Lowell Weicker Is Dead

“Lowell P. Weicker Jr., who swaggered through three terms as Connecticut’s last Republican senator, challenging Richard Nixon over Watergate and the GOP’s rightward shift under Ronald Reagan, then willed the state’s income tax into existence in a second act as a third-party governor, died Wednesday. He was 92.” the Connecticut Mirror reports.

Hartford Courant: “Blunt and feisty, loved and hated, Weicker stood out in Connecticut politics for decades as a do-it-my-way figure who won political races at the local, state and federal levels in a long career that stretched four decades from the 1960s into the 1990s. Praised by his supporters as a one-of-a-kind maverick, Weicker was also blasted by his detractors as a bombastic iconoclast who had his own political agenda and was too liberal for the Republican Party.”