Former Malloy Legal Counsel, Luke Bronin and Gov. Malloy
Photo: ctmirror.org
Meet Luke Bronin.
Luke moved to Hartford from Washington just over two years ago.
[Luke had previously lived in Hartford for period in 2007-2008 when he had served as the top aide to the President of the Hartford Financial Services company]
Luke grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut.
Luke attended the exclusive Greenwich Day School and then Philip Exeter Academy; the nation’s most elite preparatory boarding school. Bronin went on to get degrees from Yale University, Oxford University and then returned to Yale School of Law for to get his law degree.
With no municipal or elected experience, Luke now says he is ready to “bring new leadership” to Harford, the poorest city of its size in the United States.
In a city in which more than 80% of the residents are “minority,” the notion that a White, privileged, wealthy, young man from Greenwich would move to Hartford, Connecticut and run for Mayor might raise some eyebrows.
So would the fact that Luke Bronin, who has never run for office, raised more than $660,000 in first six months of his campaign, a significant amount of that money coming from the white, business elite who may work in Hartford, but live far, far away from the city and its troubles.
But perhaps the most telling development of all is that with the Hartford Democratic Town Committee set to meet tomorrow, July 27, 2015 to select their nominee for mayor, Luke Bronin appears on the verge of getting enough support from Hartford’s leading political players that the Democratic Party will jettison its Hispanic, incumbent Mayor, Pedro Segarra, and hand the Democratic nomination to the newcomer.
Back on January 15, 2013, Governor Dannel Malloy named Luke A. Bronin to replace Andrew McDonald as the governor’s chief counsel.
At the time, Bronin announced that he was “happy to be moving back” to Connecticut and would be locating in Hartford. Unmentioned was the news that Bronin and his wife had purchased a dilapidated Bushnell Park Brownstone seven months earlier and were part-way through renovating it.
Less than two years later, Malloy’s Office announced that Bronin was leaving the post as Malloy’s legal advisor. As the Hartford Courant explained at the time, Luke Bronin, who is “strongly considering” a run for mayor of Hartford, will join the law firm Hinckley Allen.
On January 15, 2015 exactly two years from the date Malloy announced Bronin would leave Washington for Connecticut, Bronin announced that he would be challenging Hartford Mayor Pedro Segarra for the mayor.
The move surprised many since Mayor Pedro Segarra has worked tirelessly on Governor Malloy’s behalf and not only had he appointed Bronin’s wife to serve on Hartford’s powerful Planning and Zoning Commissioner, but despite her being new to the City, made her the Chair of the PZC where she helped push through the new Hartford Stadium Project.
But Luke said he was running and compared to Hartford’s per capita income of $16,610, the Bronin’s income must place him among the wealthiest 1% in the Capital city.
Certainly his prestigious education background and golden-boy credentials put him in a league by himself.
Bronin’s state-of-the-art website, developed by a Washington D.C. consulting firm that built Governor Malloy’s campaign website and has also done work for the Connecticut Democratic Party, features a “Meet Luke” section in which the viewer will be informed by pictures of Luke Bronin on the steps of his Hartford Brownstone, a picture of Luke in full military battle attire and the ever-present picture of Luke surrounded by his attractive family. (Mayor Segarra, whose spouse is male, has pictures that are somewhat different).
The Meet Luke bio explains;
Luke is a father, a husband, a veteran, an attorney, and a committed public servant — who is running for Mayor to get Hartford working again — for all of Hartford’s residents.
In this day and age when people often “pad their resumes” or go so far as to attempt to “change” their race or ethnicity to gain the upper hand, Luke Bronin’s website, interestedly, makes absolutely no mention, at all, of his educational background.
While dozens of Bronin bios on the Internet celebrate his elite educational achievements, there is not a single word on his campaign website biography about where he went to school or that he is new to Hartford.
While there is mention of his work fighting “Al Qaeda” and “rogue regimes like Iran and Syria, and international organized crime,” there is no mention that he graduated with a law degree from Yale University in 2006, or got a degree from England’s venerable Oxford University in 2003, or a Philosophy degree in 2001 from Yale. He even fails to mention he graduated from Philips Exeter Academy, the most prestigious boarding school in the nation, or that he also graduated from the Greenwich Day School, the very same institutions that educated President George H.W. Bush.
Bronin’s pitch stays on the straight and narrow message that he is a “Man of the People” and simply arrived on this earth ready for battle for the “little people.”
While the Bronin website goes into great detail about his previous occupations, there is no mention of the Greenwich Day School (Tuition starts at $33,500 for kindergarten and rises to $37,500 a year for the higher grades), Phillips Exeter Academy (With a cost of $48,000 a year, although that does include the $180 “Linen Fee”) or that he spent ten years in the halls of Oxford and Yale.
In today’s dollars, the cost of an education like that would be far more than the vast majority of Hartford residents will ever make in their lifetime… In fact, it is more than all the residents of entire Hartford neighborhoods earn.
There is certainly one thing you can say for Luke Bronin…he has been planning for his rise to power and stardom for a very long time.
Long before Luke Bronin announced that he was planning to become Hartford next mayor in January 2015, he had already reserved a plethora of website names, including;
Along with other sites he might need such as luckbronin.com, lukebronin.us, lukebronin.net and lukebronin.org.
All are now linked to his campaign website: http://lukebronin.com/
Most, if not all, of these sites were purchased when Bronin was still a kid at Yale University, where he collected the website names using his Yale University email and his Greenwich home address.
In total, Bronin appears to have reserved at least twenty three website names, the majority aimed at locking down any and all that he might want to use in his future political endeavors.
Although, at the time, it looks like he also purchased underpuppy.com and underpuppy.net, but one assumes that must have been for some unrelated project.
And then there is this…
While Bronin’s early effort to buy up every “ilikeluke” website reveals the drive of the young politician, the more noteworthy tidbit may be that on January 12, 2015 – three days before Bronin announced that he was running for mayor– some “entity” purchased and locked up:
And that secret entity? PERFECT PRIVACY, LLC, using Network Solutions LLC
And what do does one discover when looking up the various Ilikeluke and his other Luke Bronin campaign websites? They are all managed by PERFECT PRIVACY, LLC, using Network Solutions LLC.
Yup, looks like Luke Bronin is so “sophisticated” that not only did he buy up websites that he might need to promote his own name, but before he even announced that he was running against Hartford Mayor Pedro Segarra, he bought up the websites Segarra might want to use.
Bronin’s calculated effort to become Hartford’s mayor is a powerful reminder that while hashtags like #blacklivesmatter continues to trending on Twitter,
#wealthywhiteprivilegedandmale is still a concept that is very much a part of the American political environment.
This article first appeared in the Wait What? political blog and is reprinted with permission
