Three of our favorite topics are in the news again this morning! Perfect blog fodder for a beautiful Sunday.
- On casinos, this long article in the Globe is a must-read. Here’s a short excerpt that gives you some of the flavor:
developer Gary P. DeCicco — a felon with a history of fires of suspicious origin on his properties and nasty disputes with the government over his unpaid taxes — found a new ally when Mayor Carlo DeMaria took office in 2008…. The mayor’s relationship with DeCicco and another felon, their mutual friend Charles Lightbody, sheds new light on the controversy over Steve Wynn’s proposal to build a $1.6 billion casino in Everett along the Mystic River. DeCicco and Lightbody were among the investors who bought the land in 2009, but their names disappeared from official documents by the time Wynn arrived in 2012….
“As mayor of the city, you associate on a daily basis with people from all walks of life,” [DeMaria] said in his statement to the Globe. DeMaria had no interest in discussing the casino controversy further, canceling four scheduled meetings with the Globe before finally admitting he does not want to be interviewed.
OK then. Read the whole thing, and then ask yourself this: really, Martha and Steve? You’re really in favor of getting this industry rolling here?
- On the People’s Pledge, Globe columnist Joanna Weiss is both partly right and completely wrong. She’s right that the Mass. legislature’s new disclosure rules are a good idea (as I’ve already said) – though she doesn’t mention that those rules will have no impact on federal races, so they don’t apply to high-stakes races like U.S. Senate, or the Tierney (assuming he wins his primary)/Tisei rematch up in MA-6. And she’s right that the now-apparently-inevitable back-and-forth between candidates about whose proposed pledge is better, and who is taking the high road, has gotten tiresome. But it’s no worse than other inevitable campaign dickering, such as debates about debates and the like. Should we not have candidate debates, simply because the campaigns like to send out press releases arguing about debate schedules? Come on.And she’s quite wrong about whether the thing actually works. Consider this bit:
And so both candidates [Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren] signed, promising a new era of high-minded, positive campaigning. Let’s recall how it went. The pledge didn’t cover direct mail, so voters were bombarded. On TV, the “elevated dialogue” included a Brown-funded ad about whether Warren was Native American. Brown lost. He moved north. Now, he’s declining to sign a People’s Pledge in New Hampshire.
Is this supposed to be an argument against the effectiveness of the Pledge? Exactly wrong: it’s an argument in its favor. No, the Brown/Warren pledge didn’t cover direct mail; that was a mistake that is easily corrected. And in any event, direct mail is far less annoying than TV ads. Furthermore, nobody thinks that a Pledge is going to eliminate negative campaigning, so that’s a strawman. What it does, and did very well in the Brown/Warren race, is force candidates to own their garbage. And that is exactly what happened: Brown’s ridiculous attacks on Warren backfired. He’s not going to sign one in New Hampshire precisely because he wants someone else to do his dirty work for him. But that’s hardly an argument for why People’s Pledges are a bad idea. To the contrary, it shows that it worked, which is why Brown doesn’t want to do it again.
Then there’s this bit, which makes even less sense.
That’s one major problem with the People’s Pledge: It’s easy to craft one that sounds nice but is riddled with loopholes. That’s a complaint super PAC donors who wanted to support Brown raised about the original pledge: It didn’t include phone banks or get-out-the-vote drives, big staples of union electioneering. In last year’s US Senate primary, Stephen Lynch and Ed Markey signed a People’s Pledge that banned third-party spending on TV ads, radio ads, and direct mail. Then a California billionaire flew airplane banners that attacked Lynch for supporting the Keystone XL pipeline.
Whoops. The People’s Pledge didn’t cover airplanes.
What nonsense. It hardly needs to be said that airplanes with banners have not proven to be a significant force in modern elections (if that should change, we’ll worry about it then). As for the laughable whining from SuperPAC donors that a People’s Pledge doesn’t cover get-out-the-vote efforts, I’m stunned that anyone not on Fox News’s payroll would take that seriously enough to reprint it. Again: a People’s Pledge is not supposed to end all third-party involvement in elections. It is supposed to be narrowly targeted to cut down on third-party advertising, which has over the years proven an especially noxious and corrosive force in our politics. To say that a Pledge doesn’t prevent individuals from talking to other individuals and encouraging them to vote, and therefore isn’t good enough … well, I don’t even know where to start.
Weiss then tosses up yet another strawman:
That’s another argument for third-party ads; they can be conversation-starters, awareness-raisers, a way to bring different perspectives to the table…. [O]utside ads can also come from advocacy groups, some of whom you might agree with, who want to launch a conversation on an issue you find important.
Oh for God’s sake. If a third-party group wants to run a real “issue ad” – i.e., one that actually talks about an issue instead of a candidate – and “launch a conversation” about that issue, nothing in any People’s Pledge prevents them from doing so. So if the Sierra Club wants to blanket the airwaves with ads talking about saving the environment, or green energy, or something, they’re free to do so. What they can’t do without running afoul of a Pledge is then add the tag-line about “call Senator X and tell her that you wish she’d stop supporting Y.” It’s that last bit that has come close to ruining American politics. Personally, I have no problem at all with candidates taking a stand against those kinds of advertisements, which frankly have been misleading from both sides. But real issue ads? Have at it.
Weiss’s conclusion is totally unconvincing. She acknowledges the “own their garbage” theory of the Pledge, but then says that it doesn’t really work – even though she recognizes that it actually did work against Scott Brown.
Yes, there’s something to be said for a candidate owning his own attacks instead of hiding behind someone else’s negativity. As former state Democratic chair John Walsh points out, those Native American ads, personally approved by Scott Brown, wound up hurting Brown’s good-guy image.
On the other hand, outside ads reflect on the candidates anyway. An odious ad can backfire, no matter who paid for it. That’s the reason many campaign operatives actually adore the People’s Pledge: It leaves money on the table, but allows campaigns to control the message.
WTF. What is Weiss’s basis for claiming that “[a]n odious ad can backfire, no matter who paid for it”? That may in theory be true, but in practice it is far, far more likely for a campaign-sponsored odious ad to backfire (as it did with Brown, or Kerry Healey and her “parking garage” ad), than for a third-party’s odious ad to do so, for the obvious reason that with third-party ads, candidates maintain plausible deniability. They can (and do, always) say that they had nothing to do with it, that they deplore this sort of dreadful skullduggery, and that they wish the third parties would stop it, all the while doing nothing to make that actually happen. That’s the beauty of the People’s Pledge: it forces candidates to put their money where their mouth is. Remember, the Pledge does not and cannot actually prevent anyone from running any sort of advertising they want to. It just means that the campaigns promise to take a financial hit if they do so. Nobody’s First Amendment rights are under assault.
And so what if “campaign operatives” like the People’s Pledge because it lets the candidates’ campaigns “control the message”? It is, after all, the candidate who is running for office. Shouldn’t we want to hear from them exactly what their “message” is?
People’s Pledges aren’t perfect. But I have yet to see a convincing argument as to why they aren’t a substantial improvement over the status quo. Certainly, Weiss doesn’t supply any today.
- On the Olympics, I just wanted to call everyone’s attention to a report that was issued by a legislative commission back in February. There’s a lot of interesting information in it regarding what would be needed for Boston to host an Olympics. It’s a bit on the cheerleader-y side (the commission was, after all, chaired by Suffolk Construction CEO and Olympics booster-in-chief John Fish), but the information is useful nonetheless.
Patrick says
That was also my impression to various parts of it. Some guy was able to pay for a plane with a banner trailing behind it, so may as well chuck the whole People’s Pledge. It’s nonsensical!
I was trying to argue a bit on twitter with her and Jeff Jacoby. It’s maddening.
ryepower12 says
I almost wrote a diary about it, but didn’t have the time.
I have so many thoughts about the whole thing…
1. Everyone needs to read it. Seriously. It’s real can’t-put-down stuff and absolutely wreaks of corruption.
2. Wow, Everett. This is 2013.
3. At this point, I’m working under the assumption that are casinos will be run by criminals and fund their enterprises. There’s no reason to believe this level of corruption is limited to Everett, not when the whole process governing the roll-out has been so corrupt themselves.
4. If the Supreme Court for some crazy reason doesn’t allow a vote, will they be willing to take the culpability for letting these people into our state, to prey on our people? Will they take culpability for protecting this level of corruption? Perhaps the SJC will want to read this article, too.
ryepower12 says
This is 2014. /bonkshead
SomervilleTom says
The woman has been Attorney General for years. Don’t kid yourself — she knows all about the Everett situation.
The shame here is not limited to a sitting AG who actively promotes casino gambling while in position of this knowledge. In my view, the more important question is why the rest of the party remains so enamored by that candidate and by the criminal enterprise she, in essence, promotes.
When I write here of a “pervasive culture of corruption” in the Massachusetts Democratic Party, it is the party’s apparently happy embrace of this kind of clear corruption that I mean. The AG’s office should have been all over this stuff, years ago. Instead, the AG is running point to quash the referendum that would stop it. The party sees and apparently embraces it — I don’t see party leaders distancing themselves from the casino gambling issue, the tawdry goings-on of players like Mr. DeMaria, Mr. Crosby, or Mr. Wynn, or gubernatorial candidates who aid and support the criminal enterprise.
What I see instead is a party who apparently celebrates the desire of Ms. Coakley to be a “team player”. The “team” wants casino gambling, and Ms. Coakley is happy to help however she can.
Massachusetts should STOP casino gambling, along with the many criminal enterprises that come with it. Only one candidate for governor agrees with that.
petr says
… you’re willing to implicate Deval Patrick, the first promoter of casinos in the state, in this “pervasive culture of corruption” then I’m not sure how you can split hairs that finely.
I’m as opposed to casinos as anyone here. But it’s a fight we’ve lost.
harmonywho says
And it’s a fight that isn’t over
David says
Not yet.
JimC says
Not yet.
But we are losing, and many people deserve blame, but there’s no question who deserves the MOST blame. Deval Patrick.
sleeples says
For all his high-minded rhetoric about helping the least fortunate, he invited this predatory industry here and did everything he could to roll out the red carpet. I do think he is more steeped in corporate culture than a lot of people give him credit for, though he has also made some good progressive decisions along the way.
This is why I want to support real populists going forward, like Warren and Berwick, who actually scare the corporate world instead of trying to partner with them at every step and tiptoe around the various boards they serve on.
SomervilleTom says
I am most certainly willing to implicate Deval Patrick in this.
Sadly, in my view it really IS pervasive. It appears to me that Governor Patrick attempted to make a compromise (with himself, as well as the many casino supporters on Beacon Hill) — not very different from Barack Obama and the GOP — and lost an enormous amount of credibility (at least with me) as a result.
I suspect Governor Patrick hoped — if not expected — that after showing “reasonableness” on casinos, he would get Mr. DeLeo’s support on his subsequent transportation bill. Instead, he got a middle-finger salute. When you deal with scum (and the casino business is filled with scum), you’re going to get dirty. That’s why the phrase “clean house” works.
Finally, as others have observed, we most certainly have not lost this fight.
petr says
In general, I agree that the most disappointing, and potentially the most harmful, thing Deval Patrick has done is to introduce casinos to the CommonWealth. Very disappointing.
But not, per se, corrupt. Which is the distinction you made above regarding Martha Coakley and the situation in Everett. That was, I think, an accusation of crime and collusion. That’s what I meant about ‘splitting hairs’: you are ‘disappointed’ in one politico but are actively accusing another of collusion…. And, as far as I can tell, both politicos are merely endorsing casinos. Are you saying that anybody who endorses casinos is complicit in crimes that are committed in their implementation?
SomervilleTom says
As Attorney General, Martha Coakley has an affirmative obligation to investigate and prosecute criminal corruption. That’s her job.
I don’t see how this is “splitting hairs”. An AG who chooses to have no interest in corruption in Everett is, in my view, very different from a Governor who chooses to cave to the Speaker of the House. Both are disappointing. Both are politically corrupt (in the sense I use it).
Still, one is very different from the other.
petr says
‘
… and so she does. Would she not be allowed to endorse liquor licensure because, as I’m sure is the case, some of it is criminal? Many past candidates for governor has endorsed both dog and horse racing. To date, none of them had the same logic applied to their candidacy: the notion that ‘well some people are illegally betting on the dogs and/or the horses so whomever it is that endorses dog and/or horse racing is corrupt.” We can go on an use any public policy you want: The Big Dig? Surely the hydra of Weld-Celluci-Swift and Romney knew all about the abuse and the boondoggles…
I voted for Deval Patrick the second time around in full knowledge that he may have ‘caved’ to the speaker of the house. If, in fact, he was complicit in actual and acute crimes, I would not have voted for him.
Now, you are splitting that hair and saying, ‘well, Deval was a disappointment but that disappointment is no reason to indict anybodies vote…’ while simultaneously saying the exact opposite about another candidates support of the same issue…
If i voted for Deval Patrick knowing his support for casinos I can’t really use that as a reason not to vote for Martha Coakley. That’s a hair split too fine for me… Now, If Martha Coakley did indeed, and deliberately, overlook the corruption in Everret then she will have lost my vote in the same way that if Deval Patrick did that, I’d not vote for him. If, however, you merely disagree with her stance on casinos and just want to make hay of it, that’s an entirely different matter.
harmonywho says
The difference is that there is an excellent Democratic alternative to choose in the Primary this time.
petr says
.. That there is a candidate who gives some a warm fuzzy isn’t the same thing as a viable future governor. Warm fuzzies are about as tangible as accusations and insinuations so I don’t consider the “excellent alternative” bar met…
harmonywho says
“We must choose the one that everyone tells us is polling ahead.” There’s nothing more empowering than that for your average citizen!
petr says
… you made a value judgement when you said “excellent Democratic alternative”. I don’t see the value. I don’t see the judgement. I see wishful thinking. I have no problem arguing the case. However, if you wish to reply with a non sequitur about horse races and quoting something I never said, then I have to assume the voices in your head have begun to disagree amongst themselves.
So don’t think this is a plea for ‘my’ candidate. Martha Coakley could be a complete vegetable and still neither Berwick nor Grossman will have yet proven themselves “an excellent Democratic alternative.”
David says
Knock it off, petr.
Christopher says
…is a key reason I have been more open to it than some. When somebody I campaigned hard for and have gotten to know and largely shares my values says that this is something to consider, then partly because I trust that person I am willing to give it that consideration.