So, the question is the same: What will the candidates do to make West Haven a better place? What will they do, if elected, to make us safer, happier and more prosperous? To say the mayoral campaign, which ends in three weeks, has been something short of exciting is an understatement.
On the Democratic side of the aisle, we have the September primary winner, Nancy Rossi, and we have incumbent Mayor Edward M. O’Brien. Both have turned their campaigns in to little more than bicker-fests, where charges and counter-charges are proffered and defended. We get it.
O’Brien has made decisions Rossi hasn’t liked and didn’t like at the time they were made. She was originally an O’Brien supporter, it should be noted, when the mayor beat John M. Picard for the Democratic nomination in 2012. One of the things O’Brien campaigned on was a five percent across-the-board cut of the city budget in an effort to bring it into balance. That was done eventually, but by that time other decisions had been made which were considered financially unsound, by the candidate who continually reminds us she is a Certified Public Accountant.
O’Brien, meanwhile, believes Rossi to be a political gadfly, who has a political history that shows her to change allegiances as the opportunity presents itself. He sees her constant switching of alliances as more a symptom of political opportunism than a political stance based in principle. That may be true, but opportunism is rife in politics, no matter what the affiliation. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” is the dictum in the political world. Locally, the Democratic Party has always presented itself as a fractured majority.
As we’ve said before like all Gaul, the city’s Democratic Party is divided into three parts. Over the last two-plus decades there has been a game of “king of the hill” between the three factions, with two coalescing to be the third. Those fights have seen the leadership switch several times. O’Brien, it has to be noted, is allied heavily with the Morrissey faction of the party, and has been for more than a decade since his days on the City Council. And O’Brien has allied himself with the Borer faction when the opportunity presents itself.
If the candidates are looking for hypocrisy, they needn’t look far nor into the long past. O’Brien excoriated Picard in 2012, when he opted for a write-in candidacy after losing the primary. A short look at the reasons and justification for O’Brien doing the same thing four years later will elicit the feeling one has read these reasons before.
Meanwhile, David Riccio, the Republican candidate, has played the “ground game” and walked from house to house over the last several weeks, but his campaign has been short in taking advantage of the continual back-and-forth between the two Democratic opponents. Just this week he has finally taken a positive step toward telling people what his campaign stands for and the principles by which it will be governed.
That is the ingredient that has been missing in the campaign thus far. The reasons the city is in tough financial shape are well known. We can disagree about what caused it, and even about some of the remedies, but we haven’t heard how the candidates hope to govern and move toward relieving the financial rut the city has been in since the 1980s.
We hope that in the final days of this campaign the combatants will take the opportunity to present cogent, positive programs and principles that will guide their leadership in the next two years. The time for recriminations and the blame game are past.
What the voters of the city need to know and want to know is what each candidate stands for and what each candidate will do to improve the city over the next two years. How will you govern?
That is what we hope to see and hear in these next few weeks. It is important, because the city’s next two years will determine whether we extricate ourselves from this rut, or dig ourselves ever deeper into it.