Snark-Infested Waters by Mike Bailey » Steve Pagliuca

The week in politics

Mike Bailey — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 17:00:47 +0000

I’ve gone into detail elsewhere in this section, but in case you’re the type who jumps right to this column so you can groove to my wit and wisdom, Attorney General Martha Coakley and State Senator Scott P. Brown (R – Wrentham) won Tuesday’s primary race and will now face off in the January 19 special election for the seat previous held by the late US Senator Edward W. Kennedy.

As a wise parrot once said, I could have a heart attack and die from not surprise over the results.

Now, to address pieces of business old and new. The old business: after last week’s issue I heard from a few people who wondered why Stephen G. Pagliuca and Alan A. Khazei got the full interview treatment while everyone else got mini-profiles.

It’s very simple: if they bothered to return my phone calls and made time for me, they got interviewed; if they blew me off, they didn’t.

The exception to this rule is Sen. Brown. By mutual agreement we’d planned to get together after the primary election since, at the time, he was the only Republican running — then Jack E. Robinson popped up at the 11th hour. After speaking with him about this, he said he was cool following our original game plan and we will be getting together soon.

Presumptuous, you say? In principle, yes, but it’s hard to hold it against him in light of his opponent; Robinson simply was not a viable candidate, especially when he appears in the race at the 11th hour and apparently goes out of his way not to make himself especially visible.

Or maybe Sen. Brown has a low-grade precognitive ability and predicted Robinson’s defeat, along with AG Coakley’s win; the day before the election, Sen. Brown issued a press release challenging the Democratic candidate to “tell the special interests to stay out of the Massachusetts special election.”

Sen. Brown was referring specifically to a $214,000 radio ad campaign funded by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in support of AG Coakley.

“It reinforces the perception that she is the candidate of the status quo who will protect big government spending programs at the expense of taxpayers,” Sen. Brown said in a press release. “Martha Coakley needs to tell the big government unions to stop trying to buy this election. This election can’t be bought and we should let the people decide without any outside interference. We should be looking out for the people’s interests and not the special interests.”

Uh, Sen. Brown? Question over here. The SEIU represents (as per their website): “nurses, LPNs, doctors, lab technicians, nursing home workers, home care workers…local and state government workers, public school employees, bus drivers, and child care providers…workers who protect and clean commercial and residential office buildings, and…private security officers and public safety personnel.”

Are you saying the SEIU is a big government union – slash – special interest and not looking out for “people’s interests”? They seem pretty people-interest-oriented to me. Just sayin’.

Follow-up question: will you be returning the $1,000 donation from the United Services Automobile Association Employee PAC, which represents employees of the USAA, which provides insurance and financial services to military personnel? Or the $4,500 from Mitt Romney’s “Free and Strong America PAC,” which supports candidates who conform to an arch-conservative platform? Or are those not big government unions and/or special interests?

And what about the PAC money you received in your 2008 state senatorial campaign? Will you be returning any donations from the PACs representing Bank of America, the Mass. Credit Union League, the FMR LLC (Fidelity), MA Correction Officers Federated Union, the MBTA Police Association, the Association of Builders and Contractors, the Fraternal Order of Police, Insurance Agents and Brokers of Massachusetts, the Mass. Association of Realtors, the Mass. Hospital Association…

Again: just sayin’.

(FYI: the above lists provided courtesy of, respectively, the Federal Election Commission and the Massachusetts Office of Campaign and Political Finance.)

Now, I’m not trying to insinuate that AG Coakey’s campaign is free of PAC influence because it sure ain’t – 27 PAC donations and counting! – but if Sen. Brown is going to play the “refuse special interests money” card, he should play by the same rules.

Political news and announcements may be sent to Michael Bailey, Region editor and senior political reporter, at bailey@capenews.net

The primary post-mortem

Mike Bailey — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 23:35:12 +0000

One election no one really cares about down, one to go.

Yeah, I know it’s a primary election held at a weird time of year, but c’mon, people. If you’re reading this and you didn’t vote, I am officially revoking your right to crab about anything the eventual winner of the election does once he or she gets to the US Senate.

And that’s the new question: who will voters send to the Senate next month? Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley or State Senator Scott Brown (R – Wrentham)?

Before I weigh in on that, let’s look at the primary race and how Coakley and Brown got their wins.

Well, with Brown it’s an easy answer: Jack E. Robinson sucks as a candidate. Sorry, Jack E., but it’s true; you popped up about a month before the election, then didn’t do a whole heck of a lot to promote yourself. You waste space on the ballot every time you half-heartedly run for something. Next time, get serious or get out of the way.

Coakley benefited from several factors, only some of which were within her control. Frankly, her ideas didn’t stand out in any huge way from Congressman Mike Capuano’s, Alan Khazei’s, or Steve Pagliuca’s, so I think it’s not unfair to say that she got by on superior name recognition born of a strong grass roots campaign, her mostly positive track record as AG, the fact that she wasn’t part of a federal government structure that has spent much of the year spinning its wheels and getting bogged down in pointless in-fighting (especially among the Dems), and her very disciplined presentation.

(That latter point, which was a plus in the primaries, may be a drawback from here on out, but I’ll get to that in a bit.)

That she was the sole female in the race? I think that heightened her visibility, but it’s tough to say whether it crossed the fine line into swaying voters…let’s just say it didn’t hurt her.

Capuano sank himself by playing the Ted Kennedy card as hard as he did. Perhaps he was trying to appeal to voters who liked Kennedy — and they are many — but instead he came across as a wannabe Kennedy carbon copy at a time when people are kind of tired of the same-old same-old.

Khazei’s story is lamentable. Of the four Dems I believe his desire to serve the public was the most sincere and selfless, but he showed his political inexperience by failing to get his message out early and often. He made a decent showing in the final weeks of the campaign — enough to barely surpass at the polls Steve Pagliuca, who came out of the gate at a respectable gallop — but it was too little too late. I for one would like to see Khazei regroup and take another shot, if not for this office in 2012 then for another major elected office.

Pagliuca, as mentioned above, started strong but couldn’t keep the momentum up, and time eventually proved his enemy. The more people got to know him, the more he came across as a businessman dabbling in politics rather than a serious candidate. And really, wheeling out a Celtics championship trophy during your later campaign stops just smacks of desperation.

So, now we come to January’s Big Game, and I think most would agree that Coakley has the edge in a state that, despite the fact more than half of its voters are unenrolled, is still very blue. She also has the advantage of greater exposure; Brown has been pounding the pavement a lot, but the limp GOP primary did him no favors as the Boston media’s spotlight has been solidly on the Democrats — therefore on Coakley — for months.

Brown is doing himself a disservice with some of the stuff he’s tossed out in his opening salvos against Coakley. On Monday he threw down what has become a standard gauntlet for whoever has less money to blow on a campaign: the challenge to refrain from accepting special interest money. Yeah, that old chestnut.

The Brown campaign issued the challenge earlier this week in response to an SEIU-sponsored radio ad series supporting Coakley. It read, it part:

“The news that SEIU is supporting Martha Coakley with a six-figure, last-minute expenditure is obscene. It reinforces the perception that she is the candidate of the status quo who will protect big government spending programs at the expense of taxpayers,” said Brown.

Brown said public employee unions like SEIU have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo at a time when people are looking for a new direction in Washington.

Brown added: “Martha Coakley needs to tell the big government unions to stop trying to buy this election. This election can’t be bought and we should let the people decide without any outside interference. We should be looking out for the people’s interests and not the special interests.”

“Accepting this money shows that Martha Coakley is already playing the role of the Washington insider. If she becomes the nominee we should expect more money from more special interest groups trying to influence this election.”

Now, for the record, Coakley is raking in some crazy union/PAC money (more than two dozen such donations according to the Federal Election Commission), but Brown himself has accepted a couple PAC donations during the campaign (and even more during his last state Senate run) — but more to the point: the tactic has to my knowledge never worked, either in terms of a candidate agreeing to turn down such hefty donations or in convincing the public Hey, I’m not some “Rich Uncle Pennybags Goes To Washington” type; I’m just an average guy who’s going to fight for you!

As I write this, Brown just fired off another favorite cliche, the I Won’t Raise Your Taxes And I Challenge My Opponent To Say The Same gambit. Again: has this ever worked? No one likes paying taxes and God knows people are digging it even less nowadays, but this is and always has been empty pandering.

Brown has also displayed a mildly combative attitude in the opening day of Phase Two. In his primary night acceptance speech, he called the Democratic primary a race for the title of “most liberal,” and said Coakley as US Senator would be a “partisan placeholder,” a “rubber stamp” for the Democratic supermajority, and (my favorite) “another robot who’s programmed to vote like the rest of our (Congressional) delegation.”

Now, if that fire can be reined in and strategically doled out in modest doses, it could add some much-needed zazz to a race that has thus far been a major league h0-hummer. It could even take Coakley off her carefully crafted and disciplined game and lead her to make a crucial misstatement; Coakley showed that she can handle a cool room with ease, but she hasn’t shown whether she can maintain that poise in the face of a more direct attack delivered with a side of hot sauce.

Yet, as we’ve seen too often, that fire can burn out of control too easily, and Massachusetts voters traditionally hate candidates who run aggressively negative. Recall if you will the 2004 effort to reinvigorate the GOP’s presence in the state Legislature, which flopped hard in part because the candidates ran negative, fast and furious and frequently (and I’ve heard the same accusation from local Republicans of a much more reasonable and level-headed nature).

An element of that negativity that has become increasingly common in Republican campaigns is an over-reliance on the GOP Big Book of Sound Bites, a collection of slogans, mottos, and high-concept sales pitches that, for starters, reveal an appalling lack of imagination on the candidate’s part.

Personally, I don’t want to hear Brown talk about how the country is going in the wrong direction, how anything with the tag “liberal” attached to it is bad bad bad, or how one-party rule is ruining things (it is, but it’s always disingenuous when coming from whichever party currently has the short end of the stick). I don’t want to hear Brown regurgitate the national platform chapter-and-verse in small easily digestible chunks that use lots of small words so I don’t get confused. I want to hear HIM; HIS ideas, explained to me at length and in detail, free of partisan contexts. Appeal to my intellect, please. Assume I have a guiding intelligence, a sense of reason and logic; don’t try to ply me with empty cliches that provoke a visceral response but tell me nothing.

An independent voice? Sure it is.

But I digress.

From a strategic standpoint, speaking in sound bites leaves one vulnerable. To wit: his crack about Coakley voting like a robot in lockstep with the Democrats? What, and he wouldn’t? Am I to believe Brown wouldn’t diligently vote exactly how the GOP wants him to, i.e., in direct opposition to anything coming from the Dems? He’s talked about limited government and honoring personal freedom, yet the standard GOP platform is pro-life and anti-same-sex marriage — in other words, things that limit an individual’s freedom to make very personal choices.

Ah, but what about Coakley, you ask? I’m not under any delusion that she’s a loyal Democrat and is going to vote as Democrats do, speak ill of the GOP as Democrats do, and yeah, probably support some new and creative ways to dig our national debt hole a little deeper and suck more money out of my pocket. Democrats have yet to prove to me they can shake off the “tax and spend” stereotype in any serious way, and in all honesty, I tend to like Republicans’ fiscal policies a lot more the Democratic policies (except for the whole “free market” thing…ask any retiree who saw his 401(k) vanish in a cloud of smoke if that system worked out well for him).

In her acceptance speech Coakley said she’d be a different kind of leader. Hm, let’s see: a Democrat running to replace a Democrat on an all-Democrat Congressional delegation that helps comprise a Congressional supermajority. Yeah…real different.

But Coakley I think has yet to truly reveal her big weaknesses, and again, I think that’s due to how carefully she’s crafted her message to minimize the chinks in her armor, but if Brown and the media do their respective jobs, Coakley will get a nice trial by fire and either reveal herself as a solid candidate or, as Brown put it, a Democratic placeholder in the US Senate.

If I could set the tone of this campaign, I would insist that each candidate tell me and my fellow voters why they’re not just clones cast in their respective party molds. I would insist that they stick to talking about ideas rather than political philosophies (or dogma, if you prefer). I would insist that they never play the blame game and try to build themselves up by tearing down their opponent and their opponent’s party. I would insist that they emphasize their own strengths rather than their opponent’s real or imagined weaknesses.

And I would insist that the voters, unlike in the primary, paid attention and got involved.

The week in politics

Mike Bailey — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:00:29 +0000

First of all: of you haven’t already picked up your copy of this week’s Enterprise, go do so now to read my interview with US Senate candidate Steve Pagliuca, who was kind enough to give me some time last week following his visit to WHOI.

***

YOU! You’re the campaign consultant!

Or, you can be – kinda-sorta – by going to the official website for US Senate candidate Alan A. Khazei and checking out three campaign videos and voting on which one gets pasted all over the Internet.

One is a straightforward (read: dull) endorsement by Max Kennedy, son of the late Robert F. Kennedy; the second attempts a kind of mild whimsy (and comes off as kind of dopey); and the third…oh, lordy, the third one just sucker-punched my brain. It knocks off the theme to “Cheers,” badly, and includes the lethal line, “But nobody knows his name.”

That’s really not the kind of thing you want to admit, dude.

I dare say whoever participates in this exercise might make a better campaign consultant than whoever came up with these videos.

***

State Representative Matthew C. Patrick (D – Falmouth) has released a letter of endorsement for his choice in the US Senate race, Congressman Michael E. Capuano (not Martha Coakley, as previously and erroneously reported).

“Mike is a real down to earth guy who is not too important to discuss issues with the average person,” Mr. Patrick wrote. He extolled Rep. Capuano’s work in promoting “progressive values” in Congress over the past decade, and urged voters to support him in the upcoming primary (December 8, by the way).

***

Our last US Senate race-related note of the week: Martha Coakley’s supporters are holding visibilities (a fancy name for “standing in the freezing cold to wave at cars”) in Bourne and Falmouth tomorrow. The Bourne visibility runs from 1 to 3 PM, the Falmouth visibility from 9:30 to 11:30 AM.

For more info on these or other campaign events, contact Mike Falcone at mfalcone@marthacoakley.com or 617-241-0200.

***

Republican Mary Z. Connaughton of Framingham is joining the growing field of candidates for – get this – state auditor. Who’d’ve thunk that this would be one of the races to draw early attention?

Ms. Connaughton ended last month her tenure on the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority’s board of directors, which she was appointed to in 2005. She previously ran, unsuccessfully, for state representative of the seventh Middlesex district.

In addition to Ms. Connaughton, the brewing race includes fellow Republican Earle Stroll and Democratic incumbent A. Joseph Denucci, who has served six terms in that seat.

***

Charles D. Baker Jr., Republican candidate for governor, has launched a revamped website with a new look and, at last, some decent content. Go scope it out.

Among the new bells and whistles: “Conversations With Charlie,” a feature that allows visitors to submit video or e-mail questions, to which Mr. Baker will respond via the magic of Internet streaming video.

***

Mr. Baker’s sole rival in the primaries (so far), Christy P. Mihos, seems to be having some campaign difficulties. The Boston Globe reported this week that his fundraising has been floundering, and was thus unable to launch his planned TV ad campaign in October.

The more disconcerting news to me was how his director of communications, Kevin Sowyrda, was fired: he learned he’d been terminated not from Mr. Mihos himself, but from someone else within the campaign. Mr. Sowydra was quoted as saying, “Apparently, [Mihos] has told people on the campaign that I resigned a month ago and have been working pro bono since then, which of course was news to me. However, we all love Christy dearly for this type of eccentricity, because that’s what makes him the very special person that he is.”

WHAAAAAAAAAAT?! You get canned indirectly, the man who should have done the dirty deed himself lied about it, then divested himself of all responsibility, and your attitude is, “Oh, that rascal!” ?

Is this really the sort of behavior we want in our Corner Office guy? I personally am not crazy about the idea of a “very special eccentric” running the state…

***

A reminder: Ray Kasperowicz, Republican candidate for the US House of Representatives – 10th Congressional District, will meet with the Sandwich Republican Town Committee on Tuesday, November 10. The meeting will begin at 7 PM and will be held at the Riverview School on Route 6A in East Sandwich.

The press release I received added that one attendee will receive a door prize. My bet is it will be a stuffed toy Honky the Republican Elephant, official mascot of the GOP.

Hey, it’s better than the Tickle Me Rush Limbaughs they were giving out during the last election…

Political news and announcements may be sent to Michael Bailey, Region editor and senior political reporter, at bailey@capenews.net

How to lose a debate without ever actually debating

Mike Bailey — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:09:29 +0000

If you missed Monday night’s debate among the four Democratic candidates for US Senate, go here to check it out, then come on back.

I know they called it a debate, but the candidates, you may have noticed, never really engaged one another, except to toss the occasional mild jab — which brings me to my major observation: no one went after Martha Coakley.

Every poll I’ve seen to date has Coakley well in the lead among the four Dems, and many pundits expected the three guys to gang up on the theoretical front-runner to A) take her down a peg or two and B) build some much-needed cred for themselves, yet she escaped unscathed. I wonder if the men were hesitant to attack en masse the sole female on the roster and look like bullies — a very real concern, sadly; gender-based double standards make politics an even trickier minefield than it already is. For the guys in this situation, it was something of a lose-lose scenario: attack Coakley and risk looking like jerks, or avoid her and hope she hangs herself with her own rope.

…which she didn’t; Coakley presented herself very well in general. She was businesslike, perhaps to a fault (she was a titch wooden), mostly stayed on-topic and answered the questions as they were asked, if not necessarily directly (a fault shared by all), and parlayed her work as AG into a viable foundation for a Senate stint.

Alan Khazei often looked and sounded like he was reading off a teleprompter, or reciting carefully memorized campaign position papers. And he did not do well on his feet, as evidenced by his response to the question about how he’d respond to the possibility of military base closures (something the late Ted Kennedy successfully fought off, as evidenced by the MMR’s continued operations here on the Cape). Khazei partially answered the question, then went off on a lengthy tangent about economic and job policy.

Khazei also had a problem with speaking efficiently. He tended to over-talk his points, a sign that he had little to say, so he filled the space by repeating, with increasing emphasis, what little he did have. And we all know how well that worked out for Sarah Palin…

His most telling moment was at the end of the debate, when he challenged his opponents to weekly televised gab sessions. This is a secret code, you know. Translated, it means: “You guys are kicking my can all over the place because you’re all getting more exposure. Since I don’t have the deep pockets you guys have, let me veil my attempt to increase my face time on TV behind a seemingly noble intent to educate the voters.”

Good hustle, Alan, but I have yet to see anyone bite at that one.

Congressman Mike Capuano pushed his Congressional experience hard, which was wise because that is his greatest strength; he knows the system far better than his rivals, he has the connections that are crucial if you want to get stuff done, and he could hit the ground running. Yet that is also perhaps his greatest weakness: he’s part of a system that has been in low gear for many, many months…why should anyone believe he can affect more positive results as a Senator than as a Congressman?

On an aside: Capuano should stop throwing out that “working class joe” angle. For any established politician, especially at the federal level, to claim he’s just like one of us is disingenuous at best, insulting at worst. Read about his financial status here and tell me if he’s really “like us.” Just because you live in Somerville (official city motto: “Wickid Pissah!”), it doesn’t automatically make you Joe Six-Pack, bubbi.

Steve Pagliuca played the outsider card to mixed effect. Considering how lackluster Congress has been as of late, some fresh blood is definitely desirable and attractive to an increasingly frustrated voting public. However, Pagliuca showed his naivete (not optimism: naivete) by expecting he would somehow be able to enter the US Senate and magically turn things around. I would love to see a Mr. Smith Goes To Washington thing, but reality can be a cruel, cold splash of unwelcome reality, can’t it?

Both Khazei and Pagliuca also fell back on one of the hoary old cliches of fresh-faced “outsider” candidates: the ardent refusal to accept special interest money. Right, like anyone will admit to that? Guys, EVERYONE accepts some form of special interest money sooner or later. You would too. Don’t fool yourselves and don’t try fooling us.

I was gratified to see none of the four went bonkers painting themselves as the Second Coming of Ted. Capuano was by default the worst offender here, invoking the Kennedy name several times over the night, but never to what I would call excessively. So: no egregious grave-robbing here (although all four readily admitted that they didn’t wait for Kennedy’s seat to get cold before deciding to run).

I’m not about to opine about the candidates’ respective stances on the various issues because, to be honest, I’m still learning their positions myself, but I have to say that only once during the night did I go, “Aha! Candidate Johnson is right!” and that’s when Capuano remarked, on the topic of whether it’s better to save certain jobs (police, fire, teachers) or create new ones, that a saved job is just as vital to overall economic health as a new job.

There was little difference in their opinions on how to tackle issues such as economic stimulus, foreign affairs, and immigration reform, and in typical politician fashion they all showed a knack for delivering non-answers that sounded like answers to the untrained ear (in such cases, it’s what they’re not saying that tells the tale more than what they are saying).

Khazei distinguished himself a little by being the only one to address (and oppose) the prospect of expanded casino gaming in Massachusetts — was this really a pressing issue in the Senate race? — and Capuano broke out of the pack on the health care reform/public option issue. He carried the Kennedy torch on that one and, somewhat contemptuously, said Republican support was unnecessary to carry a health care reform bill (way to reach across the aisle Kennedy-style, dude). He disagreed with US Senator Harry Reid’s idea of giving states the choice to opt out of a government-run public option, Reid’s concession (one among many) to leverage greater support in Congress for health care reform.

So, who “won” this non-debate? According to the Coakley, Capuano, and Pagliuca camps, their respective candidates did. Each of them sent me e-mails touting their alleged wins: Capuano’s people said he proved that he was “by far the most qualified and best prepared” of the candidates; Coakley’s team said she was “the clear winner”; and Pagliuca’s mouthpieces, writing as Pags (I’m pretty sure he didn’t actually write it himself), said he was the only one who had a definite game plan for turning the economy around.

Me? I think Coakley and Capuano were the de facto winners, but more by dint of the fact the other guys were rather weak than because of their own dazzling oratories and muscular stances on the hot issues. The true test of all four candidates would have been a true debate, a head-to-head-to-head-to-head discussion amongst themselves instead of them standing at lecterns and reciting their carefully prepared rhetoric to the cameras.

We still have more than a month with the Fab Four before the December primary, so here’s to hoping that their next get-together will be more than, as WHDH-TV’s Andy Hiller so astutely put it, four simultaneous hour-long press conferences.