“The Big Dig culture of Beacon Hill”: We’re taking credit, ’cause credit is due

The prospect of Jim Aloisi being named Transportation Secretary has brought a lot of talk lately about the “Big Dig culture of Beacon Hill,” or its shorter version, the “Big Dig culture.”  It’s a brilliant turn of phrase — in just a couple of words, it encapsulates exactly what’s wrong with the way business has been done on Beacon Hill for many years, by both parties.  You just have to say it, and everyone around here knows exactly what you mean.  Deval Patrick made the phrase famous in his July, 2006 op-ed in which he argued that

The Big Dig culture of Beacon Hill allowed corners to be cut and oversight to be lax. The culture is a failure to take the role of government seriously.

But Charley invented it.

In May of 2006, two months before the ceiling in the Big Dig tunnel collapsed, Charley wrote, in the course of discussing the possibility of rolling back the income tax to 5.0%:

It is completely natural for taxpayers to want lower taxes, just as it’s natural for shoppers to want lower prices. And frankly, the Big Dig culture of Beacon Hill — which has been a bipartisan failure, over a long period of time — gives taxpayers a strong suspicion that their money is being flushed down the toilet.

In the comments, FrankSkeffington noted what a clever turn of phrase that was:

…the Big Dig culture of Beacon Hill…

Wow, Charley I have not read that anywhere yet.  I love it.  It should be the mantra of Deval or Chris in the general election.  (Unfortunately for Reilly–the taker of Big Dig campaign contributions, it won’t play for him.)

As Healey runs the same Republican play about “protecting the voters from Democratic control”, the outsiders (Deval or Chris) counter with “the Big Dig culture of Beacon Hill” and everybody will get it…the Republicans in the corner office are part of the problem.

And so a turn of phrase was born — one which quickly entered the local lexicon and is now universally used.  It’s easy to assume that it was always around, or that its origins have long since vanished.  Nope.  It started right here.

Please share widely!

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