The Guv played it well. So what can he do for an encore?

A lot of ink was spilled covering the back-and-forth sniping between the Governor and legislators over the past few months.  In the end, despite the heated rhetoric, the Governor’s gambit in playing off the sales tax against the trifecta of reforms he sought worked out.  

Real reforms will be law on transport, ethics and pensions and the Governor can take a lot of the credit for raising the temperature on all those issues to make it happen.  Like a chastened teenager headed to the headmaster’s office, legislators spewed all forms of bile and bluster about the Governor’s very public tactics.  But, the legislature ultimately chose to stay in school, even if it meant giving the principal what he wanted.  The Governor turned out to be very relevant indeed.

Now of course some will say the legislature would have passed this stuff anyway.  After Sal’s indictment, they knew they had to show that Beacon Hill wasn’t endemically corrupted. But what worked for Patrick was a deft use of that thing that only the Governor can truly command – attention – together with a willingness to take some risk.  

Using his bully pulpit to call the legislature out on passing reforms as the price for the sales tax was a well calculated gamble.  Even if leadership technically had the numbers to override him on the sales tax (which they made clear in votes in both chambers during Budget debates), Patrick and his staff correctly judged that once reform was tied to the tax, the legislature would be hard pressed to not only raise taxes on their own but also look incorrigibly entrenched in snubbing the Governor’s reforms.  Well done Governor and team!

Patrick can learn and build on these successes in his future dealings with the legislature.  One lesson for him will no doubt be that getting movement in the legislature doesn’t necessarily require comity.  Confrontation with the legislature is no doubt uncomfortable and the press plays it up in a way that often makes all the players look bad.  It carries significant risk in that the legislature holds the fate of many priorities in their hands.  But, if you can get past the negative quotes and tolerate a level of hostility, confrontation can pay serious dividends.  For all their bark, the legislature is very sensitive to criticism. Even if it makes relationships less friendly, the Governor has shown he is willing to take them to the woodshed from time to time and that it can work.

Another lesson for the Governor can come from looking at those issues where he has achieved his goals versus those where he couldn’t gain traction.  Let’s think about the issues where Patrick was unable to make headway – most notably his casino gambling plan (which I personally am not a big fan of) and his pursuit of a gas tax hike (which I like).  Is there anything that sets his efforts on those issues apart from the areas in which he has scored wins on?

No doubt, the gas tax and casinos are highly controversial revenue-raising policies with significant economic and social ramifications.  Making progress on such issues would always be difficult. But I still think the way Patrick approached these matters, versus how he approached areas he has been successful on, made defeat more likely.  And in being seen to lose on these issues, these setbacks harmed his wider agenda and diminished his political capital.

With both the gas tax and casino gambling, the Governor decided, without much public consultation, to issue very defined and comprehensive legislation in his own name.  In both cases, these were issues in which he had, until the point at which he decided to own the proposal, either been hesitant on or even hostile about in the past.  And when he decided to put his name on the measures, he wasn’t then able to define the terms of debate advantageously.  

While his proposals for the gas tax and casinos were always means to an end – i.e. raising more revenue for investment and vital services, Patrick was never able to get the debate off the means to discuss the ends.  They became personally associated with him and disassociated from the wider goals he sought to achieve.

I compare these misadventures with his success on say corporate tax reform and now ethics and pensions reform.  On ethics and corporate tax reform, Patrick didn’t just suggest his own legislation and then hope the legislature would pass it.  Instead he set out the principles he considered important and formed commissions, with external interests involved, to consider the facts, develop ideas and make recommendations. This gave his ultimate proposals a measure of independent approval and built in support – harder for the legislature to ignore or the media to personalize.  With casinos and the gas tax he never really built up an independent evidence base or a constituency for change.

What this suggests is that the Governor is at his strongest when he sets out the goals he wants to achieve, puts in place a process for those principles to be considered and delivered and then presses the legislature to fill in the blanks.  This allows him to set the parameters for debate while retaining some flexibility to adopt or dismiss the policies that emerge from the sausage grinder.  With the reforms Patrick has recently signed or will soon sign, he followed this course – setting the tone, convening independent authors to make proposals and then using the spotlight and levers only he can command to force action.

So with this run of successes in the bag, but an ugly economic and fiscal outlook potentially overshadowing these achievements, what can Patrick do this year with the re-elect just around the corner?

I’ll try to post more on this later, but I think one thing Patrick should start doing is defining the terms of the 2010 race – which could see him face up to an independent fiscally conservative Cahill, a maverick Republican in Mihos or possibly a managerial moderate in Charlie Baker.  Patrick will eventually need to offer a forward-looking agenda that will give people an idea of what another term for him will mean for them. But, even as that is being shaped, he can start defining what the stakes of the race are, a race where the focus will most certainly be on the economy and fiscal challenges confronting our State.

Positioning will be important and it has to start now.  With some real reforms under his belt, that positioning just got a little easier for the Governor.

Governors do their best work in the sunshine. They can raise issues above the parapet and get air time for anything they seek to pursue.  This is in contrast to the legislature, which often does its policy work in the shadows.  

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