On the WBUR site today she hit Baker with the op-ed equivalent of a top rope piledriver, detailing his terrible record of protecting children and lessening the overwhelming caseloads of DSS social workers. To be honest, my memory banks were so filled up with Baker’s role in the Big Dig debacle that I had forgotten the miserable job he had done on health and human services.
McNamara whipped out those Pulitzer skills to kick off her piece:
Charlie Baker is not the first politician to exploit the suffering of Massachusetts’ most vulnerable children for political gain, but he might well be the brashest.
It takes no small measure of nerve for a public official with a record of callous indifference to the plight of abused and neglected children to impugn the commitment of a woman who has spent her career championing their cause.
She goes on to detail reports that got ignored and appropriations for a supposed fix that never got spent. Got a feeling Baker won’t be sending the Commonwealth Future Independent Expenditure PAC any thank you cards for opening up this can of worms.
a highly partisan writer digs up some reports from the mid nineties and pins it on Baker. Does Coakley’s attack ad start with “Twenty years ago Charlie Baker….” Or how about tagging him with “brashest.”
This will have the same impact as pinning the Big Dig over expenditures on him. The average voter just can’t envision that far in the past and can’t connect old dots.
Wait wait, I’ve got it. “Charlie Baker while in the Weld administration was worse for children than current officials in the Patrick administration.”
They seemed to envision Charlie Baker’s role in the Big Dig just fine four years ago.
but it’s hard to point fingers at one person on a $14B project (is it $22B with interest? Maybe.)
He was one of the most powerful people in government at the time and in charge of financing it.
A whole lot of blame can absolutely, positively be dropped on his feet.
here
http://cognoscenti.wbur.org/2014/04/30/department-of-children-and-families-massachusetts-eileen-mcnamara
they are not running for governor. Mr. Baker was head of finance for Gov Weld. He was the architect how to put money meant for improving DCF put back in the general fund. Caseloads increased and social workers had to sue to get overtime due them. The were paid back by court decree. I understand Mr. Baker is a Republican’s dream to get tax cuts, the citizens hurt add up to more than the savings to the few.
Which is my point.
… if they did know Baker was in the Weld administration?
Just askin…
I suspect that a history of mismanagement like that would scare more than a few low information undecideds away. Those are pretty glaring and sticky negatives if Coakley wants to play Pin the Tail on the Charlie.
I think it’s hardly an evisceration, and certainly not a pile driver.
I have been all over the state at political events, parades, etc. and I have not seen hide or hair of our Lt Governor Steve Kerrigan. Who thought this guy was a good idea? Any sightings to report?
Fun watching the Baker apologists lose their minds over this accurate account. Kudos to McNamara!
Hardly losing my mind.
I’m sure if Deval Patrick was running again and it was an issue you would be dismissing it.
It’s not rally necessary for you to do that.
With notable deviations it’s my guy good, your guy bad here.
BTW we (you and I) have an exception to that.
You don’t like Diana DiZoglio. I think she’s awesome (I know her personally as well as politically) and if I could vote for her, I would over the Republican (who I also know well).
A big part of Baker’s pitch for why people should elect him is his experience in the Weld administration. Apparently he thinks he can use that at his convenience and no one else gets to touch it. However, we’re still paying for the Big Dig and it’s been kneecapping our statewide transportation system for 15 years thanks to a financing plan of Baker’s creation. He was the guy watching the financials come in when the obscene cost overruns took place and did nothing to curb them. It’s real simple, if Baker wants to claim ownership of any positives that happened during the Weld years (because he was a star player on the team and he made a difference), then he’s got a major piece of ownership of the Big Dig fiasco.
The DCF is a curious issue for this campaign, since it’s got just about nothing to do with Coakley. The Commonwealth Future attack ad is engaging in a serious reach, probably hoping to erode Coakley’s support among female voters. However, it does open the door to compare the records of the two candidates in order to determine which one is better qualified to fix the current situation. And the problems we’re having today are a spit in the ocean compared to the travesty that occurred back when Baker had direct control over DCF. They were quite literally the bad, old days for that agency.
If Baker were smart, no one would have uttered the acronym DCF during this entire campaign. However, one of his attack dog keeps barking it and it draws attention to the fact that Charlie Baker’s record in state government is that when he was confronted by a true problem he proved himself incapable of fixing it. His main strategies were ignore and kick the can down the road for someone else to solve.
Baker should be scrambling to make this whole issue go away before Coakley tallies up how many children died during Baker’s time in DSS and as director of finance and turns it into a major talking point. There’s no statute of limitations on dead children.
… if no one cares about the ’90’s… what is Charlie Baker running on? His tenure at Harvard-Pilgrim?
If that’s the case, what’s the difference between Charlie Baker and Evan Falchuk?
Is he, perhaps, running on his time at General Catalyst, a VC firm?
If that’s the case, what’s the difference between Charlie Baker and Jeff McCormick?
No one hires you for a job based on your experience 20 years ago.
Even assuming that nobody hires you for a job based on your experience -14 -years ago, what — exactly– does that leave Charlie with for those 14 years? Why should J Random Republican favor Charlie Baker over either Evan Falchuk, similarly a ‘health care executive’ or Jeff McCormick, also a VC? What has he done to distinguish himself that they have not done?
Mr. “I was a state senator for a bit and then a US senator (and maybe only won because of a bad divorce) for a couple years but now I’m qualified to run the most powerful country on the planet” made it so people believed he could do it and they voted for him. Note that before the primaries the majority of Democratic insiders thought he wasn’t ready yet.
The person who gets elected and the person who’s the most qualified are often not the same.
My point is not that Baker is not qualified, but that what he did all those years ago is part of a story. There’s always a chance that chapter disqualifies you. The chapter mentioned here does not.
you make no sense.
Or, “Yeah, but — Obama!
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
But it really was a disgustingly bad divorce. That McCain can show his face in public after that, let alone hold public office, is an indictment of our society’s standards of behavior.
I thought the reference was to Peter Ryan in Illinois. His wife was an actress and revealed in divorce papers he pressured her to go to swinger clubs or something.
Peter Fitzgerald was the retiring Republican incumbent.
I was gonna look it up but I got lazy. Jack Ryan also was in the Tom Clancy books/movies and I figured it couldn’t be the same name. But it is.
The fictional Jack Ryan became president by accident while the actual Jack Ryan made a President by accident.
I thought you meant THIS Jack Ryan…
Icon, I’d say.
Can’t distinguish Star Trek from Star Search. Whatevah.
Obama was third place behind a Daley ally Comptroller Dan Hynes and rich liberal named Blair Hull in the 2004 primary. Obama got sealed divorce papers showing Hull beat Mrs. Hull and he dropped out of the race. Obama then consolidated the anti-war/anti-machine vote against the pro-war/machine hack Hynes and won. In the general he faced a centrist Republican named Jack Ryan whose ugly divorce from Jerri Ryan (aka 6 of 9 to us Trekkers) got leaked and he dropped out replaced by carpet bagging nut job Alan Keyes (only after two months where it seriously looked like Mike Ditka was gonna run).
and aims before shooting.
Baker’s constantly spinning the tale that he was great at government before so he can do it again. No, he wasn’t. He was cartoonishly bad at it. We’re still paying through the nose for one of his blunders and now one of the PACs on his side has opened the can of worms which revives the fact that his mismanagement at DSS had fatal consequences.
You can’t hit the history eraser button on this stuff. If dead children become a campaign issue, Baker loses on that one. It’s not even close.
issue out of it.
You’re like the kid who got plugged for everyone to see and still insists you didn’t get hit. Drone strikes? Really? Let me know when that becomes an issue in the gubernatorial race.
In the meantime there’s an attempt from the pro-Baker camp to make DCF an issue and it apparently forgot when it comes to DCF and dead children Charlie Baker has a closet filled with skeletons.
I even agree this wouldn’t have been an issue under normal circumstances, but Baker and his surrogates brought it up. This has now gone beyond its initial attack ad phase and there’s no conceivable win for Baker on this issue. His record is that bad and incredibly easy to grasp.
nt
My brother and sister in law had a miserable time with DCF trying to be foster parents to a cousin who had addiction issues and couldn’t handle it anymore. They investigated them, my parents, and made it increasingly difficult for their situation and insisted that the birth mother be given responsibilities and authority that she was incapable of having and in fact begged not to have.
It took them three months to clear dad as an adult to be trusted around my cousin since apparently they found an old charge that he was arrested for underrage drinking in a NH state park in 1970, and my dad worked to take care of mentally handicapped children for the state for almost thirty years. And they had no way of cross checking that.
Meanwhile, they let kids in the here and now die, they made the Pelletier’s family life a living hell, and Deval has nothing but excuses, he couldn’t even fire the moron he put in charge of this. These are actual dead kids and not political footballs to be played with for cheap points.
Baker and his cronies behind this PAC ads clearly are doing that, and his own record his inexcusable. But so is Devals. So is Martha who has been too busy campaigning to launch an investigation. The poor Aqauteen guys go to jail, but the moron in charge of DCF when these kids died is still collecting a pension. This should be a shameful outrage, that all of our leaders in both parties clearly just do not care about the children left behind in bad family situations. Considering Deval’s own past and his eloquent defense of housing immigrant children, his indifference and continual buckpassing is particularly disheartening. The best way to beat these ads is for Martha to do her job and articulate a clear plan of zero tolerance and accountability to make sure this doesn’t happen again, not simply to say ‘Charlie is worse’.
Yet, given his history, Baker’s just about the last person you’d want to put in charge of fixing it. It’s broken right now, but it is worlds better than it was when Baker ran DSS. “Worse” does not really capture the gravity of the difference.
If this catches on as a campaign issue, which is probably what Commonwealth Future probably hoped when it started down this path, there’s a number, probably in the 20s or 30s, of children in DCF system who died from abuse or neglect during Baker’s DSS and Administration & Finance years. It was horrific and Baker does not want that to revive that in the collective memory of the electorate. Regardless of how any of us feel about this being a political football, it’s one Baker cannot handle.
None of the surrounding politics on this fix the current problems. Baker’s going to be looking pull back on spending to hand out tax cuts. Coakley’s inaction to date doesn’t fill me with a lot of hope this issue has her attention. Sadly, there isn’t a lot of political traction to be gained in doing right by children in need. For the two major candidates in this race, I fear political traction will be an overly large part of their calculation.
I also suspect Coakley will do exactly what you prescribe. She’ll start by mentioning the attack ad, deliver the dagger about Baker’s record, laud her own record on children’s issues and say she’s got a zero tolerance/accountability based plan.
The key problem at DSS is long-term structural underfunding. This has been a problem for ALL administrations, Blue and Red, since the Weld era. Multiple outside investigations have concluded the same.
I don’t doubt that the Democratic nominee is more likely to publicly wail and gnash her teeth about the funding issue. Nevertheless, NEITHER candidate has the ability to actually do anything to increase DSS funding.
This problem will ONLY be solved by INCREASING the funding. That will only happen by INCREASING tax revenue.
Neither candidate will say that, and neither candidate will do that if elected.
that seems more to your speed.
Would you like to bring Obama’s long form birth certificate into this gubernatorial debate, too?
ROFL
because I can’t get through the thickness.
I downrated MGs comment upthread as well about drones. Let’s remember its important that our little bubble is burst by centrists like CMD and center-right folks like porcupine and MG. MG brings far more to the table than an authentic troll like DFW. And I actually think he makes some great points about the basic politics. Coakley’s numbers are trending downward while Bakers are trending upward, and these races tend to break against the incumbent party when the mood of the electorate is sour. It is absolutely essential that Coakley puts some distance between herself and Deval Patrick and DCF is a tailor made issue for her to do that, viewing her long history as a fighter on behalf of women and children as AG, one even this critic won’t argue with. She should make it clear Baker is not the guy, but neither was Deval, she brings a unique perspective and passion neither one of them can. At least that is what she should say.
Otherwise, I agree with MG and KBusch that this issue hurts us far more than it hurts Baker.
is to find any reason to absolve Charlie Baker from taking any shred of any kind of blame.
Right?
At no point here did I say Baker was blameless.
I’m pointing out that in the whole scheme of things the undecided voter is not going to think this is a big deal.
Everyone here can do the usual group happy dance because someone said something you agree with, but you’ve already made up your mind. You’re thinking this will influence others, I say it won’t.
What influences undecided voters tends to be all over the place. What doesn’t jibe is the pretense that voters will care about a DCF crisis over which Coakley had no control and not a DCF catastrophe over which Baker had direct control. If Baker casts that stone, there’s a boulder coming back at him.
If this issue truly doesn’t resonate with voters, then Commonwealth Future blew a lot of money on an attack ad that missed. If this becomes an issue that gets attention, it breaks against Baker.
Coakley now.
Baker 20 year ago.
… If Baker was on the ball then would this be a problem for anyone, much less Coakley, now.
Don’t bother replying, we both know the answer…
Whether on or off the ball, neither Charlie Baker nor Bill Weld could have funded DSS enough to solve the problem then — just like neither will be able to fund DSS enough to solve the problem now.
The “Baker-is-a-heartless-exploiter” straw-man is a very alluring strawman, but it distracts analysis from the root cause of the DSS problems.
The state needs more tax revenue to solve any of these problems. The media has been filled with reports of scandal and corruption for years now.
Sadly, THAT issue breaks against the Democrats.
I get that you want to play “Spank-A-Dem” but I don’t think that is adequate license for mis-remembering your history correctly. Charlie Baker was hired outta the Libertarian Pioneer Institute by Bill Weld who was then in the grip of a post-Reagan, balanced budget, tax cut and anti-welfare frenzy in a CommonWealth that had many more Republicans in office than it does now, including two in the House of Representatives. Bill Weld balanced a whole bunch of budgets, never raised taxes and stopped the state from borrowing money all on the backs of the poor and lower classes. He didn’t have to do that but the impetus from the Dukakis Administration and the growing Clinton economy let him get away with it. Yeah, some Dems were complicit in that but it wasn’t anything like the complete numerical control they have now. The numbers were different back then.
It’s a simple question and it’s not a strawman. If Charlie Baker was on the ball then — i.e. not mismanaging the Big Dig, which was supposed to end in 1997 but didn’t finish until 2007– a whole host of other things that could have been cared for, would have been cared for. We’ve seen the Big Dig as great white whale throughout the administrations of Weld, Celluci, Swift, Romney and Patrick and overflow into the MBTA, transportation in general, and many other aspects of the CommonWealth.
And Charlie Baker was at the center of that. It’s very simple, if he had done a better job then, we’d have fewer problems now.
IN-correctly
#@!%$^@!
It sounds to me as though you assume that had Charlie Baker been “on the ball”, then subsequent administrations would have somehow solved this problem. Who? How?
The next Democrat in the corner office was Deval Patrick. Mr. Patrick faced the same resistance from the lege that the incoming Governor will face. Mr. Patrick tried, and failed, to raise taxes in a progressive way.
The “great white whale” of the Big Dig would have had its same negative impact on everything else with or without its cost overruns. I note that NO Attorney General or federal official had either the juice or the inclination to stop the obvious corruption that was happening. I further note that it was Charlie Baker’s boss, Bill Weld, who was arguably responsible for most of the outrageous graft that happened. What you have had Charlie Baker do about his corrupt boss? Should Mr. Baker have quit? Maybe, I’m sympathetic to that. I still don’t think anything would be different today.
But still, we are rehashing ancient history. The DCF would be in trouble today whatever Charlie Baker had done differently. Mr. Baker is, if anything, more culpable for the MBTA issues than the DCF issues, since the financial instruments that proved so catastrophic were his idea.
But our nominee doesn’t want to talk about that, because that means talking about the MBTA and our party doesn’t want to discuss the MBTA or public transportation in this campaign.
In my view, we are working so hard to “manage the message” that we’ve forgotten that the step that follows winning an election is GOVERNING.
We’ve had total domination of Massachusetts government for eight years now. I think its a grave error to believe that blaming our current problems on a minor official in a Republican administration YEARS ago will successfully convince voters that the next term of a Democratic governor will be any different from the last two.
In short, I think you assume the outcome you’re attempt to prove. I suggest that even if Charlie Baker had done a better job then, DSS would still be an embarrassment today.
… I’m quite clearly assuming that if Charlie Baker had solved the problem then subsequent administrations would have no need to solve it. Derp.
I ABSOLUTELY place the blame for our present woes at the feet of a MAJOR official (chief financial officer) of the Republican administration of Bill Weld, who slashed services and balanced budgets not because they had to (as Deval Patrick was required to in 2009) but because they had an ideological hard-on for hating on poor people and an even harder-on for loving up on rich people. There was no requirement to slash services. They just wanted to slash services and so they refused to raise taxes or borrow money, called that a crisis and went ahead and slashed services. It’s sentence one of chapter one of volume one of the Reagan playbook. That is a situation markedly different from our present one which is marked by extreme political cowardice: that which cowardice is unable to solve the problems that the audacious dopes of the Weld Administration refused to solve, isn’t the core of the problem.
Again, It’s very simple, if he had done a better job then, we’d have fewer problems now.
I think you mean “Secretary of Administration and Finance” (the Massachusetts government way of spelling “chief financial officer”).
Now … quickly, without looking at the link … who is the current holder of that office? How many people, especially voters, know that name? How many people list “Glen Shor” as a “MAJOR official” in the Patrick administration?
Now, about those slashed services … didn’t those budgets have to be approved by the lege? We Democrats held the lege all those years, how hard did the lege push back? Governor Patrick took office in 2006. Were those cuts restored by him?
I know you fervently desire to make it simple. The real world is not nearly so black-and-white. The fact remains that we Democrats have controlled the entire state government since 2006 and we’ve done essentially nothing to reverse all those cuts that we (and you) now complain so loudly about.
It’s ancient history. This kind of bluster is NOT going to help today.
Baker had control 20 years ago, Deval’s record is worse than Weld’s in the publics eye since its a fresher failure. Coakley’s failure to do anything about it in the office she currently has casts valid aspersions on her ability to do so in the future. I agree though that she should hammer Baker AND hammer Deval on this issue and say as the first women’s Governor and first AG to come into the Corner Office in a long while, she will make this her first priority and fight for it. It’s obviously not a priority of Deval’s, let’s not pretend that it is.
I had forgotten how much I loved that movie, and I had forgotten how much I enjoyed Winona Ryder in it.
The clip is just FABULOUS.
What DO YOU think the voters will/should decide this race on? If the records of the candidates are not relevant then what in the world is?
I’m only saying that the “OMG !!!” nature of this post is misplaced and this article and the points about Baker will have little or know impact on those that are still undecided. Do you disagree?
Pretty soon we will be at the “Most Important Election of Our Lifetimes” point.
I promised myself I would stay away from the BS, and have been succeeding everywhere (thanks to Netflix, MLB playoffs, and Podcasts) but here. Here, I return to this folly, like a dog to his vomit.
Oh well. Month and half to go, and things get more interesting again.
FWIW, it seems to me that the Baker ad is decent strategy on DCF. MC has claimed “child protection” as a strength (a claim that I find dubious for other reasons) and he is attacking a perceived strength. DCF presently seems to be in disarray, spending huge amounts of time, effort, and money to treat one girl for a disease she doesn’t have, while bizarrely demonizing the girl’s family, while simultaneously dropping the ball on multiple cases of clear abuse. That seems like more of a priorities problem, that cannot be explained away by the usual cry of “underfunding.”
I guess the MC counter-attack is the Weld/Cellucci era DCF, with helpful damning commission report. But most of that is O-L-D news, can’t easily be connected to Baker in a TV spot, and tends to sound like little more than “of course our agency is a problem, we want more money.” Even if true, and it is probably true, I am not sure how much traction that has.
I think the Big Dig has more potential traction, simple because people still remember it as a hugely corrupt mess that cost all and benefits few. That may have some traction out here beyond 495. In reality, I give the guy more of a pass on this– in my view, much of the fault was caused by disinterest by the governor and the legislature, both of which were astonishingly unwilling to come up with a mechanism to pay for the thing, or oversee the actual construction.
Charlie Baker filleted Martha in the debate yesterday. Martha said she wasn’t AG when Charlie got $1.7M from Harvard Pilgrim. Charlie slammed her by asking if she was AG in 2008! She stammered something about not being in charge of pay. Yikes.
Martha is disintegrating, just like she did with Scott Brown. Its only a matter of time before she makes a “stand outside Fenway park” remark. We should have gone with Grossman, at least he knows not to stick his foot in his mouth. Stick a form in Martha, she’s done!
With such classics as “Why Warren is Losing” and “Tell the Truth Elizabeth,” as well as the fact that you only come around during elections where Republicans feasibly have a chance to win, your past diaries and comments make that clear.
n/t