Charlie Baker damns Healey with faint praise

Harvard Pilgrim CEO and ex-Secretary of Administration & Finance Charlie Baker’s op-ed in today’s Globe is about as weak an endorsement of his fellow Republican as one can imagine, barring Baker’s pulling a Gloria Larson and endorsing Deval Patrick instead.  (I confess I harbored some hopes that Baker might do exactly that.  But realistically, Baker probably still wants to run for Governor someday; he can only do so as a Republican; and he therefore cannot abandon his party.)

He starts out by reciting the difficult situation faced by the next Governor:

“The next governor and Legislature will face a staggering mismatch between expected revenues and the costs of a broad array of important priorities . . . potentially in the billions of dollars . . .” This cheery conclusion comes from the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation’s recent report on the Commonwealth’s fiscal condition.  The report states that the fiscal 2006 budget surplus of $400 million has already been spent, the fiscal 2007 budget is out of balance by about $500 million, and only very tight spending controls on everything in the fiscal 2008 budget will deliver a balanced budget during the first full fiscal year of the next gubernatorial administration.

Then he gets blunt: no one, he says, is really being honest about it, except Grace Ross.  Of course, he is including Kerry Healey in that assessment.

Yet here we are, four weeks away from the November elections, and every candidate for governor is promising more money for local aid, higher education, K-12 education, and healthcare reform. At least Green Party candidate Grace Ross makes no bones about where the money to fund her priorities will come from — $3 billion in new taxes — a bad idea ….

Then Baker takes on each candidate.  He says that Patrick has kept himself from getting trapped, and has told the truth on property taxes:

Democratic nominee Deval Patrick has worked hard to avoid becoming trapped into one position or another on the state’s financial situation — choosing not to support the voter-supported rollback of the income tax to 5 percent, not ruling out the possibility of raising taxes down the road, and avoiding specific commitments on spending. But he’s also done a good job of pointing out that huge cuts in state aid to cities and towns during the fiscal crisis a few years ago translated into whopping increases in property taxes at the local level, as cities and towns scrambled to make up the lost revenue. And when state officials blame these property tax overrides on overspending at the local level, tell them to read the Hamill Commission report. It points out that local government spending in Massachusetts has risen half as fast in real terms as state spending since 1981, when Proposition 2 1/2 became law.

It’s interesting to me how non-judgmental that description is.  You’d think that Baker would take Patrick to task for opposing the rollback, for example — but he doesn’t.  In fact, he almost gives Patrick credit for leaving himself some flexibility in how to deal with a fiscal crunch, should one emerge (though of course he can’t quite come out and say that — too close to an endorsement).

On Kerry Healey, Baker’s actually pretty merciless in not only tagging her for the current situation, but in pointing out how difficult it is for a Republican faced with an overwhelmingly Democratic legislature to be able to credibly promise that she can do anything.

Republican nominee Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey carries the political baggage associated with this financial quagmire. Yes, the economy is OK overall, but it’s much better for high-wage workers than it is for middle- and working-class families. Cities and towns haven’t fallen apart, but they’ve created and raised fees, laid off public safety employees and teachers, and supported numerous Proposition 2 1/2 overrides to make up for big reductions in local aid, and voters have felt the squeeze on their incomes as a result.

Healey also walks a fine line between blaming the Legislature for inaction on good ideas while she promotes herself as a check on their bad behavior. If she blames them too much for poor performance, she raises questions about her own effectiveness, and if she takes too much credit for working with them on key issues, she risks having to explain why so many good ideas have never gone anywhere.

Finally, after all of that, Baker says that voters might want to support Healey.  Kind of.

Still, she’s the only candidate who’s made it clear that if the choice comes down to cutting state spending or raising taxes, she’s going to fight to cut spending. At a time when the Commonwealth’s budget writers and elected officials will face tremendous pressure to raise taxes just to stay “even,” voters would be wise to keep this in mind.

“Voters would be wise to keep this in mind”??  What kind of endorsement is that?  While for the reasons noted above I don’t expect Baker to publicly back Deval Patrick, I have to say that this op-ed leaves me wondering which candidate he’ll back in the privacy of the voting booth.  After all, if Patrick wins, it’s a lot easier for Baker to run in 2010.