Manchester, Conn.

Congratulations to Connecticut's Democratic Party for landing Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren as keynote speaker for the party's annual Jefferson-Jackson-Bailey fundraising dinner in June. Unlike the party's presumptive next presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, Warren at least poses as the scourge of Wall Street, though conveniently for Wall Street she also opposes auditing its great enabler, the Federal Reserve.

But another big irony in Warren's appearance should be addressed too. That is, many years ago, possibly to obtain ethnic hiring preferences, Warren claimed Cherokee Indian ancestry, and the “Jackson” of the dinner is President Andrew Jackson, perpetrator of a disgrace of the country's history, the genocide of the Cherokee Indians, the expropriation of their land in the southeastern part of the country, though they were living at peace with their neighbors, and their deadly forced march to wastelands beyond the Mississippi River.

In part because of that disgrace, there is a growing movement to replace Jackson's portrait on the 20-dollar bill with the portrait of a woman, women being unrepresented on U.S. paper currency. The best candidate seems to be Eleanor Roosevelt, the great advocate of human rights, politically incorrect in her time but vindicated by history.

So why keep honoring Jackson at the Connecticut Democratic Party's biggest event? Eleanor Roosevelt's husband, President Franklin Roosevelt, the greatest Democratic president, did far more for the country than Jackson did and could ably replace him as a dinner honoree. (While Roosevelt's internment of U.S. citizens of Japanese descent during World War II was a disgrace too, at least nobody died from it and it was a consequence of war.)

Like the Democratic Party's subservience to Wall Street, Andrew Jackson has become just a bad habit. It would be good if Warren could persuade the party to dump both. At least dumping Jackson won't cost the party any campaign contributions.

xxx

As he seems about to be sent to prison a second time for political corruption, former Gov. John G. Rowland is becoming an ever-easier target for any grievance involving his 9½ years in office, and now the state employee unions are claiming a great if bitter triumph over him in the settlement of their federal lawsuit challenging what turned out to be Rowland's temporary layoff of 2,500 union members amid state budget difficulties in 2003.

The unions call Rowland's action a great crime. But the lawsuit got to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, where the unions won, only because the state had prevailed at the federal district court level, so it's not as if the state had no case. An appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court might have gone either way, and the unions figured, as did Gov. Dannel Malloy and Atty. Gen. George Jepsen, that the parties would do best to settle rather than go for broke.

While the nominal value of the settlement is said to be $100 million, the attorney general says it has been structured so that most of the money will be paid to the state employees over many years as vacation and personal days off and thus not require special appropriations.

The unions say the settlement's structure demonstrates their generosity amid state government's latest budget difficulties under an infinitely friendlier governor. But the structure seems more like an admission that state employees are not much missed when they don't show up for work, as they didn't show up a few weeks ago on Good Friday, one of their already innumerable paid holidays, which closely followed Martin Luther King Day in January and Washington's Birthday and Lincoln's Birthday in February.

If, as the unions' posturing suggests, state employees spent those days mostly steaming about their oppression, they'll be able to do it again in October on Columbus Day, when, for some reason, Connecticut will honor the destroyer of the Indians of the Caribbean.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, based in Manchester, Conn.

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Having been convicted a second time on federal political corruption charges, former Connecticut Gov. John G. Rowland has people shaking their heads in wonder at why he didn't learn his lesson the first time, even as he was given a couple of pretty good jobs upon his release from prison, one doing economic development for his hometown of Waterbury, the other doing a radio talk show.

But it's hardly a mystery. Not all incorrigibles in Connecticut are fatherless young men from minority groups in the cities or boys who think they want to be girls only to end up as wards of the state Department of Children and Families. Every day Connecticut's courts are full of people amassing their umpteenth felony conviction, people who, to get into prison, had to work much harder than Rowland did -- and unlike Rowland's those cases are not compounded by the corruption inherent in political power.

The Meriden Record-Journal laments that people were "duped" twice by Rowland, "once by the young, up-and-coming Rowland and once by the older but not necessarily wiser ‘got religion' Rowland." But unless he was born corrupt and ill-motivated, there may have been no duping at all as he began his political career, just an ordinary vulnerability worsened by a ruinously expensive divorce.

Besides, it is hard to stay in politics in Connecticut for long without becoming cynical, since the very structures of government are greedy, fake, corrupt, or fostering of corruption, from binding arbitration of public employee union contracts to the control of professional regulatory agencies by the professions purportedly regulated. If Ambrose Bierce was still around he might use Connecticut as the example for his definition of "politics" in "The Devil's Dictionary": "A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles; the conduct of public affairs for private advantage."

It's not likely that Rowland was born corrupt, more likely that he simply did not have the moral strength to put himself at risk fighting a corrupt system, and, making his peace with that system -- putting his Republican affiliation largely aside and reaching a modus vivendi that proved even more profitable to the Democrats who controlled the General Assembly -- he became not only cynical but arrogant, and then just as venal as they already were, since they had been in power longer. He was just less careful about the details of the law.

Rowland seems to be considered unique in Connecticut for his downfall but he is not. A few decades ago U.S. Sen. Thomas J. Dodd, a Democrat, was even more corrupted by power -- taking bribes, converting campaign contributions to personal use, and evading income taxes while drinking himself into oblivion, leading to his censure by the Senate. But in his last two years in office, by selling his vote to the new national Republican administration of Richard Nixon, Dodd escaped criminal prosecution and now has a stadium named for him in Norwich and a research building and an annual prize named for him at the University of Connecticut.

Rowland, Dodd and others like them are only part of the oldest story in politics, as Shakespeare had Richard II explain:

... for within the hollow crown

That rounds the mortal temples of a king

Keeps Death his court, and there the antic sits,

Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,

Allowing him a breath, a little scene,

To monarchize, be fear'd and kill with looks,

Infusing him with self and vain conceit,

As if this flesh which walls about our life

Were brass impregnable, and humour'd thus

Comes at the last and with a little pin

Bores through his castle wall, and farewell, King!