Candidate getting master's degree to run for office

By Scott Benjamin

GREENWICH – If you happen to know something about Republican Harry Arora, who is running for Congress in the Fourth District – which ranges from gated 12-bedroom Greenwich mansions to Redding farms to lower-income Bridgeport housing – it is probably that he raised more than $600,000 in the first five days of his campaign - $500,000 of it his own.

To put it in context, then-state Rep. John Shaban (R-Redding), who was the GOP challenger two years ago, only raised $160,000 the whole campaign as he took about 40 percent of the vote.

In his first week, Arora had about 70 contributors, some of them maxing out at $5,400.

The hedge fund manager stated in a news release that he “has the ability to raise the money to match” the fund-raising of Democratic incumbent, Jim Himes, who, like Arora, lives in Greenwich. That would be a rare accomplishment for a congressional challenger.

Greenwich is in the upper crust of Connecticut - where gasoline is about 60-cents a gallon more than 23 miles north on I-95 in Fairfield and, according to Forbes, 12 of Connecticut’s 16 billionaires reside, including Ray Dalio, reportedly the richest hedge fund manager in the world.

Neither Arora nor Himes can throw a spiral the way that former Greenwich High School quarterback Steve Young did during his Pro Football Hall of Fame career or trade quips with a co-host the way that weekend resident Regis Philbin did as he went into the Guinness Book of World Records for most hours in front of a television camera.

But Himes and Arora can show you the money.

According to CT Mirror, as of December 31, Himes, who used to work at Goldman Sachs and has served as finance chairman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, had raised $892,000 during 2017 and had $2.5 million cash on hand as he seeks a sixth term in a district that the Republicans had controlled for 40 years before he upset 21-year GOP congressman Chris Shays of Bridgeport in 2008.

However, Arora, who has been managing hedge funds related to European energy businesses, insists that it’s more than just money that talks in politics.

Since last summer, he’s been back at school Monday through Wednesday, studying the fine points of public policy from an array of scholars, including some that teach the orientation program for new congressman, at the prestigious John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. The guest speakers have included federal Education Secretary Betsy DeVos

He will earn a master’s degree in April about a month before he will likely secure the GOP nomination in the 17-municipality district.

Arora - who is from India and is among the 24 percent of the population in the district that is first generation - said he entered the program to “see how business ideas can be translated to politics and understand the pressing problems so that I would not shoot from the hip.”

“Business experience is a good preparation for solving problems,” he added in an interview in an office with clocks designated for New York, London and Tokyo.

“It is not a be-all and end-all,” said Arora.

His political resume is limited to doing policy research for former GOP state Sen. Dan Debicella of Shelton, who lost to Himes in 2010 and 2014.

He said the top issue with voters is a “Connecticut economy that has not kept up.”

Connecticut is the only New England state that hasn’t recaptured all of the jobs lost during the 2008 recessions and the state budget has been engulfed with deficits since then. That is partly due to being so dependent on capital gains coming from Greenwich and neighboring Stamford, which reportedly was the fourth largest financial market in the world a decade ago.

As state Commissioner of Revenue Services Kevin Sullivan told The Wall Street Journal last year, the loss of some of the top 1 percent, many of whom live in the Stamford/Greenwich financial hub has caused state finances to tumble.

Arora said the hedge funds in Greenwich, where about a decade ago one-third of the office space was devoted to that kind of business, and the financial services in Stamford, which had surged in the late 1990s with the arrival of UBS, which had a trading floor the size of two football fields - are both coming “back in a smarter way” under the regulations established in 2010 under Dodd-Frank, which was co-sponsored by then-U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd (D-East Haddam), who chaired the Banking Committee.

UBS is still in Stamford but the trading floor is empty. Yet, Bloomberg reported in 2016 that Stamford is vibrant, noting that over about a decade it has gone from Connecticut’s fifth largest population to its third largest and may overtake New Haven for second place. The city has added housing, which has attracted more residents who take 50-minute train ride to New York City daily.

Arora said he expects that the Stamford/Greenwich hub to continue to attract the newer money service companies operating in financial technology, exchange transfer funds, payments processors, as well as getting more of the traditional financial and insurance businesses.

He said with the changes in banking practices following the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall legislation, which had been in place for 66 years, it would have required “too much surgery” to re-impose Glass-Steagall, which had separated the banks’ commercial and investment portfolios.

However, he said there are “several sections of Dodd-Frank that are overreach and create undue costs.”

Additionally, he supports U.S. Sen. John Kennedy's (R-La.) proposal to make the community banks which have less than $10 billion in assets exempt from the Dodd-Frank since the burdensome regulations have caused 1,700 of them to disappear since 2010.

Arora said he has not met Larry Kudlow, the Redding resident and CNBC commentator, who was just appointed by President Donald Trump as director of the National Economic Council, but noted that he supports the recent tax reform, which Kudlow helped write while he was an informal economics adviser on the president’s 2016 campaign.

He said the package will boost gross domestic product growth by lowering the corporate tax rate to 21 percent and put businesses on “a more level playing field” with foreign competitors. He added that the increased earned income tax credit will assist low-income earners.

Arora acknowledged that the lower deduction for state and local taxes “was a little too harsh.”

He said the package also will increase the federal budget deficit an additional $50 billion to $100 billion a year, but that could be offset by scouring the federal agencies for ways to make programs more efficient but not reduce benefits.

Himes supports the Pay As You Go proposal, which former Republican President George H.W. Bush, who grew up in Greenwich, sought successfully from Congress in 1990 when he increased taxes and set a course that started the longest economic expansion in the 242-year history of the United States. Under those provisions, spending increases must be offset by additional revenue or reductions in other parts of the federal budget.

Himes voted against the Trump tax reform package, saying, among other things, that it didn’t do enough for the middle class.

He was one of 38 congressman that supported the Alan Simpson-Erskine Bowles grand budget bargain in 2010. That package would have increased taxes, cut spending and reformed Medicare. Former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker of Bridgeport, who is now seeking the Republican gubernatorial nomination, has said the package, which came from a commission headed by Simpson, a former U.S senator, and Bowles, a former White House chief of staff, “would have more than gotten the job done” in reducing the soaring federal budget deficit.

Arora said even with the tax cut there is room for a major federal infrastructure construction program. He said he wants to secure federal money to enlarge Interstate-95, which Gov. Dannel Malloy (D-Stamford) has called a “parking lot” during rush hours. Arora said rail service should be upgraded to the point where there are 30-minute cycles from Hartford to New Haven, New Haven to Bridgeport and Bridgeport to Stamford.

Malloy appointed a study committee in 2015 that recommended a 30-year, $100 billion program. However, some legislators have balked at increasing the gasoline tax or installing electronic tolls.

Regardless, former Metro Hartford Alliance head Oz Griebel of Simsbury, who is running for governor as an independent, has said usually about 80 percent of the funding for transportation projects comes from the federal government and seniority often determines how those funds are allocated.

On another topic, Arora said he believes in free trade, but supports Trump’s foreign tariffs of 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminum as a negotiating tool. He said that will bring countries “to the table” that have “no respect for intellectual property rights” and labor and environmental standards.

After the economy, he said voters are most interested in personal safety, particularly following last month’s shootings in Parkland, Fla.

Arora said Connecticut’s background checks law is “very good” and he wants the federal government to enact similar legislation.

On foreign policy, he said the United States and China should partner to insist that “North Korea give up their nuclear program.”

In similar fashion to Shays, who skewed away from the Republican mainstream, Himes has taken a similar approach as chairman of the centrist New Democratic Coalition caucus at a time when more Democrats are embracing Bernie Sanders progressivism. He supports some of that platform but has not endorsed it to the same extent as some other members of Connecticut’s seven member all-Democratic congressional delegation.

He was initially elected in 2008 by about a 1,200-vote plurality, and has won each of the last four elections by at least 14,000 votes. The district registration is 36 percent Democrat, 25 percent Republican, 38 percent unaffiliated and one percent minor parties.

However, generally speaking, even though Democrats have controlled all of the congressional seats in Connecticut for the last decade, the party may face obstacles as Malloy, who last year had a 24 percent approval rating, is not seeking a third term and there is no prohibitive favorite for the Democratic nomination to succeed him.

Regarding his motivation for running for Congress, Arora said, “It’s a good thing for people to say that I gave back.”

He added, “Ten years from now, I want to be able to say that I made a difference.”