nothin Candidate Calls For CT Single-Payer System | New Haven Independent

Candidate Calls For CT Single-Payer System

Paul Bass Photo

Gubernatorial candidate Dan Drew at the WNHH studio.

Dan Drew knows what it’s like when reporters stick their noses into your campaign fundraising records — because he was one of those reporters once himself.

As a reporter with the Potomac News and Manassas Journal Messenger, Drew discovered a Prince William County sheriff candidate had misrepresented a source of corporate cash to his campaign. Drew’s story sparked a special prosecutor’s investigation that resulted in an indictment against the candidate.

Now, Drew is raising money himself, for Connecticut’s highest office. He has formed an exploratory committee to begin seeking the Democratic Party’s 2018 nomination to replace Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, who announced last week that he’s not running for reelection. Potential candidates — such as Republican Joe Visconti and Democrats Jonathan Harris and Chris Mattei — have emerged daily since Malloy’s announcement. Drew was first out of the box, months before.

At 37, Drew, who’s in his third term as mayor of Middletown, presents a young face in what promises to be a 2018 field dominated by aging boomers. In an interview on WNHH radio’s Dateline New Haven,” he stopped short of calling his age a reason to vote for him (as opposed to former presidential candidate Howard Dean, who said in a recent New Haven visit that the Democrats need to jettison boomers in favor of millennial candidates). But Drew did make a generational pitch.

I want to be a transformational candidate. I don’t want to make my pitch based on my age. I want to make my pitch based on ideas. The baby boom generation has largely embraced this idea of trickle-down economics. I think we should change direction. It’s not working. …

In our society we’ve gotten used to the idea that we have kowtow to very elite people in order to make all of us successful…. We’ve put ourselves in the position where we’ve repeatedly asked the middle class and the working class to subsidize the wealthy on the presumption that it’s good for them. I just don’t agree with that. I think it’s wrong. I think it’s immoral… I think it’s bad public policy. I want to get back to the idea that we have to help real people. That’s how we become prosperous again.”

Branding himself a Franklin Roosevelt” Democrat, Drew has joined other 30-something Democratic local officials like South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg in a national pro-growth progressive” group called The NewDEAL. Drew has tapped a 28-year-old campaign manager, Kyle Buda, who ran Justin Elicker’s 2013 New Haven mayoral quest.

In the WNHH interview, Drew borrowed a page from 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders in citing two campaign positions. He supports universal free tuition to Connecticut’s public colleges and universities, and he supports a single-payer universal health care plan in the state.

He said he’d pay for those plans by raising the income tax rate on high earnings; ending a carried-interest” loophole that allows hedge fund managers to pay 20 percent rather than 39.6 percent in federal taxes on their income (even Donald Trump opposed that loophole on the campaign trail); and ending state subsidies to corporations like the $22 million in grants and loans to the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates under Gov. Malloy’s First Five” program. (Drew said he had no answer when asked if he would have supported the First Five” support for New Haven’s Alexion Pharmaceuticals move. He also didn’t specify the level at which he’d raise income taxes; some Democrats have proposed raising rates on annual incomes over $1 million from 6.99 to 7.5 percent.)

Drew offered few specifics on the single-payer health care plan — for instance, whether the state would administer the program itself or hire an outside manager. But he said a single-payer plan would also cut medical costs, as the Medicare program (a single-payer system) currently does. He called private health insurers the only industry I know where you pay out the nose — then the minute you need to use it, you’re penalized.”

Drew supported Hillary Clinton, who was seen as the corporate” Democrat, over Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primaries, for which he took heat from some WNHH listeners who posted on the Facebook Live page during the broadcast. But he said he liked both campaigns and agrees with much of Sanders’s platform.

Drew also came out in favor of sanctuary cities” like New Haven and Middletown that embrace immigrants and decline to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement efforts. He said he supports legalizing recreational use of marijuana, though he himself has never smoked it. (“I don’t like the feeling of my not being in control of my body.”)

Drew edited the campus paper as a University of Connecticut student. After working in Virginia, he moved back to Connecticut, where he worked for the Connecticut Post. He decided to make the switch to government because, he said, he felt he could make a difference in people’s lives. 

Click on or download the above audio to hear the full interview with Dan Drew on WNHH radio’s Dateline New Haven.” The interview covered his personal history, his record in Middletown, and his gubernatorial campaign platform.

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