This evening, Kim, Fiona and I went to a fundraiser for the Connecticut Democratic Party with National Party Chairman Howard Dean. Of course, Fiona had to have her photo op. You can see her photo here. You can see the other photos here.

All of the usual suspects were there. There was some friendly banter between Gov. Dean and Congressional candidate Diane Farrell over who Fiona liked better. Fiona is over at her grandparents’ house and is not available for comment.

I wore the ‘Blogger’ shirt that Kim had embroidered for me. Early on, one person asked how I knew if my blogging was having any sort of effect. I said I didn’t really know. I can measure the number of times pages on my blog are accessed, or how many different Internet addresses they are accessed from, but I can’t tell for sure what sort of effect this was having. What matters is that people get ideas and then they talk with other people about these ideas. However, for the rest of the evening, people came up and spoke with me about reading my blog.

I was also given a card for MyLeftNutmeg, a new political blog starting up in Connecticut. I hope everyone stops by, checks it out, and considers blogging there.

There were the standard discussions about the Gubernatorial race and both Mayor DeStefano and Mayor Malloy were there. I had some friendly discussions with a few Malloy staffers. There were discussions about campaign finance reform and the special session scheduled for next week, as well as discussions about possible further special sessions.

One of the hottest discussions was about the special election in 23rd Senate District. Ed Gomes was there with a large group of supporters, including people who had considered running for the seat themselves and decided to support Gomes instead. There was some talk of Lt. Governor Kevin Sullivan breaking with the Democrats and supporting a different candidate than Gomes, but I couldn’t get any details.

John Olsen, President of the CT AFL-CIO gave some good warm-up remarks and the event ended with a great speech by Gov. Dean. An important aspect of the message was that our moral values are based on caring for everyone around us and not just for our cronies. This gets to another theme that I want to write more about, but that will have to wait until another day. I’m pretty tired.