David Bernstein’s Talking Politics blog at the Boston Phoenix just posted that Dan Wolf may run for Governor in 2014. Remember Dan Wolf? He’s the state senator from the Cape & Islands, and founder and CEO of Cape Air*, who went to Washington this summer to give Congress this testimony about how health care reform in Massachusetts – and hence Obamacare – is good for business.
Worth watching again!
* Disclosure: At my day job at ITA Software (now part of Google), I work on a new airline reservation system that launched this past February with Cape Air as our first customer.
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Simas is an excellent nuts and bolts administrator. He was the Register of Deeds in Northern Bristol County. He took a sleepy, backwards county office, and brought it out of the nineteenth century and into the twenty-first century. During his short tenure, he was comparable to Dick Howe in Lowell, John Buckley in Plymouth, Jack Meade in Barnstable, and Bill O’Donnell in Norfolk.
and Simas sounds like a stout fellow.
But our bench must be pretty thin if this is news. Registers are typically landing pads, not launching pads, for political careers, and normally would be a stretch even for Lieut Gov let alone the corner office.
Simas seems like a solid LG candidate. Gov is a stretch. Wolf is more interesting.
One reason Wolf is very interesting is Cape Air. I’m probably a lot more familiar with them than most readers (or people in MA) right now – as I noted in my post, I’m on the team that runs the software their business runs on – but if her runs I think that will change.
Dan Wolf started Cape Air with a couple of people, from scratch, and not only did they make it into a successful business that continues to grow today, but Dan Wolf was able to get it started and stay with it as the leader of the company decades later, when it’s a significantly sized business with hundreds of employees. That’s not the most common story with successful startups; often, you need one kind of person to get it started, and a different kind of person to run it successfully when it’s big. Dan Wolf seems to have done a great job at both roles.
Furthermore, I’ve been to several Cape Air locations including their headquarters for stuff on the job in the past year and a half, and met a number of their employees, and … as far as I can tell, the employees are all happy with the company and most of their customers love them. In its early years, Cape Air converted to employee-owned, and remains employee-owned today. In more recent years, it seems to have put a lot of effort into energy efficiency and renewable energy.
So, I think one of the things that makes Dan Wolf very interesting as a candidate is what looks like some kick-ass executive experience as a very successful business leader, running a company in line with very progressive principles. If he does run, that story will likely be a big part of the campaign.
…and someone who has been a Register of Deeds might consider Secretary of the Commonwealth.
Agree that Register of Deeds naturally leads to running for Secretary, but there’s no immediate indication that Galvin plans to do anything other than run for reelection.
As for Wolf, what makes you say he’s “more like Treasurer material”?
Regarding Wolf for Treasurer, it just seemed his business background lends itself to that, though it was just an off the cuff thought and certainly nothing I feel strongly about.
I had heard a couple of suggestions in conversations that Galvin might try moving to Treasury himself thus opening that slot. I’ve also heard it suggested that Bump might try for Treasurer and of course the incumbent Treasurer may run for Governor. The political junkie in me would love to see all six constitutional offices open at once.
A successful businessman running for Governor as a progressive Democrat is, other things being equal, a fabulous idea. Republicans use love to drone on and on about how Dems are bad for business and hence bad for jobs because they love taxes and regulations and hate entrepreneurs and besides, “they didn’t build that.” Someone like Wolf instantly makes it far more difficult for them to press that point.