolded against the backdrop of a very nasty battle in the registrars of voters office, in which both sides are hurling accusations and the secretary of the state has been forced to step in. A moderate former GOP registrar resigned his post in the flap.
It’s unfortunate that events such as this GOP counter-rally pass for discourse in the Trump era. Recall, the Republican National Committee voted to call the events of Jan. 6, 2021 at the U.S. Capitol “legitimate political discourse.”
McCormack agrees the politics of 2022 are out of control. “We must meet in the middle on a lot of issues,” she told me Wednesday. “I say that as a Republican. We can’t be on these polarizing extremes….But they can’t be giving out mandates to people.”
That’s temperate. Still, the event Sunday leaned toward a more aggressive, less civilized tone — rising in a Connecticut town where Republicans once stood for something entirely different. We see the same thing on the fringe left.
Is this really how Republicans want to act as they call themselves the silent majority? Advancing politics that block America from healing the wounds of Trump? They can be better than this. Karen McCormack, a smart lawyer, doesn’t need to disrupt the other party’s events to make her points.
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