I have talked to so many Democrats who confess that they actually like Don Berwick and his policies the best but are held back by their fear that he can’t win against Charlie Baker. Let’s not dance around the issue: they are wrong. Of all the Democratic candidates, Don Berwick has the best chance of beating Baker.
Trust Matters
The fact is, in a general election, most independents don’t vote based on ideology. They vote for the candidate that they believe they can trust. Independents voted for “Dubya” in 2004 because they felt they could have a beer with the guy. Kerry…not so much (big mistake). The same goes for Romney vs. Obama and Clinton v. Bush Sr.
Charlie Baker? He is as out of touch as they come. He worked as a millionaire CEO for a health insurance company–the corporate bureaucracy that stands between you and your medical care–and is more robotic than C-3P0.
One of Don Berwick’s biggest strengths is that he actually cares about everyday people – and it shows. As a pediatrician, this is part of his job description! He talks about tackling poverty and investing in our communities. You can tell he gets the pain that everyday citizens are going through. And he has the resume to prove he can get the job done: as an executive who grew a small nonprofit from nothing to a $40 million budget and a staff of 140, and as President Obama’s pick to run Medicare and Medicaid — the largest agency in federal government by budget.
Don has the ability to connect with voters one-on-one and small group interactions, but he also has the ability to captivate large audiences as evidenced by his moving and inspirational convention speech. His natural ability to relate to the average person is a tremendous asset in winning over the electorate, and is critical to Democratic success in November.
A Bold Visionary We Can Count On To Fight
I think his secret weapon is that Don speaks honestly: He doesn’t hedge when talking about the problems we face in the Commonwealth and what it is going to take to solve them. And he doesn’t abide half-measures. His core message, “‘all’ means all” is the clearest distillation of the progressive agenda, and a clarion call to squarely address our shortcomings. Yes, hunger and homelessness seem insurmountable, but Don reminds us not to give up before even beginning–we have solutions; we just need the leadership to insist we tackle them. Don has the boldest and clearest vision, and strongest track record of results when taking on seemingly intractable problems.
I was very inspired by Don’s speech at the convention. His vision resonated me and many of my fellow delegates, even the ones who’d committed to other candidates. His powerful, clear message is an enormous advantage in both the primary AND the general election, one that all of the other candidates lack.
Coakley has no clear campaign message or clear reason for why she is running for governor. She is running the same campaign she ran for Senate– safe, centrist, predictable, standard fare (which Charley’s question, “Why Martha?” seems to get at).
Grossman doesn’t have a succinct and clear vision either; he’s walking a thin edge, trying to assert progressive priorities while leaving room to hedge. While Don unambiguously sets single payer as our ultimate goal, Grossman punts, saying, “I am willing to have a CONVERSATION about single payer.” And as he said on Monday, he doesn’t know where that conversation would lead. It looks to me like he’s paying lip service to single-payer advocates, but if elected; he would use his “conversation” to talk it to death.
Voters know semantic games when they hear them. I for one am tired of such games, and I think this is what turns so many people away from voting. Elizabeth Warren has been such a fresh breath of air not only because she’s a liberal champion but also because of her “radical” style of speaking proudly and plainly about her progressive goals. We need more politicians who say what the mean, and mean what they say.
An Outsider With Commitment, Not Empty Rhetoric
Grossman does talk frequently about paid sick time and helping labor unions. Don supports those things and more, but his message is more than just the policy points. It’s about the need for change, the struggle in people’s lives. It’s not just about the “what” or “how”, but the moral imperative of “Why”.
Grossman enumerates the policies he would implement as governor, but fails to articulate powerfully enough why these things are important issues. Don excels in speaking not just to our progressive platform, but to our progressive morals, heart, and soul. He is advocating a vision, one that the next Governor must communicate powerfully to the people in order to create the grassroots momentum to get that work done, not just during but far after the election too. Anyone who dismisses his platform as just “pretty words” or “lofty Idealism” has not looked carefully at his extremely impressive record of accomplishments. (See this article on his time at Medicare/Medicaid and this one on accomplishments at Institute for Healthcare Improvement).
Don has been talking about the issues that no other Democrat has been brave enough to tackle head on–poverty, single payer, and progressive taxation. He is the only candidate to make eliminating child hunger core plank in his campaign. Now that he’s on the ballot, he’s not backing down, and both Grossman and Coakley are readjusting their rhetoric because they see his progressive vision has traction.
Some might argue that political posturing is a necessary evil, but figures like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders should show us this is not true. If anything, voters have a strong distaste for political insiders, particularly the unaffiliated/independents that must be won over. We need Don’s bold leadership in the corner office–not politicians who follow the wind. Baker makes claims to being an outsider, but he is the epitome of government dysfunction as architect of the Big Dig financing fiasco. Only Don Berwick has the “experienced but ‘outsider’” profile that will be a critical asset in the general election.
So let’s stop fooling ourselves: we don’t win by running away from our convictions, our vision, and our goals. And we don’t win by playing it safe.
We have an exceedingly qualified and charismatic candidate in Don Berwick. The fact is, Don is the most appealing candidate to general election voters, and is committed to the transformational progressive leadership we all care so much about. If we want to defeat Charlie Baker this fall, we need to nominate a bold progressive to make the case, without apology, for our shared values. So join me in supporting and working to elect Don Berwick as our next Governor!
I’ll just add a statistic I like to use when talking about “insurmountable problems.” If you go to the bottom of page 6 of this PDF from Concern Worldwide, you will read that “It is estimated that it would cost $30 billion to solve the world hunger crisis. Although this may seem like a lot, in 2011, the U.S.’s defense budget was $711 billion and each year, Americans spend about $40 billion on weight loss products.” Clearly, we can be doing better when it comes to fighting poverty both in MA and around the world.
Berwick is THE candidate to beat Baker. I don’t think the others can, frankly.
The GOP is going to attack him as a candidate in exactly the same manner they attacked him as head of CMS. What has changed about Berwick that has made him invulnerable to the attacks that took him down the last time?
He needed the Republican legislature to approve him beyond the recess term. What’s different is THIS IS MASSAFREAKINGCHUSETTS and the Rand Pauls don’t control the nuthouse. In fact, we have tons of enlightened people who want single payer and fair taxation and ending child poverty. IN fact, we have MORE of them than we do people who believe it’s important to have a cadre of slick politicos owing your candidate favors.
It’s not the only reason I like Don Berwick, but I’ll admit I’d find it deeply aesthetically satisfying if Massachusetts were to make a habit of grabbing star appointees that the tea partiers in the Senate wouldn’t confirm and electing them to constitutional offices here.
The only difference between Warren’s situation and Berwick’s is that knowing she wouldn’t make it through confirmation, Obama elected not to try with Warren. With Berwick, he went for a recess appointment, but the terms on recess appointments expire and Berwick left office as his term ended and a successor was chosen. It wasn’t a question of folding under pressure, iirc.
Baker will be running as a social progressive, fiscal conservative like Weld-Cellucci. We will hear him talk about helping business, trimming waste, and keeping the corrupt legislature in check. Frankly , those are the same things Grossman and Coakley have been talking about. But, as statewide office holders and in Grossman’s case-a former state and national party chairman-we will not see their arguments gain traction with swing voters. They are the most vulnerable to Republican attack.
Berwick can emphasize his outsider status, the fact that the GOP Congress was too afraid to approve him, and that he will fight for the underdog against the elites. Populism wins races, and the best way to head off the ‘out of touch elitist’ charge is to demonstrate loyalty to working people and a willingness to fight on their behalf. Warren, by taking in the big banks so strongly, was able to push Browns truck off the road, totally showing his working class hero persona to be the fraud it was and deftly deflecting all the anti-Harvard attacks. It worked once, it can work again.
SG’s rhetorical insistence on being a “Jobs Creator” ‘is playing right into the right’s narrative frame.
And MC’s studied non-commitments on taxes and tax burden inequality (she gave a very hedgy “Probably not” to the question, “do the wealth pay their fair share in taxes?” Um, the answer is emphatically “NO.”)
Beat the Republicans by trying to be more like them is one way to try to win.
It’s one that I really really dislike. I’m going with the candidate who, like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, forcefully uses their status and platform to make the case for our values.
I’m tempted to call it “leading the conversation”!
I for one am quite glad Grossman is reclaiming the term for our side.
I suppose “reclaiming” and “pandering to more conservative voters by using RW buzz words” is a matter of interpretation.
I’d love to see that reclamation. But I am much more interested in reclaiming our own good, popular, winning, moral, progressive values.
And of course, you know that Don Berwick is also a progressive jobs creator.
Notice that he describes himself as a “Progressive Job Creator”. He is using the term for people who really do hire others and ideally like himself treats people right once they are hired. This is a far cry from the coded connotation from the GOP side which really means people who have more money than God and hoard it rather than using the money to hire people, but don’t you dare tax them because they might someday if they feel like it hire someone at minimum wage.
They both have good business records in terms of actual business success as well as social responsibility. What I dislike about some of Steve’s emphasis is that it focuses too much on ‘job creators’ and business rather than the entire commonwealth. ‘All means all’ is a great tag line that shows we can be pro-business while so having obligations to one another. I don’t doubt Steve believes the same thing, just as I don’t doubt he prefers single payer, but I suspect his base of support in the business community and focus on keeping their needs prioritized might prevent a holistic approach to state governance.
SO I’ll just say yeah me too.
As an endorser of Don Berwick, Sen. Eldridge’s insights like the ones on his post are no doubt invaluable to a Governor Berwick’s strategy to “move policy thru legislature” (as discussed elsewhere).
This is gold:
Berwick is an articulate progressive champion. This is what we are lucky enough to have in our Senior Senator, and we need more of it. The country needs to see and hear more of it. Are Grossman or Coakley going to be the candidates who inspire people towards progressive values? I’ve watched a lot of both their stuff and I can’t even imagine that scenario.
While I agree that progressivemax has done an excellent job here of describing why Don Berwick is the best candidate, I disagree that he is the only one who can beat Charlie Baker.
I know that I will work hard for either Steve or Martha in the unlikely event that Don is not the Democratic candidate in November. We just can’t afford to have our ship of state being steered by Big Dig Baker; he will run us aground again!
Meanwhile, heading into the Primary, it is clear that Martha will run a safe campaign, avoiding controversy, riding the popularity she enjoys. And perhaps that will be enough to win the nomination; I hope not.
Steve is in a tough position, having to fight against two opponents that have an edge on him for different reasons.
And Don, despite the disadvantage of being relatively unknown, is, in some ways, in the catbird’s seat.
What a difference a week makes. Before the #DemVention, Jaclyn Cashman wrote in the Herald that Don had no chance of winning the Primary. After
— “surprising” to her, at least — she wrote
But take a gander at her entire column. Beyond her gems of naïveté in the political analysis department, she has some rather telling remarks by the candidates.
and
Steve is trying to position himself as the “job creator” candidate, but I haven’t yet heard him give any specifics about how he will make that happen. Don, on the other hand, has a lot to say about the topic.
I’m not sure how engaged Martha will be, but it appears that we will have a lively debate between Don and Steve. I look forward to it.
The “job creator candidate” is so stale it’s rancid.
Whatever jobs will be created in this state in the first term of the next governor will have little or nothing to do with who that governor is. That’s especially true when the quality of those jobs is included in the analysis.
The only way to truly create jobs (and other prosperity) is to make immediate and substantive progress on the income disparity crisis and on the equally catastrophic skyrocketing of wealth concentration. Only one candidate addresses this reality — Don Berwick.
Sorry, Steve and Martha, but casinos aren’t the answer. They provide a handful of low-end terrible jobs and worsen income disparity and wealth concentration. Sorry, Steve and Martha, but steady-as-she-goes is not the answer.
The answer is smart, bold, aggressive, and creative leadership — Don Berwick. The best way we can help Governor Berwick achieve the vision he articulates? Help Governor Berwick cut off the political power of Bob DeLeo at the knees.
I want to see a chagrined Boston Globe running front-page above-the-fold stories in January, that say “Newly-elected Governor Berwick has become the lightning-rod for a increasingly dominant progressive force emerging from everyday people across the state. Senior Senator Elizabeth Warren remains popular, Governor Don Berwick won election handily, and un-named staff members of Speaker Bob DeLeo suggest he is considering retirement after the surprising defeat of last year’s casino legislation.”
The grassroots movement that energized Occupy Everything, that elected Elizabeth Warren, and that will elect Don Berwick are, like me, sick to death of stale stereotypes like “job creators”.
It is long past time to leave these tired bromides behind and engage the present and the future.