Visconti for Congress

When you start hanging out with Republicans in the year 2008, your friends nag you about selling your soul to the prince of darkness and why you shouldn’t do that.

Especially when you’re not a Republican at all, but a left-leaning civil libertarian who’s been a registered Independent these last many years.

(Okay, I did once spend five days, 23 hours and 24 minutes registered as a Republican so I could back a dark horse in a primary. But as soon as I left the voting booth, I drove straight to City Hall and re-registered Independent.)

My nagging friends live mostly out of state, and I tell them: “Guys, you don’t understand how Connecticut works. We’ve got a Republican governor, yes, but most of the state’s run by Democrats.

"There’s elected offices they’ve held for half a century now. So they’re the ones with the power here, and they’re usually the ones pulling shady government shenanigans. Not the Republicans. Yeah, I know. It’s Bizarro World.”

I used to cover West Hartford for a local alt-weekly, which is how I first met a guy who (at the time) was the Official Town Malcontent: Joe Visconti. And I went about town and state alike trying to report on the powers that be, all so tight-lipped they’d barely tell me what time it was without making me file a Freedom Of Information document first.

Meanwhile the OTM’s going around complaining about the lack of openness and transparency in government, and at some point while typing my umpteenth request for information I paused long enough to massage my carpal-tunnel-stricken wrists and think “Yep, he’s got a point (ouch) dang, this hurts.”

A few months later Joe mounted a dark-horse campaign for a town council seat. When he won I told him congratulations and thought: “Now that he’s an elected official rather than a gadfly outsider, I hope he doesn’t become one of Them.”

He didn’t. But after awhile he decided to run for Congress against a longstanding incumbent, and my job vanished around the same time when the alt-weekly started shedding positions. So I called Joe to give him the nice-knowing-you news, and he invited me to spend my newfound free time hanging out with his campaign.

“Joe,” I said, “I’m a –”

“I know you’re a libertarian, not a Republican,” Joe assured me. “That’s why I want you around, to give me an outsider’s perspective.”

“Hmm,” I replied. “Let me think about this a bit.”

And I considered that time, shortly after I’d started writing for the alt-weekly, when I thumbed through some of the more rococo advertisements in its back pages and thought, “If I got a job working for one of these phone sex lines, I’ll bet I’d get a great story out of it.”

I daresay I did. But the story inspired a little controversy among the locals, some of whom didn’t think their new reporter should engage in such stunts ’twixt town council meetings.

I hadn’t met Joe yet, though we’d exchanged a couple of polite e-mails. But he stepped into the controversy to publicly state he saw nothing wrong with a reporter doing her job.

That’s why I say to my friends: “Things are different here in Connecticut. When a writer tries pushing the envelope now and again, it’s the Republicans who stick up for her while the Democrats get all indignant. Bizarro World, I know. So I appreciate your sale-of-my-soul concerns, but they won’t be an issue. I view this as a learning experience. You know, the whole Dian Fossey Republicans In The Mist thing? Except they won’t let me put fog machines in their houses.”