Evan Falchuk seems intent on taking the sport out of MA politics. Like weather talk, bemoaning the shortcomings of Dems and then Republicans is our MA sport without colorful hats and jerseys. He is confident that his new political party will shut your mouth.
Click below to listen in to his vision of the United Independent Party that is at once synonymous with Falchuk and then is is vision of the new commonwealth political order. He starts with the cliché about not having to vote for the lesser of two evils, then zooms into specific details on what he and the UIP would do differently.
You can also check his ideas and platform at his Rappaport roundtable presentation, on his campaign site, and on my commentary at Marry in Massachusetts.
Falchuk is a big vision guy. That includes:
- Healthcare — squelching the monopolies created that drive up costs and give patients no choices
- Taxes — repealing the 1915 commonwealth constitutional amendment mandating a flat tax, setting up a commission to define what makes sense heading to progressive tax regs
- Infrastructure — similar to taxes, defining what makes sense for the next three or four decades and working toward that instead of patch, patch, patch
- Economic growth — building for more citizens as well as more jobs, while doing what’s necessary to foster health of small and medium businesses
Falchuk also has plans beyond this election. He sees the UIP fielding candidates at multiple levels in MA. He certainly figures he’ll have the resources for this gubernatorial run. He claims to have hundreds of passionate volunteers augmenting his staff, and a vigorous fund-raising effort, including his personal $2 million contribution.
Sweeping visions/small details
Falchuk sees the majority unenrolled voters here as symptomatic of deeper problems. He figures that’s where the UIP and his candidacy have their opportunity. Instead of begrudgingly voting Dem or GOP, voters would go for “forward thinking and innovative and new, and at the same time spending our money wisely.” He was almost poetic in circling around to his UIP principles that “everybody is equal and everybody’s civil rights have to be protected and the government has to spend our money wisely.”
For much of his party’s platform, he has a populist, even chauvinistic vision. Instead of scrimping and doing what we can with our limited resources, in areas such as infrastructure among others, he wants to lead a go-to-the-moon set of goals. That is, define what we need to do and plan how to get there. Beyond infrastructure, he speaks of areas such as health care. He has a big plan there for making dramatic difference in our highest-in-the-nation costs.
He points to the deregulation of the industry side of health care in the Gov. Bill Weld administration (abetted not coincidentally by Charlie Baker). Falchuk is quick to point out that the subsequent Dem administrations have sat idly by while conglomerates have created regional health-care monopolies and oligopolies, which have driven up the prices to patients.
His shtick seems to be that we have plenty of innovative brainpower here. We need leaders to tell the bigs that they don’t automatically get what they want. Instead, the public will get what they need. The model repeatedly is defining the goals, planning the strategy and executing.
On a more personal level, he wants to see a flattening of the playing field for political designations and nascent parties. As he describes it, newbies such as the UIP are automatically limited by rules created by and for the Dem and GOP parties, such as a $15K per donor limit for their candidates and a $1K per donor limit for the new groups. As it is now, the UIP will have to field a statewide candidate and get 3% of the vote to the benefits. Falchuk sees that as pretty undemocratic.
He has grand visions of succeeding even under the current rules. As he puts it, “The times of these parties has passed.” Meanwhile, he takes his year’s race very personally. As he puts it, “A political campaign is a job interview.”
~Mike
