The Beacon Hill political season began for real on Tuesday when Governor Deval Patrick delivered his first budget message two months after taking office.
If intelligent rhetoric and impressive delivery translate into reality, then Patrick’s performance will be judged as winning.
But the devil is in the details. While the broad strokes painted by Patrick are promising, the public, the press, and the political community await the fine details of what Patrick proposes in his $26.7 billion budget, up 4.5 percent from last year.
Unfortunately for Phoenix readers, the specifics of Patrick’s proposal won’t be made public until after the paper goes to press. Still, general comment is possible:
— Over the past four years, the Democratically dominated legislature has become accustomed to essentially discarding former governor Mitt Romney’s budgets and writing its own. Not only was Romney a Republican, but he didn’t even try to negotiate with the legislature as his Republican predecessors did. In addition, the legislature paid no political price for overriding all of Romney’s vetoes. That is not likely to be the case with a governor of the same party who received an impressive 56 percent of the vote. Political observers of various stripes think the legislature generally wants to work with Patrick’s budget — at least to the extent that individual legislators deem it to be in their interest to do so. As a result, for the first time in years, the political game begins at a different starting point. Whether the outcome is more favorable to the public remains to be seen.
— The public, the press, and the politicians, as they scrutinize the details of the budget, are going to find lots of small cuts — or reductions in rates of growth — that may be harder for them to swallow than for the governor to propose. The big targets have already been identified: elimination of earmarks, cuts in Medicaid, cuts in the parks budget, and many, many things we’ll learn about in the coming days. Patrick’s strategy appears to be that he can take the heat from a number of containable political fires if he can convince enough of the parties that the sum of perceived damage will be offset by broad-based gains.
— This budget is predicated on measures that Patrick has or will file separately, including closing what he calls corporate-tax loopholes. The legislature will not be keen to pass these. The prospects for increasing aid to cities and towns, which is key to any sort of property-tax relief, is likewise muddled. The various local-tax options now on the table face an uphill battle, at least in their current forms. While these facts present challenges for the governor, they also place the burden of balancing his proposed budget clearly in the legislature’s court.
— The essentially bogus but politically titillating flaps over the governor’s helicopter travel, his choice of an official car, and the price of new curtains for his office have compromised Patrick’s credibility with Beacon Hill’s legislative barons — at least for the time being. The specifics are not as important as the general impression that Patrick’s young and unseasoned team may not be as ready for political prime time as his successful gubernatorial campaign might have suggested. Patrick will have to demonstrate more acuity in the close political combat that is to follow if he hopes to deliver on his budget’s promise.
