19 May—A quadrennium ago (don’t bother looking it up, it means four years), Bob Stefanowski cleverly and brilliantly bypassed the silly Connecticut Republican convention and petitioned his way to run against Ned Lamont. Lamont, we lament, won the governor’s job with 49.38 percent of the vote, 694,694, to Stefanowski’s 46.21 percent, 650,113.

Stefanowski’s 2018 campaign was full of unbelievable platitudes and promises about dumping taxes. But the margin was only 44,581 votes, very close in the circumstance. Stefanowski also had the endorsement of the state’s Independent Party. The late Oz Griebel, running as an independent (unaffiliated) candidate, garnered 54,705 votes and the Libertarian creamed another 6,079, for a total of 60,784 spoiler votes, most of which would have gone to elect Gov. Bob Stefanowski.

This year, Bob Stefanowski has gone the conventional route. (Great pun, if you hadn’t noticed.) But even though he’s not making idle promises about reducing taxes, most of the campaign rhetoric is peppered with the tried and true clichés no campaign can avoid.

He’s already screwing up on abortion. He likely can count on the die-hard and moderate Republican votes, as well as less wasteful, more rational independents. But moderate Democrats who might just be turned on by his implicit fiscal conservatism could just as easily be turned off by his pussyfooting around abortion.

Democrats are (of course) lying about Stefanowski “following the Republican playbook to repeal Roe v. Wade,” as the harpy Susan Bysiewicz cackled recently. It’s a given that Bysiewicz is full of shit at the best of times. But Bob hasn’t done much to dispel that calumny. And his implications about abortion restrictions don’t inspire confidence that he’d actually fight to preserve a woman’s nine-month rights.

Stefanowski’s assurance that as governor he wouldn’t try to change the 1990 state law that codified Roe sounds too much like the assurances Donald Trump’s three SCOTUS nominees gave to the Senate about respecting stare decisis on Roe, during which they were probably crossing their fingers.

Even if both houses of the Connecticut General Assembly were by some miracle to morph Republican, they wouldn’t support fiddling with Roe anyway. Would they?

As for parental consent or even notification, Lamont has it right. And Stefanowski should cut the crap and join him. Mandatory consent and notification are wrong. Consider that a lot of the minor girls who need abortions will have been raped by a father, step-father, or boyfriend of a mother. Parental notification should be voluntary. No more needs to be said about that.

And what about guns? In 2018, the NRA gave Stefanowski an “AQ” rating—“A” but with no voting record to support it. This year? The BobforGovernor.com website is silent on the subject. We need to hear something positive about gun rights, for a change, as well as castle-doctrine and stand-your-ground legislation.

And, while Bob Stefanowski’s opinion of Donald Trump could be considered irrelevant, wouldn’t we like to know it?