Two longtime Democratic activists - Jonathan Pelto and Roy Occhiogrosso - had a bit of a dust-up this week over the appointment of a prominent Republican to t he new administration's transition team.
Governor-elect Dannel Malloy chose well-known Republican Ross Garber, a highly respected attorney, to be a member of the transition committee's personnel committee.
After the dust-up spread quickly among political insiders and throughout the blogosphere, Pelto now says that he was simply saying the exact same thing that the Malloy campaign had said five years ago. Pelto has pulled out a quote from a New York Times story in 2005 when Garber was sharply criticized by Malloy's then-campaign manager, Chris Cooney.
''It would be very difficult for Jodi Rell to disassociate herself from this scandalous legacy of John Rowland if she has as one of her top advisors the person whose job it was to defend and basically guide him through the corruption scandal,'' Cooney said in 2005 in the article written by Connecticut reporter Stacey Stowe in The Times.
"It's just so funny that they said the very same thing I did five years ago,'' Pelto tells Capitol Watch. "And Cooney is on the [current transition] team, despite living in Florida. So my point was legitimate, but perhaps more importantly - if their skin is really that thin, it is going to be a long and ugly year because there is going to be a lot of concerns raised from across the political spectrum.''
Occhiogrosso, though, declined to comment on Pelto's latest statement on Garber.
"I don't have anything more to say than what I had to say the other day,'' Occhiogrosso told Capitol Watch.
On Monday, Occhiogrosso absolutely unloaded on Pelto after Pelto questioned whether two of Rowland's supporters - Garber and Waterbury attorney Gary O'Connor - should be members of Malloy's transition team. Occhiogrosso said that Pelto - a former longtime state legislator and activist who has been involved in multiple campaigns through the decades - and his comments were both "irrelevant.''
"No one cares what Jonathan Pelto thinks,'' Occhiogrosso said Monday night. "He posts some comment on Facebook. Who cares? If some guy in the Midwest posts something about the Malloy transition team on Facebook, is that newsworthy? The fact that he's reduced to making comments on his Facebook page'' proves his status in the Democratic Party.
"These are people who the governor-elect is proud to serve on his transition team. That they are Republicans is beside the point,'' Occhiogrosso continued. "Connecticut is in deep trouble, and the governor-elect has made it clear that the old way of doing things isn't going to work. To reach across the aisle is simply him following through on his campaign promise. ... What Dan said during the campaign is he wants to govern in a way that will move the state forward as quickly as possible. The best way to do that is to form a transition team with the best and brightest people. If he didn't, he'd be criticized for picking all Democrats.''
Pelto, who has nearly 3,000 "friends'' on Facebook, is among the Democratic Party's most hard-core activists, and he has been involved in campaigns over the past 25 years.