Don Berwick just got endorsed by my original choice for Governor, Sen. Dan Wolf (time is a flat circle!) and Arlington Sen. Ken Donnelly. From the campaign:
At a press conference this afternoon, State Sen. Dan Wolf (D-Harwich) and State Sen. Ken Donnelly (D-Arlington), two of the strongest progressive voices in the Massachusetts legislature, formally endorsed Don Berwick for Governor.
Wolf, from the Cape and Islands, is the founder and CEO of Cape Air, a successful Massachusetts business. Donnelly is a retired Lexington firefighter and former legislative agent for the Professional Fire Fighters of Massachusetts.
“I am proud to stand with Don Berwick,” said Sen. Wolf. “Don knows what it means to grow an economy consistent with our values and vision, supporting local businesses, creating jobs that make our communities and environment healthy. Whether it’s understanding the need to decouple health care from employment, or seeing that casino gambling is the wrong path for our Commonwealth, Don gets it.”
doubleman says
He has a growing group of incredible elected officials backing him. It’s really becoming a list of my favorites.
I still don’t know if he can catch up to Coakley, but he clearly has more momentum than any other campaign, and I’m working hard to see that continue.
mimolette says
I thought I saw a reference to Wolf having formally endorsed Berwick at the convention on Saturday, but so much else was happening that I couldn’t tell you now precisely where or when that was, only that it was in a context that made me wonder when it had happened and how I’d missed it. But whatever the timing, it’s excellent news.
It’s also excellent to see the campaign moving to make the critical point that Berwick’s policies are good for business and good for the economy. I sometimes think that the candidate himself understands it so well, and that it’s so much a part of the background furniture in his brain, that he and the campaign sometimes forget that they’re going to need to lay out the facts and argument for voters who don’t moonlight as policy wonks.
jconway says
I think one of the exciting things about Wolf was is business experience as a progressive CEO, and Berwick also has that in spades but maybe should be more emphatic about it going forward.
mimolette says
We can see the looming communications issue in today’s front-page post about Martha Coakley, that says something like “Yeah, yeah, Berwick is for single-payer and against casinos, we get it, but let’s be practical here.” It positions Berwick as an impractical idealist whose value in the race is to move the Overton window, rather than as a practical and indeed compelling choice for the corner office.
Which is ridiculous, when you consider that far from having a “bureaucrat’s resume,” as somebody here said, we’re talking about someone with a record of extraordinary tangible accomplishment in the private sector, whose background is in two separate disciplines centered around identifying and solving problems, who founded and grew an organization of substantial size that’s a success in financial terms as well as for the value of the work it does, and who successfully transferred his skills and expertise to government service. You can’t lay out an entire economic policy in a five-minute speech, but when he has time to range over more topics in more depth, it becomes clear that he’s seeing both single payer and the casino issue in the context of the whole Massachusetts economy, and thinking about where money spent is a deadweight loss, where it’s creating wealth and where it’s extracting wealth from some to transfer it to the wealthiest; where strategic investments can be made if we can recapture some of the lost money; what needs to be done to create an environment that’s genuinely good for small businesses; and so on and on. I’m hoping the campaign will give us some numbers to work with; but if you look at the view from 20,000 feet, it’s actually an extremely fiscally responsible and business-friendly agenda.
When I looked last night, the campaign website said that an expanded document on economic policy was in the works and should be available soon. My hope, of course, is that it will lay all of this out in easily-communicated terms — it would be so much fun to be able to outflank Baker on both the left and the right this fall.
mimolette says
I see on more careful reading that I’ve conflated the post about Martha Coakley, which isn’t saying Berwick is an impractical choice at all, with other commentary I’ve read in the past few hours. I would erase the evidence of my misreading if I could, but all I can do now is to say, Oops, and sorry about that.
Christopher says
…though given what I’ve heard from Wolf the Berwick endorsement does not surprise me.