31 August—It looks like Bob Stefanowski’s campaign is finally doing something right, something to justify sending King Ned Lamont packing and making Stefanowski Connecticut’s next governor. Maybe. We know Stefanowski is on the right track because King Ned’s slickest snake oil salesmen are out on his offensive defense, including Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin, who himself would like to be governor in his quest for the White House.

Yesterday, Stefanowski vowed to dump some 200 of the state’s nuisance taxes. Certainly all taxes are nuisances, but some are especially ludicrous, like license fees for interior designers and hypnotists, which bring in bupkes bucks to the state, while costing noteworthy bucks to collect. They piss people off in the bargain. The function of most professional and trade license fees beyond providing revenue for governments is debatable at the best of times. And even Bronin cleverly acknowledged yesterday that there was no public policy reason not to review taxes that might not be worth collecting.

Stefanowski evidently realizes that even if he should be elected, sad to say, Democrats will still hold majorities in the General Assembly. So, even though he talks about the next legislature enacting permanent repeal, he promises to engage in civil disobedience on his first day in office by ordering the Commissioner of Revenue Services and whoever else is supposed to collect the nuisance taxes not to collect them.

Sounds great, except that the nuisance taxes are the law, the law’s the law, and all state employees are sworn to obey the law rather than the governor. He could fire the insubordinate commissioners, à la Trump and Nixon and virtually all public and private CEOs. Or he could simply appoint—or try to appoint, given a likely antagonistic legislature—cooperative ones, as is his gubernatorial prerogative. (But even they’d be sworn to uphold the law.)

So it’s the first meaningful step in Bob Stefanowski’s campaign and a giant leap toward the governor’s mansion. To maintain the momentum, then, Stefanowski should—must—do some other substantive things. Like, rather than simply ignoring Donald Trump, who had endorsed him in 2018 and whom he had at the time rated A (in a primary debate), he must affirmatively disavow and criticize the embarrassing former president. This is blue Connecticut, after all, and it’s unlikely Trump diehards would vote for Lamont anyway.

On the other hand, Stefanowski, who had himself been given an AQ by the NRA in 2018, based on how he filled their questionnaire rather than his nonexistent record, refuses to reveal how he had answered the questions and pussyfoots around the subject of guns—commonly referred to as gun violence.

Today is the last day in August, the day by which Stefanowski told us last month he’d release his tax return: “We’re going to actually produce the return, the first couple pages of the return. It’s going to include all of my income, family income, everything.” It’s still morning. Will he come through? Let’s give him an extra day.

And so on. Let’s assume that Bob Stefanowski has the courage of his convictions. But what are his convictions? Though I hate to say it, in an effort to straddle the fence and chase off the fewest voters, Stefanowski has actually been demonstrating a politically expedient lack of scrotal content. I certainly hope, for the sake of Connecticut, he grows some—and fast . . .