Pushing several would-be allies over the edge was the announcement this past Monday that Patrick’s insurance commissioner, Nonnie Burnes, will end Massachusetts’s decades-long experiment with auto-insurance-rate regulation. Instead of a state commission setting those rates, insurance companies will now have the freedom to compete, within limits. Liberal legislators, who argue that the current system protects poor, young, and urban drivers, have expressed shock that Patrick will usher in this change; they fear that insurers will raise rates most on those who can least afford it, and will punish drivers based on location, credit history, and factors other than one’s driving record. Although Burnes says that she will protect against such outcomes, opponents still think this is a bad, anti-consumer idea that they believed had died when Mitt Romney left office.

This auto-insurance stunner, along with other perceived pro-business policies, has helped push progressive senators Joan Menard, Frederick Berry, Steven Panagiotakas, Marc Pacheco, Dianne Wilkerson, and Patricia Jehlen to sour on Patrick, to varying degrees. These are pols who supported Patrick’s candidacy, and should be solid allies now that he is in office. “There are a lot of unhappy people in the building right now,” says Wilkerson.

This dynamic is contrary to Patrick’s public reputation, which was forged by the high-profile fight over closing corporate-tax loopholes. That battle cast Patrick as the populist, and the legislature — House Speaker Sal DiMasi in particular — as the corporate shill.

But aside from that one issue — which Patrick pushed for the fiscally conservative purpose of balancing the budget without adding new taxes on residents — the governor has embraced a string of what some see as corporate-friendly policies.

Patrick has taken heat, for example, for alleged “corporate welfare” in pushing a $10 million grant to the developers of Boston’s Columbus Center. He enthusiastically supported, and this past week signed, new tax breaks for movie studios to film in the Commonwealth. He supports a sales-tax holiday, seen by some as a gift to retail chains with little benefit to the state. He has endorsed financial breaks to help those building the Boston University biotech lab and the Cape Cod wind farm. And in his bio-med/stem-cell bill, he intends to push a billion dollars of investment to companies and universities.

New gov, old fight
“For a long time, we’ve been the Democratic shield stopping the Republican bullets,” says Pacheco of the State Senate. “We finally have a Democratic governor, and we keep having the same kinds of battles.”

Advocates of auto-insurance reform insist that naysayers such as Pacheco are a small but vocal minority, and that they are the pawns of insurance companies, including Arbella, Plymouth Rock, and Commerce Insurance, which would be hurt by increased competition from national insurers that currently shun the state because of the restrictive rate-setting system.

Nevertheless, criticisms from liberals in the legislature have prompted the governor to unleash his PR machine, to insulate him from Burnes’s decision. Although Patrick is publicly supporting the reform, he has done so with tepid language. Meanwhile, his staff and Burnes herself have stressed that she worked independently, apolitically, and non-ideologically in making her decision. Together they have hammered that point home in a series of public comments.

Burnes tells the Phoenix that she did not have any conversation — any at all — with Patrick concerning auto-insurance reform until she briefed him on her decision days before announcing it publicly. Instead, Burnes, a former Superior Court judge, argues she was required by statute, not driven by ideology, to implement the change. “It really was a legal decision,” she says.

Patrick has another reason to insist it was not his decision. Just three weeks before the Burnes bombshell, Patrick solicited, and accepted, $20,000 worth of contributions from executives at Liberty Mutual, the company fighting hardest for reform. That looks unseemly at best, unless Patrick really was totally uninvolved in the decision.