[Cross-posted from the ProgressMass blog. Like ProgressMass on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.]
Republican Charlie Baker’s failed 2010 gubernatorial campaign fell short for a number of reasons. It has been highlighted that Baker was found to be too harshly negative as well as too boring. Adding to that was a third prominent problem for Baker in 2010: his honesty and integrity were frequently called into question.
Republican Charlie Baker’s veracity – or lack thereof – became a controversial matter regarding issues ranging from the Big Dig, to his support for tax increases, to his support for a “birther” running for Congress, to his status as a Beacon Hill insider, and more.
Former Metro columnist, now editor of the Boston Globe, Brian McGrory offered a blunt plea to Baker in the spring of 2010 to cut out the falsehoods and simply be honest with the voters of Massachusetts:
You’re the most negative presence in a stunningly nasty gubernatorial campaign. You’ve tried to take a bottle of Wite-Out to your résumé and your life. You’re emerging not as a serious candidate with serious ideas, but as another politician who will say anything for a vote. […]
Tell the truth. You failed to do that one recent night when Janet Wu of Channel 5 asked you whether you supported the Proposition 2 1/2 overrides while you were a selectman in Swampscott, and you said, “I don’t remember.’’ You told the Globe’s Frank Phillips two weeks before that you supported overrides.
You failed to tell the truth when you also told Channel 5, “The two guys I’m running against are both on Beacon Hill and have been there, and I haven’t.’’ You spent nearly a decade working under the State House dome.
You failed to tell the truth when you told me that you were “one of about 50 people’’ making financing decisions on the Big Dig. You were one of the most important people.
You failed when you put your hand on your running mate’s shoulder in a ridiculous discussion about a transgender bill, called him a “gay fella,’’ and said you’re “pretty much not pandering to much of anybody.’’ You were doing exactly that.
The problem with these untruths, however inconsequential they may seem to you, is that when you speak the truth about needed reforms and budget-cutting measures, voters aren’t sure whether to believe you.
Which is the crux of your problem. Many months into your long-awaited race, there’s precious little that’s authentic about you or your campaign.
Following McGrory’s column, Globe reporters offered a thorough review of Baker’s role in the Big Dig, a role whose influence, importance, and responsibility Baker dishonestly sought to tamp down:
Baker’s role in Big Dig financing process was anything but ‘small’
Records undercut his campaign claimThroughout his campaign for governor, Republican Charles D. Baker has sought to minimize his involvement in the $15 billion Big Dig.
When he launched his candidacy last summer, Baker said he played a “small role in the Big Dig.’’ Days later, his campaign said that, as the state’s budget chief under governors William Weld and Paul Cellucci, he had a “limited role in the financing process.’’
And in March, Baker told a Globe columnist that when it came to figuring out how to pay for the massive project at one critical juncture in the 1990s, he was only “one of about 50 people’’ involved.
But those statements are sharply at odds with a picture of Baker’s financial leadership of the project that emerges from hundreds of pages of memorandums, letters, and other documents culled from his four-year tenure as secretary of the Executive Office of Administration and Finance, from 1994 to 1998. The documents show that Baker was the chief architect of a financing plan to sustain the project during its peak construction years, just as federal support was diminishing substantially.
But even after the Boston Globe’s penetrating exposé of Republican Charlie Baker’s senior role in the Big Dig financing scheme, Team Baker still worked overtime to mislead voters, as Adrian Walker noted (along with getting into other areas in which Baker appears to have fudged the truth):
Charlie Baker appears to have a small memory problem.
An investigative story in the Globe yesterday outlined his deep involvement in financing the Big Dig, from which Baker had previously distanced himself.
Although Baker has consistently portrayed himself as barely involved, it now seems he played a huge role in raising money for the money-eating project.
After the story appeared, Baker’s campaign promptly released a statement declaring that the Globe’s story set the record straight by demonstrating that Baker’s role had been exaggerated by his opponents.
That statement is – how can I put this politely? – profoundly misleading. The story, by Michael Rezendes and Noah Bierman, did indeed set the record straight, but not in the way the Baker camp implies. […]
The real problem, at least for me, is the relentless effort to spin this. The notion that Baker had almost nothing to do with the Big Dig is false and is debunked, the story tells us, by reams of documents that detail his role.
He wasn’t just “one of 50 people” who had something to do with the project, as he suggested not long ago. He was steeped in it. […]
Don’t get me started on the $5 billion surplus he once claimed Governor Patrick had inherited, or his bizarre backtrack on global warming.
In crass political terms, I get it; he is trying, however implausibly, to portray himself as an “outsider” and a regular guy. The problem is, too much of his career has been conducted in public to be so easily recast.
The Big Dig was a mess that is owned by many people, and some opponents may well have overstated Baker’s role at some point. For years, Jim Kerasiotes was the agreed-upon villain of the Big Dig.
But the Globe did not report that Baker was minimally involved. The record, set straight, is that he was in a lot deeper than that.
Clearly, there have been numerous instances in which Republican Charlie Baker had not been truthful with voters, from the Big Dig on down. Heck, Baker even (falsely) denied attending a campaign event for Congressional candidate and right-wing “birther” Bill Hudak:
So, last week, I approached Baker after a press conference and started to ask why he had attended a Hudak-sponsored event. The GOP gubernatorial nominee-to-be declared that he hadn’t.
Unfortunately for Baker’s credibility, he was there, captured on film:
Specifically, the reports concern GOP gubernatorial candidate Charlie Baker (a North Shore homey to Hudak, with Baker hailing from Swampscott) and his appearance at a Hudak fundraiser at North Shore Music Theatre in Beverly. Baker was there — it’s on film — but he’s since pulled a Scott Brown and denied endorsing Hudak, or even attending the event. (“Hudak … Hudak … Nope, I got nothing.”) This despite the fact that it was in a ginormous theater in the round and featured attendees dressed as Sam Adams and Ben Franklin, which would be tough to forget.
Republican Charlie Baker’s lapses of truthfulness became so frequent and so prominent that even Governor Deval Patrick had to personally call out Baker:
Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick says Republican challenger Charles Baker’s campaign lacks integrity
Gov. Deval L. Patrick, previously content to let his No. 2 be his attack dog, assumed the role himself Wednesday when he accused Republican rival Charles D. Baker of lacking integrity in his campaign.
“He makes a lot of stuff up, I’ve noticed,” Patrick said during the Democrat’s monthly appearance on Boston area radio station WTKK-FM. “You got to ask yourself, if there’s this little integrity in the campaign, where’s the integrity going to be in the administration?”
The governor said Baker, the former Weld administration budget chief, is wrong when he says Patrick started his administration with a budget surplus. Patrick said Baker’s fellow Republican, W. Mitt Romney, left him with a structural deficit. […]
“If that surplus was there, I sure wish somebody would show it to us,” Patrick said. “There was no such thing; there was a structural deficit when we got there, and we’ve had $9 billion in budget gaps we’ve been dealing with because of this economic downturn.”
Patrick also said Baker seems to change his view on global warming “depending on the day and the audience.” During one forum earlier this year, Baker dodged a direct answer when asked if he believed in the phenomenon, saying it is the subject of scientific debate.
To summarize: on a wide variety of issues, Republican Charlie Baker was frequently called out during his failed 2010 gubernatorial campaign for attempting to mislead voters. The central question for discussion now becomes whether or not Baker will try to be honest with the voters of Massachusetts this time around. If Baker’s recent attempt to simply deflect questions regarding the Big Dig is any indication, voters may again find Baker’s veracity lacking:
Speaking to the Globe for the first time since announcing his run for governor on Wednesday, Baker brushed off the Democrats’ revival of an attack from the 2010 campaign over his role in the Big Dig project as the state’s budget chief, calling it a stale issue.
“I’m not going to spend a lot of time talking about stuff that happened in the last century,” he said.
After losing one gubernatorial campaign, Republican Charlie Baker should have realized that he can’t pretend his record away or deny his positions away. Sooner or later, he will have to be honest with the voters of Massachusetts.
