Bysiewicz faces uphill battle for AG post

Has Susan Bysiewicz let her ambition override her judgment?

A candidate who can wend her way from being the front-runner for governor to being possibly ineligible for a lesser office in the first few weeks of an election year, she has certainly made it look that way.

A popular secretary of the state — it’s hard not to be in that inoffensive office — Bysiewicz started the year as a candidate for the Democratic nomination for governor. Then, with polls showing her comfortably ahead of other Democrats, she said she was running for attorney general instead.

And why? She claimed she was changing offices because she really wanted to be “a fighter for the people,†which attorneys general presumably are and governors presumably are not, especially when fighting for the people entails fighting a $3 billion deficit.

Being governor in this decade isn’t going to be a very rewarding job for an ambitious politician, and when the office of attorney general suddenly opened up, Susan was ready to jump down.

The office of attorney general became available when Dick Blumenthal, the 20-year incumbent, announced he would run for the United States Senate to succeed Chris Dodd, who, after 29 years of fighting for the people and sometimes for Wall Street, decided he wouldn’t be running again. The hard-driving Bysiewicz, watching Blumenthal moving on to better things, figured being a fighting attorney general is a better career move than being a governor in perilous times.

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But there were suspicions that Bysiewicz was really eying the Senate seat of the aging and unpopular Joe Lieberman. That seat will be available in 2012, which would be inconveniently located right in the middle of the attorney general’s four-year term.

So when asked if she intended to serve a full term as attorney general of if she planned to abandon the job after two years to run for the Senate, Bysiewicz went into the traditional dance of the pols.

“One thing I have learned about politics is never to speculate about the future because I never know what the future might bring,†she explained, but didn’t answer.

She was certainly right about not knowing what the future might bring because what it brought was the strong suggestion that Bysiewicz may be ineligible for the office. The law says the state’s chief lawyer must have “10 years’ active practice at the bar†in Connecticut and Bysiewicz has practiced law for just eight years or maybe six if two years at a New York law firm don’t count.

The question is now before a judge and Bysiewicz’s most compelling argument is that her service as secretary of the state should be counted because she had lawyers working for her. But so did her predecessors like Ella Grasso, Barbara Kennelly and several other non-lawyers. If the judge decides Bysiewicz practiced law, must he and we conclude the sainted Ella was practicing the same profession without a license?

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And now it turns out Bysiewicz probably should have sought legal advice from one of those staff lawyers when she used a list of citizens who had sought assistance from the secretary of the state’s office for political purposes like fundraising. Also sure to be brought up by opponents again and again is the time in 2006 when the secretary of the state declined to pay a state judicial department lawyer’s fee of $50 and signed a form certifying she was not engaged in the practice of law.

Usually, voters don’t know very much about the candidates for offices lower than the very top of the ticket but in this case, they are learning a great deal about one candidate, probably much more than she really cares for them to know.

Dick Ahles is a retired journalist from Simsbury. E-mail him at dahles@hotmail.com.