April 01, 2009
In this week's issue of the Boston Phoenix -- in print tomorrow, online now -- I have an article about state treasurer Tim Cahill, who certainly seems to be positioning himself for a 2010 run against Gov. Deval Patrick.
The past couple of weeks, it seems to have sunk in among the state's political cognoscenti that Cahill really does intend to run, quite likely as an independent. With Patrick's recent stumbles, there is even more interest in just how serious Treasurer Tim's intentions are.
Funny thing, though -- I kind of get the sense that the Patrick team doesn't really mind letting Cahill have the spotlight for a while. A potential Cahill independent candidacy might scare off serious Republicans from running, and they can work on tearing down Cahill later.
READ MORE: Is it Tim time? As Deval Patrick flails, Tim Cahill is positioning himself to run. And that's a-okay with the Patrick team. By David Bernstein.
April 01, 2009
Michael Flaherty took in $96,928 for the month -- almost $20,000 from ZIP 02127 -- which is OK but not stellar (especially for St. Patty's day!). The question, of course, is whether this is his low-hanging fruit and now it gets tough, or if this is just the ramp-up of the fundraising operation.
Regardless, it's certainly not on par with Mayor McChicken, who is raking in the cash despite his unwillingness to actually declare himself a candidate.
Flaherty spent $64,606 for the month, mostly on consultants and fundraising expenses.
Worth noting that by my count, roughly 160 individuals contributed $50 or less during the month. I know that the campaign is trying to get people onto a scheduled payment plan (ie, $50/mo. for 10 months), so it's likely that many of those 160 will ultimately contribute the maximum $500 a pop.
April 01, 2009
Last week I blogged at some length about just how strategically foolish the House Republicans are to be introducing an alternative budget. Turns out that John McCain thinks it's a GREAT idea, which I take as evidence of how right I was. McCain is trying to push the Senate Republicans into offering a budget, according to Congressional Quarterly, but wiser political minds are prevailing.
Not so on the House side, where today Rep. Paul Ryan is rolling out the GOP "alternative budget," in time for the start of floor debate on the Democratic "real budget" today.
Ryan gives an overview of the GOP budget proposal in a Wall Street Journal op-ed; I'm going to hold off on dissecting it until I've had more of a chance to analyze it. For now, I'll just say that it includes massive tax cuts for the wealthy; no economic stimulus spending at all; serious changes to the politically-sacrosanct Medicare program; and a staggering five-year discretionary spending freeze. I noted in last week's post what happened when McCain pitched a one-year freeze; this is many, many, many times more politically hazardous.
But here's perhaps the biggest political problem: the GOP plan, unsurprisingly, includes huge, massive, deficits. Not quite as much as Obama's, but enough to obliterate it as an issue -- and the Republicans' most effective criticism to date has been that the Obama budget proposal would bury our future generations in debt.
Well, as I quickly read the GOP alternative, they're jacking up the total debt to a total of $10.8 trillion in five years, and $13.6 trillion in ten years. That may be, as they claim, $3.6 trillion less than Obama's version at the 10-year mark, but can you really make a big stink out of that difference? Can you really convince the public that one path would demolish the value of the dollar and trigger hyper-inflation, while the slighly-fewer-trillions path is good policy?
But wait -- it gets even better! Last week I also opined that it will be very difficult for GOP House leaders to hold their members together around an actual budget proposal. Well, according to The Hill, House conservatives -- via their Republican Study Committee -- are already talking about opposing the leaders' new proposal, and offering their own, more fiscally disciplined version. This one, they claim, will actually balance the budget in 10 years. That should be fun reading.
April 01, 2009
--I would have to imagine that no politician, let alone the former Speaker of the House, wants to see his name and the phrase "grant of immunity" in the lead sentence of a news item.
--The current Speaker laid it down at the C of C yesterday, talking about the coming budget; condensed version: "brace yourselves."
--Worcester hardly needs the warning: 308 municipal positions eliminated.
--On the Marian Walsh story, I think Scot Lehigh nails it in the first two sentences of his column today.
--Outside the Boston area, Bay State papers are more interested in the cigarette tax today than the Walsh story.
--Just south of the city, the Patriot-Ledger is all about Weymouth's own Miss USA contestant, who is blogging her experience for them.
March 31, 2009
Nothing definitive, but I can report that former city councilor Gareth Saunders is considering entering this year's race for mayor of Boston.
Saunders, an African-American who represented Roxbury's District 7 from 1994 to 1999, attempted a mayoral run in 2005, but failed to get on the ballot.
If he runs this year, he would be considered a long-shot in a field that includes Michael Flaherty, Sam Yoon, and Kevin McCrea -- and, presumably, incumbent Tom Menino, who has not declared his intentions but is widely believed to be running.
Long-shot, but not a political novice -- while on the other hand, at age 50, Saunders is not really considered part of the "old guard" of Boston black leadership, which ironically includes Saunders' District 7 successor, Chuck Turner. If he is better organized and funded this time, Saunders could potentially position himself as a bridge between that old guard, and the new, young black candidates running for city council at-large. That group already includes Ego Ezedi and Scotland Willis, and there are others still likely to get in -- plus Carlos Henriquez running against Turner.
Of course, the real question for political junkies is this: who would Saunders take votes away from in the mayoral preliminary?
March 31, 2009
So, state senator Marian Walsh's lifelong dream of having the number-two job at a state financing authority has been dashed, perhaps forever.
A few remaining questions for us to ponder:
--Will HEFA hire someone else for that long-vacant assistant executive director, to prove that it really is necessary? And if so, what will the salary be?
--Who was Terri Murray planning to elevate to Majority Whip once Walsh was gone? And how will Murray handle this setback to that plan?
--Will Walsh run for re-election in 2010? If so, will Michael Rush challenge her? Will John Tobin? Others?
--Or, will Murray quietly (or not so quietly) explain to Walsh that she is now a cancer on the senate, and she needs to leave ASAP?
Add your own unanswered questions in the comments...
March 31, 2009
WaPo's Chris "The Fix" Cillizza is taking suggestions for a list of best state political blogs.
I'm not necessarily saying that you should go stampeding to nominate my very own Boston Phoenix Talking Politics blog. (Although I'm not discouraging you from doing so!)
It's just that last year, Cillizza's list included exactly zero from Massachusetts, and that just seems wrong.
So, I'm suggesting that you might want to click over and suggest some blog or blogs that you think are good.
March 27, 2009
National Public Radio is doing a fun little online game, running a GOP 2012 Presidential nominating contest through NCAA Tournament-like brackets. They started with 32 candidates, and are now in the second round.
Mitt Romney, who was given a number one seed, is in big trouble -- he has come up against Ron Paul in this round, and those Ron Paul fans, they do love themselves some Internet.
With just a couple of days left for voting, Romney is getting slaughtered nearly to-to-one, in a contest with by far the most voting action -- more than 100,000 votes.
My dark-horse candidate, Mike Pence -- who I initially ranked #3 but have since dropped to #4 in my own rankings -- will be eliminated by Sarah Palin in this round, but is holding his own at around 40%, considering the difference in name recognition. Another of my big underdog picks, Jim DeMint, is pulling an upset over Mike Huckabee. My top two, Mark Sanford and Tim Pawlenty, appear headed to the final 8 as well, with Pawlenty currently ahead of Newt Gingrich. My #5, John Thune, got knocked off in the first round.
March 27, 2009
It's amazing how often politicians get goaded into stupid behavior by simple baiting -- hire a guy to follow your opponent around in a chicken suit, and pretty soon he'll agree to participate in debates that he knows he should avoid.
To put it bluntly, a remarkable amount of political behavior is explainable only by large egos, thin skin, and small penises.
Democrats on Capitol Hill have been chiding their Republican critics for being "the party of no"; for criticizing but not offering alternatives; for not having their own detailed plans and solutions; and did I mention, "the party of no."
This is an age-old, standard political posture for the majority party. The correct response is to ignore it and keep hitting with the criticisms: damn right we're saying no to X, Y and Z!
The absolute wrong response is to take the bait, and run off and draw up your own detailed plans and solutions. There's no upside to it: they have no chance of being enacted, and are thus of virtually no interest to anyone -- unless they contain flaws, stupid ideas, and/or controversial proposals. Which is likely to happen, because you're just throwing the plans together quickly, not going through a rigorous policy process.
Plus, it is much, much easier for a minority party to maintain unity and message discipline by focussing on criticisms of the majority, than on an actual positive agenda. With the former, you can all agree, for example, to criticize the Obama budget's debt creation, or to hammer at his "cap-and-trade" plan as a "cap-and-tax" plan. With the latter, well, some people in your caucus are going to think it should include some kind of carbon fuel reduction plan, and some won't, and so on.
Senate Republicans get all this, and have refused to take the bait. You would think that all of this would be pretty obvious to the GOP leaders in the House, too. But, you know, Robert Gibbs kept calling them "the party of no," and they just couldn't take it -- Gibbs wasn't actually wearing a chicken suit; and he didn't literally claim that they all have small genitalia; but it was kind of implied.
So the House Republicans have been quickly throwing together their alternative proposals, on the Big Issues of the day. Two days ago, they unveiled their alternative housing plan. Its proposals were so obviously unrelated to fixing the actual housing-market problems, that I honestly initially thought I was misunderstanding it. I was not. Even conservative analysts haven't been able to take it seriously.
Yesterday, they had a big unveiling of their alternative budget. Except that what they presented isn't actually a budget, in the sense of the word relating to the itemization of revenues and expenditures. It's a little more like the campaign literature of a candidate for high school class president: if I was in charge, I would make sure there were more books and study carrels in the library, and better food in the cafeteria, and I'd make the vending machines go back to charging 75 cents for sodas instead of a dollar, and the football team would definitely make state next year.
Everyone is now openly mocking the Republican House Leadership -- who are now backtracking and saying that this was just a blueprint for their real budget proposal coming next week. And that only makes things worse: now they've committed to producing a budget where the numbers actually add up. That's going to be awfully tough: the "blueprint" calls for deficit reduction AND massive tax cuts -- including a lowering of the top marginal tax rate from 35 to 25 percent.
The actual budget they'll have to produce next week will inevitably be chock-full of massive cuts that sound great in the abstract but really don't work well in practice. John McCain made this mistake on the campaign trail last year. He proposed an across-the-board freeze in discretionary spending. Then he had to add "except the military" to avoid looking weak on defense. Then someone asked whether the freeze meant that he was abandoning his promise to Michigan and other states for increased worker training funding, so he had to exempt that. Pretty soon the list of exemptions was so long he had to stop mentioning the whole freeze idea because it was sounding so ridiculous.
Next week, when they come out with their budget -- the one with numbers this time -- it's going to be a mess. It's going to get plenty of attention, because of yesterday's botch-up, and undoubtedly lots of criticism; inevitably many Republicans will quickly back away from specific portions of it; they'll start blaming each other for making such a mess (that in-fighting has reportedly already begun); and they will look foolish and entirely irrelevant to the serious business being handled by the Democrats.
Some of you may remember that I once wrote that if you asked who the voice of opposition is on Beacon Hill, the answer would be Speaker Sal DiMasi (or Governor Patrick, depending on who you thought was the actual power) -- not the Republicans. Things seem to be headed that way on Capitol Hill now: the GOP isn't even able to make its opposition and criticisms relevant, and so they will increasingly just be ignored.
March 26, 2009
--John Tobin tells me that he will not run for the state senate seat being vacated by Marian Walsh. He also ruled out a stab at an at-large seat. "I am running for re-election in my district," he says emphatically. So far, it looks like rep. Michael Rush has the way cleared to graduate to the upper chamber, but there are still potential candidates in the suburban parts of the district making up their minds. An intriguing rumor making the rounds is that former Allston-Brighton district councilorJerry McDermot, who now lives in Westwood, might be giving it a look.
--Interesting gender gap in that Suffolk U/Ch.7 poll released yesterday. Women give Gov. Patrick a favorable/unfavorable of 50/38, men a 38/48. The gap is still there but smaller for approve/disapprove of his performance as governor. And the gap is gone completely for "deserves re-election." Other items from the survey: only 14 percent of residents have an opinion of Charlie Baker, the GOP's most talked-about potential gubernatorial candidate, while 59% say they've never heard of him; Treasurer Tim Cahill's favorables are strong across partisan lines; more people say they trust the legislature than the governor to solve the state's economic problems; and pretty much nobody believes that serious reform will happen on Beacon Hill.
--Good piece by Donovan Slack today, showing yet another instance of how Mayor McChicken (still running scared!) bent the rules for a developer who then failed to follow through. Can this please be a campaign issue this year?
--Speaking of the Globe, this isn't a politics thing but do you think they feel at all silly doing a front-page article about how the city seems uninformed about something that the Globe itself has written nothing about?
--Kudos to st. sen. Jack Hart for keeping a close watch on how the auto-insurance reform is affecting urban customers at the one-year anniversary. Apparently a lot of drivers are finding themselves unable to find an insurer to cover them when their current policy expires. Dianne Wilkerson had been a strong watchdog on this issue (among others, including Marc Pacheco), and with her gone it's good to see Hart stepping up.
--Critics of the Gov are ready to have a field day over his selection of Stephen Crosby to review compensation at the state authorities. Among other criticisms, the easiest pot-shot is that two years ago Crosby led the Patrick advisory board that recommended big raises for judges. I happen to think Crosby was right about that: the state's judges are woefully underpaid and it's creating a long-term problem. Unfortunately, salaries for court clerks are pegged to a percentage of judge's salaries, so you'd have to raise all of their salaries. The obvious answer is to de-couple those salaries -- but it turns out that court clerks are just about the most politically protected class of residents in Massachusetts, perhaps (a cynic might suggest) because such a large percentage of them got their jobs through their close connections to state legislators and other powerful pols. So de-coupling went nowhere, just as Patrick's attempts at reforming the court system -- in large part to reduce the legislature's influence over the courts that leads to these patronage hires -- has died on the vine.
--Speaking of Deval Patrick's newfound zealotry regarding high-paid authority employees... former Maureen Feeney chief-of-staff Justin Holmes probably thought he was leaving the political hive when he split from City Hall for a job as spokesperson for the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority. As soon as he lands there, authorities like his new employer land right in the spotlight. I don't know how much James Rooney et al are making over there, but I have a feeling we're going to find out soon -- along with Holmes's new salary.
--Mitt Romney, who has been going around calling pro-union "card-check" legislation the worst thing that could happen to the economy in our lifetimes -- I'm not even exaggerating here -- had an op-ed in the Washington Times yesterday holding up Massachusetts as a "cautionary tale." As Romney explains, he vetoed a card-check bill (of relatively limited scope) in 2006, but Deval Patrick signed it in 2007. Well, you won't believe how the state has gone in the crapper since that happened, Romney tells the world (or at least that part of the world that reads the Washington Times). This might surprise you, either because A) you haven't noticed a whole lot of tales of unionizing since the law passed, or B) you thought Romney believed that the state went into the crapper because of all the gay marrying. So what is the basis of Romney's cautionary tale? The unionization last year by the teachers at the Conservatory Lab Charter School in Brighton. That's it; that's Romney's only example of the detrimental effect of the law. Just so you know, that's a whole 20 people who unionized. (All of whom signed the cards, BTW.) The horror!
March 25, 2009
In the new issue of the Boston Phoenix -- in print tomorrow, online now -- I have an article about the recent, shall we say, missteps of Governor Deval Patrick. I don't know that there's been any long-term damage, but it's clearly more of a problem than the governor's people thought just last week, when I started reporting this story.
Incidentally, I'll be talking about this very subject on tonight's "Greater Boston" on WGBH.
The article is here:
Tone Deaf -- Can Deval hear the thunder of jeers?
Also, not to pile on or anything, but the Phoenix also editorializes on the topic this week. That's here:
Shape Up Governor -- It's time to talk the talk.
March 25, 2009
This coming Monday, city councilor John Connolly will hold a public hearing about his brain-child -- or Mayor Menino's brain-child, depending who you ask -- a bike-share program for Boston, which is getting a helping start-up grant from the state. Appropriately, this hearing will be at a bicycle shop: Landry's on Comm Ave. Starts at 6:00pm.
But wait, is this all a giant wasteful boondoggle? Congressional Republicans seem to think so!
That's the impression I get from today's issue of the "Whipping Post," the daily floor schedule put out by Minority Whip Eric Cantor. (See, he's the 'whip,' and they 'post' this schedule, so they call it the 'Whipping Post.' Get it?)
Today's Post features a "Weekly Waste Watch" item, and guess what? it's about the first bike-share program in the country, right in Washington DC. This week's Waste Watch references a WTOP report on plans to expand that program from 10 racks to 50, with around 500 bikes. There are some 1000 registered "Smartbike" members, paying an annual fee of $40, according to the article, which says that people are mostly using the bikes for commuting, and that there have been very few reported problems.
Or, as the Whipping Post quotes (bolding is theirs):
"It began as a pilot program, but now D.C.'s Smartbike program is pedaling
toward a huge expansion... there will be numerous neighborhoods that get the
bikes, including Adams Morgan, Columbia Heights, Capitol Hill, Anacostia
and Georgetown.
DDOT [District of Columbia Department of Transportation] has set aside about $3 million in stimulus
money to fund the upcoming expansion."
Yes, that's right, the Whip bold-faced Georgetown for emphasis. I guess because rich people live there who should be able to afford their own bicycles.
So if you go to Monday's hearing, be sure to ask Connolly whether the state grant money will be paying for bikes in neighborhoods like Beacon Hill.
March 23, 2009
Typing while listening to Sen. John Kerry live, talking on the Senate floor about community service...
--A local accountant, Hiep Q. Nguyen, has opened a campaign committee and tells the Phoenix he is exploring a possible run for city council at-large. Nguyen is president of the board of directors for the Vietnamese American Civic Association.
--Nguyen would be, by my count, the 11th at-large candidate, joining Felix G. Arroyo; Doug Bennett; John Connolly; Ego Ezedi; Tomas Gonzalez; Marty Hogan; Andrew Kenneally; Steve Murphy; Jean-Claude Sanon; and Scotland Willis. And still no women. (Run, Ayanna, Run!)
--Sam Yoon's credit card expenses reveal a fundraising trip to San Francisco last month.
--The arbitration hearing began today for Firefighters Local 718 and the City of Boston. I'll blog more about this later, but the city is narrowing its focus to the types of egregious abuses that we've been reading about in Globe exposes the past couple of years, rather than large, organizational change.
--The American Conservative Union's 2008 ratings score Delahunt as the most conservative (or least liberal) of the Bay State's 10 US Reps last year: he rated a 10 on a scale of 0-100. It was his votes against the bailout bills that did it -- and pushed his lifetime rating all the way up to 4. Six Mass. Reps scored perfect zeroes for '08, while Tierney and Capuano each scored 4, and Lynch posted an 8. Over in the Senate, Ted K. chalked up another goose egg (lifetime rating: 2), and Kerry scored a 4.
March 19, 2009
Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele has reportedly hired Gentry Collins to be the party's new political director. Could be a sign of Romney making inroads with Steele. Collins has been a Romney guy for several years.
Back in 2005, when Romney became chairman of the Republican Governors Association, he made a strategically savvy move in hiring Collins as RGA political director. Why so savvy? Because Collins hails from Iowa, the most important state in Romney's 2008 Presidential plan. Collins was executive director of the Iowa GOP, and ran the statewide campaign for the gubernatorial candidate there in 2002. He was one of the best possible people to have running Iowa's caucus for a GOP candidate, and Romney scooped him up early.
After Romney's two years as RGA chairman, he immediately made Collins his Iowa State Director.
For the general election, McCain-Palin hired him on in a minor role as a regional campaign manager, but Collins is clearly a Romney guy.
Hey wait, you're thinking now -- didn't Romney lose the Iowa caucus -- despite an enormous lead in the polls, a massive monetary advantage, and most of the other candidates skipping the state?
Why yes. And Republican governors lost every seriously contested race in the 2006 election cycle that Collins ran. And the 2002 candidate for governor of Iowa lost. And Iowa Republicans lost seats in the 2004 elections when he was running the state party. And McCain got killed by Obama in Iowa, the crucial state Collins was running for the general election. (The others were Illinois, where McCain had no chance, and Missouri, where McCain was favored and barely squeaked out a win.)
To be fair, these days it's hard to find Republican political directors with a recent history of success. But not all of them have quite the history of failure that Collins sports on his resume.
In any event, Romney now has his guy -- good or not -- in a key spot to set the national Republican message and agenda.
March 19, 2009
I'm a couple of days late with this, but I think I'm still the first to report it: Egobudike "Ego" Ezedi, executive director of the Roxbury YMCA, sent an email letter out to his associates earlier this week, with this announcement:
I want to announce that I will be taking a nine-month leave of absence beginning Saturday, March 28, 2009 to begin campaigning full-time for one of four At-Large Boston City Council seats.
Ezedi's intention to run has been much-rumored for months. He ran in District 4, against Charles Yancey, six years ago, and put up a credible challenge that was ultimately defeated, as the "old guard" of the African-American community rallied around the incumbent.
Ezedi is 35 (if I'm not mistaken), a former aide to Mike Capuano, and former spokesperson for Boston University. He has also been an associate pastor at Morningstar Baptist Church. Expect him to present himself as part of a new generation of black leadership, running -- like Deval Patrick and Barack Obama -- as a politician who happens to be black, rather than a representative of the black community.
At the same time, of course, he will try to shore up key support in minority communities -- and try to capitalize on potentially higher-than usual African-American turnout for a competitive mayoral election.
