Stonehill Professor Peter Ubertaccio has a new post decrying the tactics of Setti Warren’s campaign, trying to strip the bark off of Charlie Baker’s popularity. Setti Warren’s campaign is alleging that the governor is dallying on Puerto Rico; Ubertaccio contends Warren’s campaign is flailing, considering the protocols in place to handle such assistance.
I’m not in a place to judge the merits of the Puerto Rico assistance issue, though it sure sounds like six people is pretty skimpy. Ubertaccio goes on to celebrate Baker’s now self-fulfilling popularity:
What voters typically want in the Governor’s office is a manager. The largely suburban professionals who support the managerial class value rationality and efficiency. Edgar Litt wrote about this subculture of Massachusetts back in 1965. They are socially tolerant and supportive of measures to reduce inequality but carefully watch how their tax dollars are used. Given the many managerial challenges left by the last administration on Beacon Hill and the ongoing crises of governance in DC, a staid manager in the Corner Office seems to fit the moment.
Honestly, I’m happy to grant that in some ways, the current governor is a bureaucratic upgrade on the previous administration. He is indeed taking on difficult managerial problems at the MBTA — not in a way I’d choose, to say the least, being so invested in the purported magic of privatization, anti-labor, and big business pieties. But I can accept that it’s hard work, and a good faith effort, if often heedless. I hear from people with little interest in his political fortunes that certain aspects of state government work better than before.
So if you view the Governor as a bureaucratic manager of a pre-determined political consensus, then he’s fine. If you’re satisfied with things as they are, he’s fine. He won’t shake things up too much. The ways in which he’s too conservative for the Massachusetts consensus, he’ll get overridden by the legislature.
Sadly, our political consensus is predicated on ignoring large, long-term structural problems. We are in a quicksand. The decay of the MBTA, which demanded Baker’s intervention in 2015 and continues to plague commuters today, is one example.
And it will not be fixed by inside-the-box tinkering, or the promised efficiencies of privatization. The over-time, over-budget Green Line extension, for example, is being built by private contractors; the commuter rail has long been run by private contractors. The 128 ring is populated by wildly-profitable, dubiously-efficient private contractors. Color me extremely skeptical that a patently-unqualified new T chief will effectively ride herd on a new group of private contractors.
We now have a new spate of reports pondering the long-term necessities of transportation, following up on the state’s 10-year-old report calling for major public transit investment. Whether on the revenue or spending side, we are now living and enduring the failure of our State House — so exquisitely adept at passing the buck — to act in our interests. They dawdled and deferred; now you can’t get to work on time.
It will get worse, with climate change as a major disruptor. From the Mass. Taxpayers report (my emphasis):
Climate change has emerged as one of the most pressing problems as both a long-term trend and a short-term shock. The state must contend with the impact of more frequent and more severe heat waves, storm surges, floods, heavy rainfall events, sea rises, and their impact on roads, rails, power, signals, tunnels, culverts and more.3 Current capital plans are not developed and reviewed within this context, and projected expenditures do not reflect the priorities or costs associated with necessary climate change adaptations.
Going forward, project selection and capital planning must incorporate the implications and costs of maintaining transportation services in an era of rapidly changing climate conditions, or risk exposing our transportation systems to potentially catastrophic damage or investing in obsolete assets.
This is not an issue that can be ignored or postponed. Climate change impacts are already manifesting and corresponding costs are rising as several components of the state’s transportation system regularly confront excessive flooding and inadequate storm water management. And the problems will worsen at a rate faster than state and municipal governments can prepare or keep pace.
We’ve been saying all of this for the last 13 years: Govern for the long-term, with regard to the cost of housing; the necessary conversion to renewable energy; gaping income inequality; health care costs. They are very hard issues, fraught with political risk, and everyone with an ox to be gored. But we all literally pay the price for inaction.
In other words, Governor Baker’s popularity is dependent upon his risk-averseness — the same tendency that leaves us with a crumbling MBTA today. Long-term planning requires short-term sacrifice; anyone saving money for retirement, a car, education, or home improvement knows that. It takes a degree of political courage to actually plan and invest in the future.
Governors will generally leave office before many of the consequences of the things done, or left undone, are felt. In the short term there may be no consequence for Governor Baker’s timidity. But it’s 13 months before the next election; Baker should take care that he is not laying up his political capital where moth and rust doth corrupt.
I think this post gives an accurate assessment of much of what is lacking not only in Gov. Baker’s approach, but also in the inaction on these issues of the Legislature. Being an efficient and competent manager is only part of the governor’s job description, and managerial skills are not a major requirement of being a legislator. We need leadership in those positions.
This impact of this lack of leadership is made worse by an ever-growing corporate influence over public policy, as evidenced by the ongoing privatization of public functions and services, which Charlie has pointed out.
The mainstream media has not focused its attention on these issues either, largely because the media too is increasingly subject to corporate ownership . In a sense, the media itself has become privatized. Look at the Globe editorials that consistently promote privatization and criticize the Pacheco Law, in particular, with little basis in fact.
I agree with the OP and with Dave’s thoughtful comment here, but I would be remiss to remind this community and the broader progressive community that we are actually a minority within this state. The vast majority of voters think along the lines that Peter Ubertaccio described. This is the government they want.
Embedded in that analysis are critical things I’ve bolded that progressive have to become conscientious of if we want to make the needed changes to the T, climate policy, and economic inequality in this state.
1). Suburban professionals determine the Corner Office
These are not the college aged DSA members gathering Raise Up signatures at the Somerville Market Basket I encountered the other day. These are the bast majority of voters who care about local and state politics and are engaged with them. Until we get more of the former crowd to learn how to engage with the latter crowd, progressivism is DOA on Beacon Hill.
We need to find a way to get this crop of voters who like their high scoring suburban schools, like driving to work, and like not paying more taxes than they have to to care about people living in our gateway cities and the urban poor in Boston. We also need to do more to mobilize that latter group of folks-the folks who should vote most but vote least-to care about their communities.
The Chelsea Collaborative knew how to do this on my CPA campaign, and it’s time for folks like PM in whiter suburbs to learn from them instead of assuming everyone with a “I’m with her sticker’ won’t be also voting Baker/Polito this fall. I’ve saw a Rav4 and Suburu in Cambridge traffic with both stickers on their car.
2) The last Governor was a bad manager
The sooner we end the Deval nostalgia the sooner we can recapture the Corner Office. Hester, Best Defense, and Paul Simmons-three policy veterans with actual Beacon Hill experience attest that he wasn’t as good as his supporters here think he was. Similarly the social workers at my school and my brother and sister in law agree that Baker did a way better job on DCF than the prior admin. A Lesbian social worker from JP shouldn’t be voting for Baker, but she might because she really thinks he did a great job on that issue and was sorely disappointed in Deval. She has no idea who Setti Warren is or what he plans to do differently, but if he is running as Deval 2.0, it’s a strategy that isn’t going to work.
3) Focus on the T, housing, and jobs
Healthcare is not longer a state issue. Berwick’s dud of a campaign should show how little it resonates with local Democratic primary voters. We should instead push for a strong focus on Charlie’s failed leadership on the T and really mobilize the users of the T, a good coalition of JP/Camberville young progressives and working families of color in the city to be on the same side. It isn’t really catching fire for Tito, but it could capture fire for Warren if he focuses on that and what he did as Mayor on those three issues.
They are all linked. We need to get people to the cheaper housing in Gateway cities, and we need to get the people isolated in those areas to the Boston job market. You solve three problems, maybe four, with a real silver bullet train. Our climate resilience, our housing shortage, our unemployment problem in gateway cities (and the other social ills like opioids it causes), and our archaic transit options.
So Warren is doing the right things, but he needs to be more aggressive and willing to throw it all on the line. Pairing him with a good communicator like Tingle could be a compelling ticket. And he also shouldn’t be shy about saying he would be a better check on DeLeo than Baker ever will be.
Charley’s excellent post reminded me that one of Baker’s promises in 2014 was to deliver: “a state government that gets out of the way”. Wonder if that’s going to be enough in 2018. .
Baker does well as long as there are small problems to handle. Given his Republicanism, So far Baker hasn’t addressed serious problems because they would take him too far out of the GOP box.
A premise that has always appealed to me is that:
“Government exists to do things the people cannot do for themselves”.
We already face a host of issues, at the state level, that are FAR outside the envelope of things we can do for ourselves.
My dad likes to say that government exists to do things for people with bad luck. People who don’t have the luck to be born privileged. He likes to emphasize the fact that our success and situation depend on things largely beyond our control, as much as the GOP would like to say it’s all a matter of individual initiative.
One of the things that adversely affects Setti Warren is his habit of playing things a little too cute for comfort:
Case in point (re: Puerto Rico), per the October 6, 2017 MASSter List(emphasis added):