So, tell me again why grassroots Dems should support the leadership?
“He’s “doing very well,” Treasurer Deb Goldberg said, at the state Democratic convention of all places. At the same confab, colleague Joshua Miller pointed out, Attorney General Maura Healey wouldn’t even mention The Untouchable One from the stage, prime venue for partisan red meat. To take the Ice Bucket Challenge, the capital city’s Democratic mayor wore a “Free Baker” T-shirt bearing the governor’s beaming face, very nearly completing the cult of personality.
“Legislative leaders have been even more effusive. “He has gotten off to a terrific start,” Speaker Bob DeLeo told the Lowell Sun’s Peter Lucas a few months ago. Not to be outdone, Senate President Stan Rosenberg went further, calling Baker’s “the strongest start that I can remember.”
“Not so much an opposition party as an alleluia chorus, swaddling His Excellency’s appeal to the moderate unwashed with each falsetto note.”
criticize that will stick or catch on? What’s the target? He’s a Republican, and we don’t like Republicans? At some point, he’s not going to want to raise taxes, and maybe our ballot question will give us something to attack with, but what do you shoot at?
He’s already a better governor than Deval Patrick ever was. That’s part of the problem. Patrick couldn’t work with his own team on Beacon Hill. Our people are freakin’ relieved they’ve got people who actually understands the situation and how to run the government. I think they are overjoyed.
I beg to differ that “he’s already a better governor than Deval Patrick ever was”, on the issues I care about.
Mr. Baker has made it clear that he —
– Will continue to destroy public transportation by defunding it
– Intends to reverse our progress in alternative and renewable energy
– Is unconcerned about the growing disparity between our very wealthy and the rest of us
As you observe, he IS a Republican and these are attributes I expect from a Republican governor. What’s missing is a DEMOCRATIC legislature that ALREADY confronts him on at least these three items.
My measure of the performance of a governor is how effectively that man or woman addresses the issues that I feel are most important to the state. By my measure, Mr. Baker is off to an abysmal start, MUCH worse than Mr. Patrick.
In my view, our most fundamental problem at the moment is that our own team of “Democrats” is as bad or worse than any Republican on the issues I care about.
I disagree with you that happily “working with” our corrupt, incompetent, right-leaning “leadership” in the House is a good thing.
The problem faced by both Deval Patrick and Barack Obama is NOT that either is unable to “work with” the legislature or Congress. In my view, the problem is that we have populated both the Massachusetts House and Congress with men and women who have no interest, ability, or willingness to place the public interest above their own personal political or economic agenda.
Today’s Massachusetts problem is Bob DeLeo, not Charlie Baker.
I agree your issues are substantive, though I don’t think they’re particularly sticky. Public transportation? Few people beyond the Boston care. Progress on alternative energies? Let’s see what happens. Baker may not set the agenda on this. What’s on the table for income inequality? Nothing. It’s hard to say he’s against it and prove it to the average voter at this point. I’m a partisan. I’d love to criticize Baker. But important issues aren’t necessarily sticky.
The OP wants our people to trash Baker. I agree DeLeo sucks and has a lot in common with Baker. I completely agree. But Deb Goldberg is not Bob DeLeo. Stan Rosenberg is not Bob DeLeo. And in spite of the convention, they don’t have the same bully pulpit as the governor. They may get their quotes in the newspaper, but that is different than being a governor who sets his agenda and makes frequent public, “newsworthy” appearances. So not only is there no issue to attack Baker on, but there is not really a medium for doing so.
Aside from marriage equality, Deval Patrick sucked. What was his agenda? Casinos? How’s that working out? He appointed a lot of incompetent people in his eight years. He couldn’t play politics with the legislature because he didn’t know how to play politics. How did I learn this? I talk to legislators on a regular basis. At the beginning, they made it very clear that Patrick didn’t know how things worked or how to work the system. Two years into his administration, I remember talking to a Democratic legislator who told me he needed to start catching on to how things worked. Seriously, talk to a legislator, and if you know them well enough, they’ll tell you.
And for colossal stupidity recall Patrick’s disagreement with the legislature over the gas tax. He decided to withhold $100 million of Chapter 90 funds? He didn’t veto the funding bill, but he instead withheld 1/3 of the the money. I think this was supposed to piss off cities and towns and make them mad at the legislature. Instead it made cities and towns angry at Patrick. We needed that money. Baker released it. Scored a lot of points.
Now Baker has Karyn Polito traveling the Commonwealth and doing photo op’s with municipalities signing the Community Compact. I personally signed the agreement with Polito in my town. This is politics done right. I told her that I had invited some of our town’s Republican leadership so her visit was useful. She said to me something like, we don’t emphasize party politics. I don’t know how much we’ll get out of the actual program, but score several big ones for the Baker Administration. They are probably averaging a story a week in the local press more than once a week. That’s good politics!
I agree. That’s why I wrote what I wrote in response to the original post. But the our house and senate are not Congress either. Baker has shown true political skill and good management style. Until he screws up, we’re not going to be able to dent his armor. We can take shots at Bob DeLeo but 95% of voters have never heard of him and don’t have the opportunity to vote for him. We could try primarying sitting Democratic legislators, but that’s playing Don Quixote. We don’t have the candidate or the support.
First of all, thanks to williamstown for sharing. I thought it was a spot-on piece in the Globe.
One thing that the state leadership has made barely a peep on is Charlie’s Exec Order 562 (http://www.mass.gov/governor/legislationexecorder/execorders/executive-order-no-562.html), aimed at rolling back MA’s environmental protection, consumer safety, public health, etc., regulations. When I went to the Mass Dems website, I couldn’t find so much as a press release.
I would love a Massachusetts Democratic Party that wants to fight Charlie’s education privatization agenda, but, alas, we do not have such a party.
The leaders of the state Democratic Party does little in terms of forward-thinking. They’re fine with just tinkering with the status quo. And that doesn’t get them very far. There are so many good ideas in the platform that are DOA in the legislature because party leaders just don’t care.
And DeLeo is a horrible speaker (I’m thinking now of how he weakened the election reform and min wage increase bills), and it reflected very poorly on the Dems in the House that almost all of them voted to make him speaker-for-life earlier this year.
Why is it always said that the Republican governor is de-funding this or that when all taxation and spending us determined and appropriated by the decades-old supermajority of Democrats in the legislature?
belongs to the Legislature. But that leaves borrowing, where the governor (of whichever party) has an enormous amount of discretion. The legislature authorizes the executive branch to borrow for certain purposes and sets ceilings, but within those limits, the executive has plenty of room to decide how much to borrow and how to spend the borrowed funds. A decision by the governor in this area of borrowed $ can easily have the appearance of a defunding.
This is true, and still seems unresponsive to porcupine’s painfully accurate observation.
Unless I’ve missed something, much of the borrowing is needed because the DEMOCRATIC legislature refuses to consider new taxes, especially on the wealthy. The impetus for casino gambling came from the legislature, not the governor (it was an example where Deval Patrick naively thought he might strengthen his standing with Mr. DeLeo by cooperating with him on casino gambling).
If our legislature would do its job and raise taxes on the wealthy so that the state did not have to borrow every year, then we would not need this discussion.
…to implement what’s known as 9C cuts, to bring the budget back into balance? If I’m remembering that point correctly then that’s all the reason I need to want Democratic rather than Republican priorities in the Corner Office.
The “Commissioner of Administrator” must first determine that the budget won’t be met by revenues for ANY funding… The governor cannot just decided to implement 9C cuts without first a determination is made that the revenues aren’t equal to the budget.
At that point, then the Governor has one of three choices: A) reduce allocations to those funds that are only under Chapter 29, section 9B (state agencies, this excludes courts and any of the agencies the governor –for example, the MBTA– that the governor doesn’t have direct administrative control over…); 2) Propose revenue increases to the general court or iii) request monies from the stabilization (rainy day) fund (or, technically, some combination of 2 and iii)
But in terms of the governers I’ll take Baker over Patrick any day of the week. The DCF was a complete joke under Patrick, and while it still has a long way to go, at least we have a governor that’s not in denial about how poorly managed the place was.
Patrick, FAIL
I don’t doubt that you prefer Mr. Baker to Mr. Patrick. I also don’t doubt that it’s easy for a governor to criticize the decisions made by a predecessor.
What we have not seen from Mr. Baker is how he proposes to SOLVE the many problems facing the state. In particular, we’ve not seen any evidence that Mr. Baker is any more able to push needed change through the legislature than Mr. Patrick was.
Both Mr. Baker and Mr. DeLeo apparently believe that more cuts, more union-busting, more reports, and more reorganizations will solve anything.
One definition of insanity is continuing to repeat the same actions over and over, believing that the result will somehow be different.
Draw your own conclusions.