Date: Fri 30-Apr-1999

Publication: Bee

Author: CURT

Quick Words:

edink-candidate-tourism-ads

Full Text:

ED INK: Fuding Publicly Financed Self-Promotion

If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's a

duck.

Such verities, so obvious to most of us, quite often escape the notice of the

politicians in charge of the legislature. To their credit, however, state

lawmakers last week enacted legislation that should put a stop to all the

pre-election, self-promotional flapping and honking by certain high-profile

politicians that is paid for with public tourism and economic development

funds. One of the main culprits who inspired the legislation, Gov John

Rowland, has said he will sign the bill.

Gov Rowland, along with Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim, raised self-promotion to

an art form in 1997-98 in the run-up to the '98 gubernatorial race by

featuring themselves in tourism and economic development ads paid for by the

state and the City of Bridgeport respectively. Not many people believed the

canard that this publicity blitz was for the benefit of the citizens.

In politics, where name recognition is everything, the biggest dividend

accrued from the $700,000 spent by the taxpayers of Bridgeport at that time

was collected by Mr Ganim himself, whose visibility and viability as a

possible statewide candidate soared as a result of the ads. Meanwhile, the

governor and his wife were assiduously paddling canoes in sylvan settings, and

using other scenic state locales to show what a great state Connecticut had

become under the Rowland administration.

These ads didn't cost the political committees of Messrs Ganim and Rowland a

cent, and yet every ordinary person who saw them could immediately spot the

duck. These ads were promoting the men, first and foremost. Connecticut and

Bridgeport were merely backdrops.

The new legislation will ban elected officials from appearing in such ads for

five months prior to Election Day. It will now be interesting to see whether

tourism and economic development promotions will be seen at all now that the

leading men are forced off camera.