I am shocked that after the latest failure of management under Republican Charlie Baker, involving the RMV, that no one on Blue Mass Group is talking about it.
The same pattern was there for other executive branch failures involving the MBTA and the State Police (and I seem to remember one more, but my memory isn’t catching it).
If Democrats want to take back the corner office, they must treat Charlie Baker the way the GOP treated Deval Patrick. Given that most of Patrick’s “scandals” were bogus, failure to hold Baker accountable for these failures is even worse.
Charlie Baker won the governorship by claiming to be a master administrator. He took every opportunity to criticize administrative shortcomings under Deval Patrick – for example, criticizing the technical problems with the Massachusetts Health Connector website, or the mismanagement at the DCF.
I know that no one can be the perfect executive, but that’s not what Charlie told us. That’s why he needs to pay a political price here, because that was the checking account he used to win election and re-election.
If only we had a Democratic majority in the House. Then the Speaker of the House could lead the charge.
The speaker is quoted as saying there may have been mistakes made. One wonders if he ran that past Charlie’s PR team before releasing it.
Touche!
How hard would it be for the state party to find a couple of unpaid interns to follow Baker around and challenge him to take the T? And to troll him on social media. I know we’ve gone back and forth on this a few times, but I get your hands are tied vis a vis DeLeo, but going after Baker should be easy prey and something your comms team should prioritize. He’s winning that third term so long as suburbanites think he’s doing s good job, they have to be informed that he’s doing a bad job. Jay was always have an uphill fight but four years of a largely complacent media and state Dem team didn’t help.
The state party has been harping on Baker on a weekly basis at least. I’m not sure how to break through to public media, or to what extent we’re trying, but if you sign up for the state party emails you will see our responses to the Governor.
@ state party emails:
If the party wants to be relevant, it has to find ways to get its message beyond its own email list. Breaking through to public media is what a political party is supposed to excel at, isn’t it?
You often ask for concrete suggestions about how to make the party organization more relevant. It sounds like we’ve just identified one.
What if we lived in a state where the dominant political party was also the dominant media player in that state?
I believe the other scandal you’re thinking of was the deaths of 3 kids in DCF care:
Children die from austerity politics. It’s a moral scandal.
The DCF issue was the big driver of turning my family from being Patrick to Baker supporters and while I stand by what I said at the time that it was a failure of leadership on Patrick’s watch-it’s been an even bigger failure under Baker. That the guy who bragged about fixing it apparently didn’t should be way bigger news.
He was supposed to be the guy willing to clean house and fund a better future for these kids. He didn’t. Yet the media is giving him a pass they didn’t give Deval. At least he’s finally getting pressured about the T.
Also to the OP we have exhaustively covered transit, the sheriffs, local climate change, the failure of Dem leadership, and other Baker scandals here. Just last week another poster argued we weren’t focusing too much on local issues and not enough about the threat to democracy posed by Trump.
This criticism reminded of what we’ve been saying to MTA members at the door this summer, this isn’t the union it’s your union. This isn’t the blog-it’s your blog.