Christine Stuart File Photo
Stefanowski on the campaign trail.
Bob Stefanowski discovered something more fun to do than running for governor: Handing out free masks.
He got started around five weeks ago. Now he can’t stop.
This week he and his wife Amy — and the groups they’ve enlisted to help them — expect to distribute their millionth free mask to help people slow the spread of Covid-19.
The drive-by events have taken place in communities all over the state, including a May 5 giveaway at Science Park in New Haven and a planned one this Thursday at Yale’s West Campus.
He’s having a ball, and finding inspiration.
“It’s amazing to see everybody put politics aside,” Stefanowski, a retired corporate executive and the Republican candidate for governor in 2018, said during an interview Monday on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven.”
“It’s in all our interests to get through this” together, Stefanowski said.
He spoke on the program of how the effort developed.
He “saw what was going on” with health care workers and others lacking masks to keep them safe, he said.
“I started making calls. From the business world, you know people.”
He got a line on a broker in New Jersey who could sell him 100,000 surgical masks (one step below the N95s). He took photos and checked with a hospital to ensure the masks were legit and had FDA approval. They were. So he drove a truck down to New Jersey to pick them up, then bring them back to Connecticut.
Through political allies he distributed them statewide to elderly care facility nurses, cops, and others risking their lives during the pandemic.
He planned to operate anonymously, he claimed, until Hearst columnist Dan Haar found out and wrote about it.
In any case, he and Amy teamed up with the Jewish Federation of Greater New Haven to create a division called Masks for Connecticut. (Find info about it here.) They collected donations and found corporate sponsors (like Pratt & Whitney, Yale) to sponsor site-based drives. He said he expects 10,000 people to come for masks at a drive-by event Tuesday at Mohegan Sun.
Thomas Breen Photo
Jewish Federation CEO Judy Alperin and Amy Stefanowski at the Science Park mask giveaway.
And the network of helpers has stretched across the aisle. At the Science Park event, for instance, Democratic State Rep. Robyn Porter, State Sen. Gary Winfield, and Mayor Justin Elicker participated in giving out masks.
“I’m in charge of sourcing; I find the masks,” he said. “Amy is in charge of distribution.”
Giving people free life-saving stuff in a high-profile way is also good politics, of course. Stefanowski said he has made no decisions about whether he’ll run again for governor in 2022. “I haven’t ruled it out.”
For now, he said, “I’m really enjoying myself. I’m getting so much gratification. This mask initiative gets [him] close to people” in a way campaigning for office doesn’t.
In keeping with his bipartisan claim, he said he would refrain from taking shots at how the man who defeated him, Gov. Ned Lamont, is handling the crisis. He did say he feels the administration should be more transparent about its decisions (rather than working with a reopening task force exempted from Freedom of Information rules). And he argued that the reopening could happen more quickly and with more logical consistency. But he also said, “I don’t know what information Gov. Lamont had” when he made his decisions.
“Overall he has done pretty well. No one saw this coming,” Stefanowski said. “There are going to be lessons learned. Now is not the time” to focus on that. “Let’s get through this.”
Click on the video to watch the full episode of WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” with Bob Stefanowski, in which he answered listeners’ questions and reflected on his 2018 campaign. (Note: Technical difficulties mar the beginning, but the sounds is fixed by four minutes in.)
Stefanowski already shows more humanity than the Governor.
If he's going to run on the same old rejected Republican shibboleths, he should just not run.
If he wants to join with progressives and push for a progressive agenda, then he should start studying.
We've had enough of business men who claim their experience is relevant to government. It isn't.
We need more humanity and less statistics.