MOHL: This is an event we hold every couple of years to look at the year ahead on Beacon Hill. We have four provocative panelists. There are many ways to go on this; we can talk about issues or personalities. I’d like to start with the newcomer, House Speaker Robert DeLeo. I don’t know if you caught it, but Jim had an interview with him last night on NECN. There was some news about him going for term limits on the Speaker. What was your take on it, Jim? I was struck by the fact that he was a state rep representing his own district’s interests, and now he has a much higher position of power to sort of exercise on gambling and tolls and things like that.
BRAUDE: One of my mottos is from Lily Tomlin, who once said, “No matter how cynical I get, I just can’t keep up.” We’ve had three [Speakers] in a row leaving under an ethical cloud, two felons and possibly a third. Why is this guy [DeLeo] different? I can’t quantify it. He seems almost normal, almost like a regular kind of person who is not totally swollen with the power. He does care about his constituents. He hinted very strongly that limiting terms of Speakers — I am not a term limit guy in general, but I am clearly a term limit guy when it comes to leadership in the Legislature — would be a great step forward. If you interviewed Tom Finneran or Charlie Flaherty or Sal DiMasi on their first week and you said you’d end up in jail in four years, they’d say, “What are you talking about? I am a different kind of person.” But I really think [DeLeo] may be a different kind of person. You get the sense that there’s not the same level of hubris.
SANDLER: The dangerous side with that is, Sal was pretty normal too. Finneran and Flaherty did not fit in that mold; they clearly had a lot going on intellectually and in terms of personality. But I worry a little bit in that Sal started out as the [normal] guy from the North End and obviously did not finish off that way. I think he’s proof of DeLeo’s greatest danger, which is that there’s just something about the position [of Speaker].
BRAUDE: Did you read what Scot said in his column the other day? The good news is, [DeLeo] doesn’t play golf.
LEHIGH: Finneran would expatiate about how essentially great he thought he was. He would say, “I could see myself in the United States Senate or mayor or in a big executive post.” It’s hard to imagine Bob DeLeo doing that. When they called him Mr. Speaker in the [Democratic] ]caucus, he said, “Come on, call me Bob.” He calls himself “a hamburger guy,” or something like that. I think that’s true. He doesn’t have big pretensions. He’s less well-known inside the State House than any Speaker in my memory. He was a backbencher until Sal plucked him out and put him at Ways and Means. There he’s been low-key and kind of a functionary. Finneran, you could see him becoming Napoleon even as Ways and Means chair. You just don’t see that with DeLeo. Sal wanted to be the first among equals and wanted credit for a lot of stuff, and he was quite stubborn about a lot of things and he really knew how to use power, for good or ill. Now we’re going to have a different type. It’s really a little unresolved at this point.
CHABOT: From the reps I talk with, it seems as though we keep moving toward a kind of “kinder, gentler” speaker. Finneran was laying down the law. DiMasi tried to be sort of a nicer guy. I get the sense with DeLeo that they see that continuing. And sometimes people can take advantage of that if they see that opening. That’s the progression I’ve seen.
MOHL: You all seem to think he’s a regular guy. Does he have the vision thing? What I heard on the interview last night was about his district and “we don’t want tolls” and “we want slots at tracks.” Not exactly the big picture guy.
SANDLER: Well, that personality or the lack thereof — I don’t mean that pejoratively — might be the perfect kind to address the number-one concern within the institution now, which is its own image and ethics. He does seem to be a good fit as someone to end the House’s long institutional nightmare, a la Gerald Ford. To that extent, he might be the right person at the right time. People have lost all of their faith in that institution, and it’s lost all of its credibility because of this series of leaders. He is just a regular guy. (You keep hearing this phrase “ham and turkey.” They used to say “ham and eggers.”) In any case, I think that kind of low-key straightforward approach is just the kind of approach you need to reassure people.
LEHIGH: It would be nice to see him open the House up a little bit. Charlie Flaherty was the last Speaker who really let committee chairman do anything. He had some very bright people. Finneran, as Ways and Means chairmen tend to do, centralized a lot of power in his office and was a control freak, frankly. For different reasons, DiMasi did the same kind of thing. He wanted to be the guy who “did it”; he wanted his brand or imprint on things. Now you didn’t see a lot of things percolating up through the committee system. And in a system where none of the rank-and-file people and committee chairmen have much to do, talented people leave and schlumpy people stay. That’s happened to some degree in the House. There’s been a big exodus of talent. It would be nice to see the new Speaker say to the committee chairmen, “Go out and develop some policy. If you screw up, fine, that’s part of learning to be a leader.” Develop the place a little bit, and not just have it be a one-person show, the way it’s been.
BRAUDE: I totally agree. But it’s a two-way street. How DeLeo turns out, regardless of him being a working-class guy, is a function of whether or not the sheep on Beacon Hill act like elected representatives. One of the most disgraceful acts I have seen in recent times was the fact that after Richard Vitale was indicted and Martha Coakley said there were numerous communications between Vitale and the Speaker of the House — in that same article you see [a reference to] the April interview where he tells the Globe, “I never talked to this guy, I didn’t even know what he was working on.” That fact that [members of the House], with the exception of about seven or eight members, voted to reinstall him — kissed him, hugged him — is staggering to me. It’s a function of the fact that the vast majority of elected officials in this Legislature care more about the will of the Speaker than they do about the people back home. They have to demand part of that power. I don’t mean it in an offensive way. They have to demand some autonomy. If they do, there could be a good balance, and you’ll get some vision from the people [DeLeo] chooses to be leaders. That’s greatly in the hands of members.
SANDLER: And that’s very promising. This is a really bad moment. DiMasi left, presumably knowing he was one more bad Globe story from departing, and at the worst possible moment. You look at what Congress is doing at the national level, and it’s easy to see we need something like [a stimulus bill] in Massachusetts and instead we have no committee chairs, no bill numbers, no real legislative agenda, no clearly defined plan for dealing with an unprecedented economic crisis in the state. Apparently, DiMasi was planning to leave with the next negative story, which inevitably occurred, and the House right now is a void and a vacuum when it comes to budgetary and economic policy. [Gov.] Patrick filed his emergency plan, and that could have been passed by now. But DiMasi allowed himself to be elected and then days later departed, leaving behind an emergency.
CHABOT: It’s funny that you say that, Jim, about reps standing up. One of the first things I remember from when I came up from the Lowell Sun — new reporter, very naïve, I guess — I talked to one of the reps about who knows what, and he said, “Well, we’ll see what the boss does.” He was talking about the Speaker. The first thing I thought was, “Aren’t the people who elected you supposed to be the boss?” It’s naïve, I guess, to think that way, but that is the first thing that comes to mind.
LEHIGH: Someone [who was] appointed a chairman in the Senate said something that speaks a little to that. I think that person said, “The Senate president is going to give me a good deal of independence.” You’re either independent or you’re not.
MOHL: It’s funny that you used the term “sheep.” From the outside, the fact that there are no committee chairs doesn’t seem to make a difference because it’s just three people [the governor, the Senate president, and the House Speaker] who get in a room and seem to decide everything. Is that true?
LEHIGH: I think it’s distressingly true. It really started when [Gov.] Weld came in. You had Weld and Charlie Flaherty and [Senate president] Bill Bulger, and the state was in crisis. You had these meetings, and these guys came to speak for the Legislature. Charlie would sometimes say, “I’ve got to see what the House wants to do.” Finneran gave up the pretense of that and said, “This is what we’re going to do.” And that continued very much with DiMasi.
BRAUDE: [State Rep.] Dan Bosley will be a very significant decision by DeLeo. This is a guy who has led the opposition to casinos, substantively as opposed to just emotionally. Whether DeLeo allows him to stay as a point person on the [Economic Development] Committee, and if he does, whether he allows that committee to maintain primary jurisdiction over casino issues, will be a huge early indicator of what kind of House he will run.
SANDLER: With [Senate President Tom] Birmingham and Finneran, you had the legislative leaders who announced what the policy would be. When I started in the ’80s, it wasn’t like that. The leaders did not presume to announce in advance what the House and Senate were going to do. That shifted. If you think back to the Birmingham-Finneran era, those personalities and egos and intellects were so big that they seemed to take all the oxygen out of the room and all the fire out of the bellies of the “followerships.”
MOHL: Let’s talk about Gov. Patrick a little bit and how he is doing. You had a column, Scot, that said he was the senior man now in this group of three and that he seemed to be getting his legs under him. I still feel like he’s still drifting quite a bit. We keep waiting for his transportation plan that never seems to materialize. Some people who have been shuffled out of his administration. He’s all tied up in knots about whether to raise taxes or not.
LEHIGH: He’s got to completely reorient. We’re in this awful downward spiral. You look at him some days, and he seems like he needs a shot of B-12. He seems very sad and almost glum. That’s how he seemed at the 9C press conference, when he announced the budget cuts. I think it is tough for him. One of his big problems is that he’s kind of an incrementalist. Also, he was elected with the support of all of the unions. Some of the stuff we are into now requires him to be a little bit bolder, and he is reluctant to reform in terms of doing things that are big enough. I know we think he lost his whole transportation agenda. What happened there is, DiMasi saw an opportunity to kind of placate the liberals and get out there and [propose an increase to the] gas tax, which does make sense as opposed to [raising] tolls. All the liberals like it. Everyone in MetroWest liked it. It changed the subject. It was a very smart political move by DiMasi. (I think [DiMasi spokesman] Dave Guarino helped with it.) It caught the governor off guard. DiMasi became bold because he wanted to look bold and change the subject as the clouds were closing in on him. Now we’ll have to see who is the bold person.
SANDLER: It’s hard to be the CEO of the largest organization in New England in a time of crisis.
MOHL: What did you think of the Patrick administration’s Readiness Project? They released their report on New Year’s Eve. I was astounded. Clearly everyone knows there are economic problems. It wouldn’t be surprising for the governor to say, “I have really big ambitions but we can’t do them right now.” To sort of peter it out and wipe [the report] under the rug seemed odd to me.
BRAUDE: There two transitions he is going through. When you are a corporate general counsel, you are used to snapping your fingers: You want the car, you get the car; you want a policy change you get a policy change. All of a sudden, [as governor,] you have to collaborate with egomaniacs — I don’t mean that in a pejorative way — and it’s hard to do that. Also, it’s very hard to go from this “big idea” thing to have to deal with “What do I not eliminate?”, as opposed to “What can I add?” It’s difficult for any human being.
The ascension of DeLeo is going to be a huge asset for [Patrick]. At least in the early going, they will have discussions on the merits of things. There’s a telling moment on [Senate president] Murray and Patrick. [New Transportation Secretary James] Aloisi is there because he knows the inside and how to do everything and knows the Big Dig culture. So the first thing he does is announce a [transportation reform] plan, and 30 seconds later Terry Murray savages him. So the guy supposedly knows how to work the system, and no one even talked to one of the two people who matter. Something is wrong somewhere. Either Murray has an ego problem or Deval Patrick doesn’t know how to reach out. Many people might say it could be the latter.
The best way to co-opt anyone is to include them in the discussion. Even if they hate everything you stand for, if you are a person of power, you talk to Jane Doe and you say, “I am going to do this and I know you hate it.” If you deal with them every day, it’s very hard to savage the messenger the next day in the newspaper. That case should be studied, the Aloisi-Murray thing. But at least for the time being, there is somebody who seems to be open and willing to talk in DeLeo. When [Patrick] came out with the ethics task force, Terry Murray’s response was, “We do ethics training for incoming senators to begin with.” Hello? They just dragged two members of your chamber out of the building [on ethics violation charges].
LEHIGH: The ethics thing was on the front pages on the day the Senate was sworn in, and she thought that was like a slap to the Senate. I thought that ethics package was pretty good. I’d like to see it passed. It may well sink in the House, where the defense bar there has traditionally nibbled away at anything like that. But that was, in my mind, a small-minded response to an obvious need, to say that the governor is “just doing that to make us look bad.” We do need ethics reform here. [Patrick] was quite diplomatic at the press conference where he announced it. He wouldn’t even talk about DiMasi’s problems. He just sort of talked generally about how we need to clean up appearances. I thought he was too timid in what he had to say. The ideas and the package were good. The reaction we got from the speaker at the time, DiMasi, was that we have some of the strongest laws in the country — which is really laughable in terms of the penalty part of the law. [Murray’s] response spoke to the wrong mindset, a backwards mindset. I hope she does something on it. It’s good to see DeLeo saying it’s going to be a top priority.
SANDLER: What I worry about is that none of this matters. All of the minutiae inside the building, we all love it and in our universe it certainly does matter. But it doesn’t really matter. Hundreds, thousands of people are losing their jobs every single day. There goes the tax base that we need to invest in the schools, in transportation, to turn things around. Really, nobody is doing anything about it. The governor is touring the West Coast. No one is even sending the messages right now about the things that people really care about, which is: “Am I going to be in my house in March?” That’s the only thing that matters. Ethics doesn’t, comparatively speaking.
BRAUDE: Maybe comparatively speaking, but if the average person thinks state government is irrelevant because it’s corrupt, not in a legal sense but in a colloquial sense, then even if they said all the right things, people wouldn’t believe them. They have to get their house in order. Perfect example: The cynicism about the [federal] stimulus package is not as much about the content but about that the people Obama picked don’t pay their taxes. It’s partially a fair criticism. How can those people fix our problems if it turns out they don’t play by the same rules? How can those people on Beacon Hill fix our problems when I know the Speaker did something bad? They’ve got to fix it, stop the infighting, stop all this little crap, and then people may say, “These people are relevant to my life and maybe they are going fix what ails me.”
MOHL: Speaking of that, the compelling image last year was Dianne Wilkerson stuffing cash up her sweater into her bra. What do you think of her apparent defense that “I am just getting gifts from people, and the Ethics Commission says it’s fine.”
LEHIGH: “Ethics Commission: Bribery OK.” I think it’s a little lame.
SANDLER: I don’t know anybody who knows anybody who is buying that.
MOHL: The Globe takes it very seriously. The commission wrote this letter, and Arthur Winn gets up and says she’s a pal of mine and I wanted to help her.
LEHIGH: The problem is you could probably make that case. Ultimately, I suppose, the ladies and gentleman of a jury may have to decide how plausible they find it. You can make the case with a close longtime friend perhaps, or certainly a family member. A lot of parents give money to children that way. It’s pretty hard when you have a situation like the FBI laid out, when she is on the phone saying, “Look, I’ve been breaking legs on this thing to get this project done.” The Ethics Commission quite clearly said in that letter that it can’t be something where you are taking official acts to benefit this person. When you are on the telephone bragging to someone that you have been breaking legs on behalf of their cause, and they’re giving you money, it seems to me there’s a nexus that says this is not just a disinterested person throwing you $10,000 to help you with your problem. So I would tend to be somewhat skeptical of that argument.
SANDLER: You can’t take personal $10,000 gifts from big developers who have business before the commonwealth if you are a state senator, whether or not it’s illegal. You shouldn’t do that.
CHABOT: To backpedal a little bit, on Patrick’s ethics [task force], the cynical view on that was he comes up with this after calling people on the phone for Dianne Wilkerson [in her re-election bid last year]. That’s another sort of, I suppose, small-minded way to look at it. If it’s good ethics reform, it’s good ethics reform. But when that came out, I think a lot of people viewed it as [Patrick] was trying to cover himself.
BRAUDE: [Wilkerson’s] lawyer, Max Stern, is brilliant. He has very little to work with. He’s creating the best he can. When I criticize, know that I really do love the Herald. About two years ago the Herald ran a Page Two story going through [Wilkerson’s] campaign and political finance and saying she spent $165 on a brassiere. Margery Eagan, my co-host on the radio, from the Boston Herald, and I spent two hours mocking the fact that she spent $165 on a brassiere and how corrupt the system is. When the show is over, the phone rings, and it’s Dianne Wilkerson, who says she didn’t hear the show, but her staff did, and the person who went to the OCPF [Office of Campaign and Political Finance] copied it down wrong: “I didn’t spend $165 on a brassiere; I spent $165 to take people out to Brasserie Joe’s.” [See Boston Globe story, which cites the amount as $60, here. Go to the last two paragraphs.]
MOHL: Hilary, if you had to guess for these next months, what do you think is going to happen on the transportation front?
CHABOT: It seems like the gas tax is inevitable. [The Patrick administration] is backpedaling like crazy on tolls. That was one of the main lessons learned from that toll [hike] proposal. There is a train of thought that it was somehow planned so a gas tax would be more welcomed. I don’t know how much I believe that. It seems as though people are coming to the idea that a gas tax is fairer. And I don’t know if getting rid of the Mass. Turnpike Authority in name is going to help all that much. The bottom line is, you have this insane debt and have to figure out how to pay for it regardless of where it ends up landing. That’s really where the focus has to be.
LEHIGH: If the state were really clever, you would have a flexible gas tax. So when gas went way up, the tax would sink, and when gas [prices fall], the tax would increase so it would stabilize the prices of gas at a certain floor, and you would go back and forth. If we go back up to $3 or $3.50 gas, the tax would be less. But now, when [the price is] $1.82, it would be more. I think we could do that.
SANDLER: Incidentally, this is what drives me crazy. If we had a chair of the Transportation Committee, and if we had a Transportation Committee, and if the governor were in the state this week, perhaps we would be having that discussion. That’s a creative and perhaps innovative solution that’s among the many that are not being talked about.
BRAUDE: I think there clearly will be [a gas tax increase]. I don’t think it will be tolls; [DeLeo] is from Winthrop. The only reason there hasn’t been a gas tax is there was a huge miscalculation from the Transportation Finance Commission, which came out with [an estimate of] $19 billion or $20 billion to fix and maintain roads. The finance commission released their report in October of the election year, which guaranteed that both Kerry Healey and Deval Patrick had to say they opposed the gas tax increase because they were going before the voters in a month.
Deval gets elected. He is on the record saying he’s opposed to the gas tax. What’s he going to say? “I was lying to you then”? If [the estimate] had came out two months later, he would have said, “I’ll look at it.” I think we would have done a gas tax already….We’re tax-phobic. It’s a tough economic time for people, but hopefully some grownups are going to stand on it. By the end of the year, I think, it happens.
LEHIGH: The problem with the calculation that the administration probably looks at is: We ’ve now put both the motel and meals tax on the table, both statewide and at the local level, and then we put the gas tax on the table. And at some point, probably if this recession keeps goes the way it looks, we’re going to have to consider other revenues. And [we also have] the beer sales tax at package stores. You start to get a constellation of taxation issues and you say, “We don’t want to be easily portrayed as the people that (as Bulger used to say to me) slap a tax on a galloping horse.” There’s a worry there, and unfortunately I think they suffer because the Republican administrations delayed a lot of expenses that are now coming due. You look at the debt that encumbers the central problem at the Pike. It’s from a project where the finances were kind of pushed backward. And these guys are about to wrestle with it. There is a worry about the political risks of taxation.
BRAUDE: The way to deal with that is if Murray and DeLeo and Patrick can agree on some piece of the transportation reform that is simple, has a huge ticket attached to it, that all three will talk about. Let’s assume some consolidation led to a billion dollar savings by taking X. Easy number. People can grasp it. They understand we are going to eliminate Y. If all three were on the same page and the message constantly was — what was the op-ed in the Globe from Baddour and Murray? — “reform before revenue.” They say we save a billion dollars by doing X. If they repeat that in every sentence, I think they then create the environment.
SANDLER: That work is starting both on the legislative side and in the governor’s office. It’s got to happen just because of the hole in the budget, which is not going to get smaller. This event is called “Starting Line.” I was thinking, “Well, what’s the message of the year? What’s going to be happening this year?” If I had to put it on a bumper sticker, a good slogan would be “Nothing’s certain but dearth and taxes.” It’s absolutely the case that we are going to see a lot of both. Deficits are going to widen, and we certainly are going to raise taxes to partially deal with it.
MOHL: What’s your sense about the federal stimulus package? Everybody is hoping a lot of money will come pouring into the state for all sorts of things. People talk about shovel-ready projects all the time, and [the funds also seem] to be going into existing programs. Do you know much about it? Are they talking about what will be funded?
SANDLER: There is not an architectural contractor in the state who isn’t frantically speeding up the plans. I worry about that, long term. I see a lot of talk about the acceleration of projects to make them shovel-ready. When I see a 2010 shovel-ready project, I think of that as a project that in 2038 is going to look like this [holds arms at strange angle]. You can just see, 20 years down the road, we may be talking about some Columbia Points. In the infrastructure hinterlands, people are frantically trying to get their proposal ready.
LEHIGH: There is lot of stuff every year, projects and bonding authorizations that don’t make the list of actual monies that the state has because of the bond cap. The governor had a task force to kind of put all of this together. They are looking hard at it. If you do have as part of your capital planning process a prioritized list of things, you can reach a little higher or lower. There are worthwhile projects. People say the national stimulus plan doesn’t have enough infrastructure in it. We don’t want to do boondoggle projects, but things can be done in this timeframe that aren’t just digging holes and filling them in.
CHABOT: There is something frightening a little bit in the scramble over what to do with this windfall. The governor’s office recently contracted with Deloitte and Touche to figure out where to spend, where to divvy up the cash. There is some caution there in trying to quickly figure out what are the right projects and where it should go.
MOHL: Does a lot of it just go automatically to the schools and this or that town, or does Patrick have a lot of control?
SANDLER: It will be a combination of legislation and A&F [the Executive Office for Administration and Finance]. You can write it into any budget bill you want. And the other secretariats have a certain amount of discretion once the money is released by the Legislature. All the borrowing and all the budgeting does happen through legislation.
LEHIGH: Some of the federal money will come in by a changed Medicaid reimbursement formula. You may change it to 54-46 so the state doesn’t have to make as much of its share, and they can take that money and devote it to other things in the regular budget process.
SANDLER: It’s perfectly OK to put it into existing programs. The billion-dollar crises that states are going through, these are real crises that do affect the homeless or the animal shelters or every sector where someone is poor. For example, if you pour three billion into Medicaid, that is just as needed as building schools or roads.
LEHIGH: It’s important to remember just how much, when we were constructing the Big Dig — for all the people who are discontented about the quality of the project — it was a huge economic boom for this state. [Same thing with] the wastewater treatment plant [at Deer Island]. When those were being built, there were a lot of construction jobs, a lot of money in the economy. There are things you can do that are important and keep that money flowing. I don’t have a view that this spending, even if you are building a new parks or playgrounds, is all boondoggle stuff. They talk about resodding the National Mall as an example of waste. It’s a big national space and an important space. I don’t look at that as wasteful spending. You could argue is it the most useful spending in the world. But if you are saying now it’s important to get money into the economic system to replace collapsed macroeconomic demand, I think it’s a perfectly legitimate way to do things.
SANDLER: This is a WPA scenario. I agree with Scot. It’s legitimate to rush into the vacuum and pump it into state government. It still puts it into the state economy.
MOHL: I want to turn the tables a little bit and talk about your business of covering politics. I used to be up on Beacon Hill, 10 or more years ago, and it was a very different intensity covering state politics than it is now. There are profound societal implications from that. I looked at this past week, this Monday through Thursday, at what you [Chabot] wrote at the Herald. It was seven stories in just four days, plus web postings. You are a very busy person covering all sorts of things. You are the only person for the Herald at the State House. It wasn’t that long ago that they had three. How fast do you have to move from one subject to another?
CHABOT: You really need to decide what you are focusing on. That changes if something huge happens, but you can’t just bumble around because there’s a lot of stuff to do. You have to figure out what exactly you want to do and what you want to get across. The other interesting thing coming from the Lowell Sun covering the State House to the Herald is there were two reporters from the Sun covering the State House. The Sun had a much more specific focus on its region and “What are my guys doing?” on Beacon Hill. But even in the two years I have been up at the State House [for the Herald], that press gallery on the fourth floor has lost three reporters. Now there are only six, seven. There was a Lowell Sun and Berkshire Eagle conglomerate that had three reporters, and now there is only one. There’s no Eagle-Tribune reporter. And it’s happened sort of quickly. They are just not refilling the posts.
LEHIGH: TV has basically abandoned the building. It used to be you saw John Henning and Janet Wu were there almost all the time, and Hiller was there. It was a regular television presence. Now Janet will come up, and she’s terrific. She used to work in print. She’s a really, really good television reporter. Really knows the subject. But she is doing more investigative stuff. She comes to the State House every now and again rather than cover it as a regular consistent part of the beat. It’s emblematic of what’s happening with television. Our [State House] bureau, we at the Globe, used to have five reporters and a full-time writing co-op, usually a very good one. We had a lot of reportorial reach. Now we have three people. I work out of the bureau but write a column. We don’t have an intern. You’ve got a lot less. We used to cover hearings. (Of course, there aren’t that many important hearings anymore.) You just can’t cover things the way you used to.
SANDLER: That means the readers and consumers don’t get as much information as they need regarding taxes, the stimulus package.
BRAUDE: All of this preceded the economic situation that’s requiring further cutbacks. This lowering of the priority of the State House for news coverage long precedes that. [Previously,] there would be a budget debate and instead of Janet Wu coming up for a pre-arranged thing, you could hold an ad hoc press thing at two o’clock in the morning, and you’d have three cameras there to put you on TV the next day. The issue is chicken and egg, for me at least. Is there less attention on the part of TV because the viewers aren’t interested in politics or because politics has become so uninteresting? I think it’s as much the latter. When there was tons of coverage, there were tons of rank-and-filers who were willing to say something that may not have parroted what the leader had to say. They would be willing to say, “I have great respect for Speaker DeLeo, but frankly he’s dead wrong on this and he’s screwing the people of Massachusetts.” There isn’t that anymore. The more docile they become, the less newsworthy anything [they] become, and so there is a downward kind of spiral. And I don’t mean this disrespectfully, but the Republicans — they are not relevant. So they bitching about what Democrats are doing. Who cares? When “big D” Democrats decide to exercise democracy once again, I think some of the press will return.
I want to go to print again just for a second. I am sitting next to [people from three places] that I think have done an extraordinary job with diminishing resources. All three of your operations [the Boston Globe, the Boston Herald and State House News Service] have done great work. But the reality, it’s hard to say to print people, is that television is where the vast majority of people get the news. When [Secretary of Health and Human Services nominee Tom] Daschle pulled out the other day, and then I saw the banner headline in the Globe the next morning, I thought for a split second, “Did I get yesterday’s paper?” Because all of us are watching cable news and listening to the radio, and the story was so old by the time it was in the newspaper. Newspapers have to be more creative in what they present.
LEHIGH: There is truth in that. On yesterday’s story, it seemed old by the time the paper was out, but I think the newspapers still set the agenda for a lot of the television media.
BRAUDE: And talk radio all the time; 99 percent of talk radio couldn’t happen [without newspapers]..
LEHIGH: The same is true for the blogging. I look at them as cheerleaders on both sides. A lot of what they are doing is simply commenting on what’s in the newspaper. They are not really news generating engines. They are kind of just, to some degree, nattering about things. That is the particular value of newspapers: You see stories in newspapers that will set the agenda for something that television just would never devote the time to report.
SANDLER: But I also think we are discussing the details of the Dark Age, or the trough. There is going to be an upswing in the future that will actually be pretty good in the long run. It will take quite a number of years, but print is far from dead. The blogs, in the longer term, will be professionalized and monetized. Newspaper coverage and newspaper journalism will be more into online journalism in a way that is really healthy and robust.
LEHIGH: It’s not going to help me much, Craig.
SANDLER: We’ll just leave that right there. Everyone in the room can concur that one real bright spot in our environment is the MassINC blog. That is a real example of a window into the future. I have never heard a negative comment about that blog. A lot of what’s on their blog is not reactive.
MOHL: So there are fewer of you covering the same number of them [public officials] up there. And yet it seems to me they are getting better and better about managing what they say. It used to be you could call one agency and they wouldn’t talk to another agency, so you’d find them all tripping over each other. Now they [say]: “We know you called so-and-so over there, and we’re all talking about you, and we’ve got you figured out.” They have put on a pretty effective game to manipulate press a lot. It doesn’t always work, but how do you all feel about that?
CHABOT: [Former transportation secretary] Bernard Cohen would sort of be like, “Tolls are on the table on I-93,” and of course Patrick’s people would freak out and say they’re not on the table….I don’t know if this is what you are hinting at, but when there are less of us [in the media] putting the heat on and making the relationships and connecting with people who will say, “I am not on board with what’s going on,” or “We are concerned about that,” then it become a little easier to corral and control.
LEHIGH: The best administration I covered was [William] Weld, where the governor was not concerned about leaks. He didn’t have a fit when someone leaked something. He thought it was a natural way for big organizations to blow off steam. He had a laid-back attitude toward it, and it percolated through the administration. You could get a lot of information. [Mitt] Romney really, really, really centralized the message. It was done just like a big firm would do it. I think that Deval is too much that way too. They are too concerned about controlling the message out of the press shop, and I think they are stifling a lot of discussion in the agencies in the name of sort of unitary message. It looks good if you are in the small group of governor’s handlers. But it’s not really good for state government, and in general it doesn’t really, in the long run, help you all that much. If I were the governor, I would be a lot more laid-back about it and have a little more openness. I think the Romney model was a mistake, and to the degree that Patrick has emulated it, that has been a mistake.
SANDLER: There’s another permutation of it that has to do with civic engagement. This was going to be an open, collaborative administration that was going to get input from the public and give the public unprecedented access and ability to drive the agenda and have input. And that hasn’t happened, even with new tools, wonderful tools.
BRAUDE: I don’t mean this as self-servingly as it sounds, [but] Patrick does an hour on the radio with us each month where real people get to call and scream at him and say they don’t like something. We don’t pre-screen the calls. We take them in the order in which they come in. That’s a small thing, but it’s something. The problem is not just controlling the message, but getting the message out. My producer at NECN is brilliant. [But] we have an incredibly difficult time, more often than not, getting someone from the administration to come on to advocate a position on a policy that they have advanced. It’s almost like a public relations opportunity. I’m looking at one person [in the audience] who is never difficult [Robert Keough, spokesman for the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, and a former editor of CommonWealth magazine]. But often what my producer has to do is to call down the line of cabinet secretaries, which you should not have to do. If you have a message, how do you get it out? You can’t just have one talking head, even though it’s the lead talking head. I think they have really suffered on that front.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: I am from the Boston Harbor Alliance. You have not talked much about the economy — the major gorilla in the room — and the shakeup with [Housing and Economic Development Secretary] Dan O’Connell leaving. What do you read into that, and the state’s attempts to jumpstart things?
LEHIGH: In general, a governor’s power over the economy is very limited. With Dukakis in 1988 there was talk of hands-on management; well, all of New England was booming. It was the whole Eastern seaboard, and much of the country was doing very well. It’s very hard for a governor, in a pump-priming way, to affect an economy. You can do business climate stuff on the margins. But I have never bought the idea that a governor deserves a lot of credit or blame on the economy. They get it because voters perceive it that way.
SANDLER: I think it’s important to do well on the margins, simply because there are 50 [states]. When our pension fund is performing at 90 percent as opposed to 75 percent, that’s billions of dollars. And we want to do 4 percent better. I don’t know about O’Connell.
CHABOT: I think that was purely political. I don’t think it had anything to do with the state’s economy or anything to that effect. I think O’Connell, for whatever reason, hadn’t really been jibing with the governor’s top staffers. [New Housing and Economic Development Secretary Greg] Bialecki had, and they just sort of brought him in. In terms of fixing or helping the state’s economy, I don’t think that change had all that much to do with that.
BRAUDE: Craig touched on it. The most important thing is the leadership thing. There is little a governor can do substantively. Confidence is a huge part of the problem, lack of confidence. If you see and trust your leaders — confidence and strength, those type of things — if you believe you are in good hands, then you start feeling better, and then it starts percolating up.
LEHIGH: Micro-economically, there’s a good deal you can do to help individual firms. I think of things like the UI [unemployment insurance] rate.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: I work in the Office of Jobs and Community Services for the city of Boston and wonder if you folks have a sense of how ready the state is to deal with monies from the economic stimulus package. What it actually is is still in flux, but I sense a need to ramp up and disperse money quickly, or a lot of it will be rescinded.
SANDLER: I think they know what you know, and my sense is they are ready for it because there’s such a high level of awareness. Obviously, execution is very important. I am not aware of any problems in that regard.
CHABOT: It was about a month ago, but I got the sense from people in economic development that they were freaking out about how to apply this amount of money very quickly. It’s certainly not easy. I didn’t get the sense that it was smooth sailing.
SANDLER: I think that a month is a long time. My sense is that, in this environment, it would be pretty mind-blowing if they were not ready.
MOHL: Actually, I tend to think they are probably not ready. If they were ready, I think they would be getting that message out. I think they are still putting it together. I think in Washington they are figuring out: “What’s in this thing, what are we going to put out?” Initially, it was very capital-intensive, roads and bridges and that sort of thing. But a lot of this money is going into existing programs and existing sorts of funnels, which sort of makes you scratch your head.
LEHIGH: It shouldn’t make you scratch your head. In terms of putting money into the economy in a way that keeps people employed, if state government were to cut $2 billion from its spending, you would see a $2 billion diminution in economic activity. What state government does — that’s employing people, that’s projects, that’s spending, that’s social services. Stimulus needn’t just be bulldozers doing capital projects. People have that misconception of it, that it always needs to focus on infrastructure. That’s not true. A dollar spent on almost anything in the economy that puts someone to work, puts money in that person’s pocket that they will spend — it doesn’t matter if that person is an artist. The money they spend is just as relevant as the money a construction guy spends in terms of stimulus.
BRAUDE: Can I disagree that all jobs are the same? I am one who does believe there is a big-time appropriate role for government in the arts. It gets back to the confidence thing. Once this is passed and the money starts to be spent, the more visually impactful the spending is, the better people are going to feel about the whole thing. Everybody is bitching about all of those construction workers. Now when they see those construction workers, they will be pleased and they will say something is happening. There may not be a difference in a strict economic sense, but in terms of people’s psychological healing, there’s a huge difference.
SANDLER: We have not used the word “housing” yet in this whole discussion. It’s what caused this crisis and what can get us out of the crisis. It’s a lot of what the stimulus package is intended to address. I don’t have a whole lot of confidence that the state is ready to leverage the stimulus bill to do something about affordable housing. And it should be the prime focus.
LEHIGH: I disagree with that a little bit. The aggregators of demand — exports, housing, consumer spending — have all been crushed with the elimination of wealth, and that’s why government needs to move in. Because all the traditional avenues where you generate and get the money into the system are basically frozen or faltering. You have such an over-inventory of housing. Until we hit the bottom of housing slump and establish a baseline, that won’t start to rebuild. You’re going to see a continued fall-off in values. I don’t think the housing sector is where you have to look.
MOHL: I agree on “a dollar spent is a dollar spent.” [But] Obama and Patrick have talked about how we could use this [crisis] to refashion our economy a little.
LEHIGH: There is a lot of money for green jobs. You can certainly catalyze investment and activity. The government can try to help do things that the market will not do on its own. There is potential there. We talk time and time again about putting all medical records online and how much money that will save. Let’s actually take some money and try to do that. I don’t think that’s an illegitimate investment. It’s an experiment.
There isn’t really a blueprint. To some extent people are making it up as they go along. I don’t buy the notion that this is just a huge hodgepodge of things that are thrown together with no philosophy. You are talking investments in energy and infrastructure, and you’re talking social supports like food stamps and UI that will keep money flowing and people spending it. And you are talking tax cuts, which I think are the most problematic part of it. You are talking individual tax cuts to get people spending again. The business tax cuts — the loss carry-forward stuff — a lot of it is very problematic and they’ve done that to placate Republicans in the House and Senate. Most economists will tell you it’s not particularly effective. When you get a tax cut, you get 400 bucks, and you put 200 in your pocket and pay down some debt and maybe spend the other 200. If government spends the money directly, all of that 400 goes into the economy, and more of that money circulates.
BRAUDE: I am sorry to be a broken record. This is much more policy-oriented than the real world is. On the stimulus discussion, how people feel it’s working is in great part how it works. When everyone is focused on people not paying taxes and the fact that essentially $350 billion was stolen from the American people with no attempt to provide accountability by Democrats or Republicans… You have to break the mindset. If people don’t feel comfortable, they are going to save more and pay bills down more rather than driving to New Hampshire and stuffing a dishwasher in their trunk. There is a huge intangible element to this that neither Obama nor Patrick, nor legislative leaders, are dealing with. It’s that a huge part of recovery is how people feel about the recovery. I don’t think it’s just how brilliant the spending is.
SANDLER: Patrick did some of these themes of being ready in the State of the State [address]. The important thing is to project the leadership now: “Darn it, we’re going to get through this and when we do we will be stronger and better than ever.” If he could give the State of the State once a week, I think that would really help with perception. Remember, FDR didn’t restore faith in the American economy in four months.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: Any thoughts on dealing with the $3.5 billion [state] deficit?
SANDLER: Slot machines, of course.
CHABOT: There are so many ways to fill the hole. They are going to use a lot of [“rainy day”] reserves, and they are definitely going to have to consider some sort of tax. They are depending a lot on the federal stimulus as well.
BRAUDE: Can we spend two seconds on gambling? I have never been crazy about government being in the gambling business. The [idea] that when people are in their toughest and most frightened moments, the [solution] is to dangle something in front of the noses of scared, impoverished, middle-class people is staggering to me. People in government who believe in this are so desperate. The candor last night on my show with DeLeo saying he had two [race]tracks in his district and “I’ve got to save those jobs,” and that sort of thing. Tom Birmingham put out the definitive report on this. When you read that [lottery players] in Chelsea are paying for the schools in Dover, the notion that we are going to have to rely more on that because it doesn’t have the “T word” in front of it and we can pretend that it’s voluntary, is insane. I really hope that there’s not this rush to easy money, which is not so easy in light of what’s happening in Connecticut, and Rhode Island thinking about bailing out their damn casino. It is preying on people at their weakest moments. And I am not even convinced that it’s wonderful economic policy in tough economic times. Having said that, it’s the easiest choice and my guess is that there is this perfect, perfect thing working: DeLeo likes slots but not casinos, Patrick likes casinos and not slots, so they do some slots, maybe one destination casino, and they are going to think everything is fixed.
SANDLER: But it’s one of the guns that you have to fire, all of which you must now fire at once.
BRAUDE: Can anyone make the case that casinos have saved Connecticut? The slot revenues are down. It’s an industry at risk. And who are the people that play? Deval Patrick does make a fairly credible point: Destination casinos are not as much focused on low- and moderate-income people as slots and the Lottery are. I hope it gets a debate on its merits rather than this notion that we ought to throw everything against the wall because we are in tough times and we can’t just keep doing taxes, like Scot says.
LEHIGH: It’s philosophical. To what degree is government’s role to say to people, if you like to do this, you can or can’t? It was different when it was just Las Vegas or Atlantic City and there was a big barrier or impediment to gambling. You had to get on a plane or a bus and devote some days. Now if you want to gamble, you can easily drive to Connecticut in two hours. And if you sometimes find yourself at Foxwoods, as I occasionally have, and you go out to the parking lot and look you will that see 40 to 50 percent of people at Foxwoods are from Massachusetts.
BRAUDE: Forget the parking lot. Go inside, it looks like a Civil War hospital. I had never been there, Foxwoods or Mohegan Sun. So Margery Eagan and I from the Herald drove on a Sunday a year ago to see what we were talking about. It would be a new thing for talk radio. We intended to stay for four or five hours. We stayed for 15 minutes. We walked into the slot machine area — the smoke was so think you could barely see people’s heads, I’m not exaggerating — and there sere 75-year-old people on ventilators smoking with their pile of money. It is demented. It is totally demented. This notion of the role of government — the answer is get on a damn bus and go to Connecticut if that’s what you want to do. If Connecticut is so worried about Massachusetts, then let Deval Patrick sit down with [Gov.] Jodi Rell and let them negotiate a deal: We won’t build a casino if you pay us not to build a casino.
LEHIGH: Mitt tried to do that.
SANDLER: The real problem, though, and to your question, is that you can raise the gas tax and put taxes on services and put taxes on pets and do slots and maybe you’ve raised a billion dollars. Now you have $2.5 billion [in debt]. You drain the $850 million from the rainy day fund. Now you still have $1.8 billion, and it’s growing fast as people continue to lose their jobs. The remaining stratagem is deep, hurtful, painful, damaging, permanent cuts in programs and services almost everyone uses — which is going to happen, beginning now and for years to come. To the extent you can mitigate that just a little bit, now is when it has to be done, granting you everything you said, and that’s the steel of the reality.
CHABOT: People say there are tough times, but there is opportunity in tough times, and the idea is now is the time to tackle things that cost us a lot of money, the sacred cows, so now maybe there is some truth to that.
LEHIGH: I differentiate a bit between the actual revenue fall-off and what they call the maintenance budget deficit, the amount to maintain the current services going forward. It’s a squishier figure. If your revenues have gone down 1.8 billion, that is the concrete figure of less money you have to work with. On the maintenance budget thing, there are ways an agency can be creative and find new ways to deliver services unless it’s just a money flow-through. If you are doing parks and campgrounds and your budget is going down a certain amount, probably there is latitude to deliver the same basic level of services by changing things you do rather than saying we are just closing the parks.
MOHL: I am always struck by these gloom-and-doom figures and the “blood on the floor” comments from political leaders. You have to look at little things here and there. I am sure there will be very severe cuts that will hurt a lot of people. But I got a kick out of how the Legislature told the governor, “You are not going to be able to cut our budget, but we’ll do it voluntarily.” They ended up cutting about $10 million of their budget. I remember looking at their appropriation of $59 million and I was like, “Wow, you are going to see a lot of people leaving their jobs, and where will they cut this stuff?” It turns out that, sort off the books, they have an account called a prior authorization, so when they don’t spend it all in one year, they put it into this account. So they have $35 million in this account just sort of sitting around for projects they need to do. It’s pretty smart. It allows you to cut without really cutting anything. I don’t know if that’s sort of a very unusual circumstance.
BRAUDE: There has not been a discussion about the infamous film credit thing. When you interview elected leaders, it is so clear that what it’s about is, “Leonard DiCaprio called me on the phone.” I’m serious. One more small thing, on the quasi-independent agencies — the concept in the abstract of being free from political influence — I am sick of this crap that goes on in these agencies. Deval Patrick was in our studio the day the story broke on Parsons Brinckerhoff, about the $30 million fee for them to build the parking garage. [In an earlier interview,] I had said, “Shouldn’t they have been debarred?” [Patrick had said,] “Well, they don’t need to be debarred, people will remember.” [This time, he said,] “You didn’t want to be in the room with me when I spoke to the people at Massport about hiring this firm.”
You say to yourself, “This guy is the governor — this is not a criticism of Patrick, but of the system — and they hire someone for $30 million, and he’s out of the loop.” This is why people have no confidence. This vacation thing is an outrage at Massport, when they sell [vacation time] back and get money and build their pensions up. Does anyone know what [Massport executive director] Tom Kinton’s response was to that? “No comment.” When the Parsons Brinckerhoff thing came up? “No comment.” There’s this endless litany of abominations that the person the people democratically elected has no control over. One reform is, it’s time to end this quasi-independent authority thing. It was an experiment that worked for a while. It’s a disaster now. Let the governor, whoever he or she is, be in charge of these things.
LEHIGH: There should be something of cross-government practices. Hopefully, we’ll see that this year with pensions. When you see Bill Bulger banging out the way he did at UMass or [someone] retiring as a carman at the MBTA after 23 or 24 years, there are real problems in the pension system that are symbolic and make the average person mad. We need to do something about that. I am a little skeptical about getting rid of the authorities. Then you get completely ridiculous spoils. Every time a new administration comes in, they fire all the people.
BRAUDE: DeLeo said last night the one-day pension rule will be part of the pension reform package. You can’t pull a DiMasi, or a Cheryl Jacques. A ton of people have done it. He said he’d get rid of the Marzilli rule. It doesn’t apply to many people. The three-year rule is a huge problem. You make $45,000 for 30 years and then go to a big job because you’re politically connected for four years…..
LEHIGH: Maybe we should just have a commission on just governmental outrage and do the 15 things that make people angry.
BRAUDE: The unfortunate thing is that the average $22,000-a-year state pensioner gets completely tarnished by this. But the outliers in the system are grotesque. When you read about the abomination of
Bill Bulger’s pension… It’s the little symbols. The day I was hired by John Olver [then a state senator] to do tax reform stuff, he took me to the
Greenfield Recorder the first day, and the editor said, “People like you who believe in government talk about everything in billions, and these numbers that mean nothing to real people.” What people like [anti-tax activist] Barbara Anderson do is bring everything down to the barbershop level. The symbols are a huge part of how people determine how they feel about their government, even if it’s a short-ticket item. I guarantee you, if you have 10 people, they can’t tell you who did X, Y, or Z that matters, but they sure as hell can tell you what Bill Bulger’s pension is or about the two guys at the T who left in their 40s to get other jobs. That’s the stuff that stays with them and shapes their view about everything important, sadly, that government does.
SANDLER: If they are going to fix it, they’ve got to have a Legislature. The House is in on Wednesday to set its rules and hopefully we can get committee chairpeople and they can get to work.
