Today's Boston Herald has a follow-up to yesterday's story by Jay Fitzgerald that implied that the lion's share of federal stimulus funds were hijacked by the Patrick administration to pay for "hack" government jobs. Yesterday's front-page story, headlined "GOV'S STIM FLAM" on the front and "Stimulus saves hacks" on the inside, made it seem like the Patrick administration had chosen to steer stimulus funds toward public-sector jobs.
Today's story, buried deep in the paper and the website (and without any link to the previous story), gives more than a passing notice to the fact that much of the stimulus funding in question was specifically earmarked by the feds for hiring or retaining public-sector employees. (It's not quite a correction, more of a grudging acknowledgment that maybe Patrick isn't lying on this score.)
Putting aside the specifics of this particular story, my question for the Herald is, when did they start using "hack" to describe every single person in the public sector, no matter what their qualifications, salaries, duties, and competence in performing their jobs?
Here's the lead to yesterday's story: "Gov. Deval Patrick's economic-stimulus program is looking more like a Save-A-Hack telethon with a federal cash infusion going mostly to save jobs on the government payroll."
But the story only mentions “schoolteachers, police and firefighters” as examples of workers who benefit from the “Save-A-Hack” move. There’s nothing about Marian Walsh-type job offers, excessive pensions, or anything else to distinguish hackery from state workers just doing their jobs.
Admittedly, it’s easier to cover politics and government when all public-sector workers are characterized as hacks.* It means that’s a silly waste of time to try to make government more effective, to try to determine which programs actually work and which employees are productive. All that matters is that the public payroll, like the crime rate, must come down at any cost. (I’m eager to see how Charlie Baker, the leading Republican nominee for governor, deals with this proposition.)
I recall when “hack” referred to the minority of public-sector employees who were trying to scam the system, but maybe we can coin a new term to separate them from people who actually put in a full day’s work – something with as much panache as another Herald favorite, “perv.” But I may just be behind on my vocabulary. When I consult my American Heritage, the definition of “hack” doesn’t mention the public sector at all. It does, however, mention the far older and more universally accepted definition of a hack as someone who produces “routine or commercial writing.”
*I suspect that most Herald readers allow for some exceptions to the rule. For example, “The guy at my city’s first-time-homeowner program who helped get me a mortgage = nice, hard-working fellow. The woman in the office next door trying to help families find places to live after their apartment building burned down = hack!”
Everyone has opinions about Scott Brown's upset in yesterday's special US Senate election in Massachusetts. I expect it to be the No. 1 topic even on the sports talk shows today. I'll have more to say about the political geography as we get closer to another statewide election (yes, just 10 months away!), but the Electoral Map has already beaten me to the punch by putting yesterday's results into the context of the "10 Regions of Massachusetts Politics," noting that Brown appears to have won six of them. Biggest surprise may be that Martha Coakley seems to have won affluent, suburban Shopper's World (west of Boston), but it didn't come close to saving her, thanks to Brown's overwhelming strength in middle-class suburbs farther out from the state's urban core.
As for the policy implications, I've already likened the selection of Brown to voters using the "nuclear option," but that imagery may not be correct, given that Brown is essentially being sent to Washington to vote "no" on big, dramatic plans. The consensus is that voters are frustrated with the state of the economy, but Brown and the GOP are counseling us to sit tight and ride things out without another stimulus plan or any kind of sweeping regulatory reform. (There is talk of tax cuts, but that seems unrealistic, given that the Republicans have shown no appetite to significantly cut government spending.)
Another irony is that Massachusetts voters were surely rebelling against the Democratic Party's dominance in this state, and they surely have an aversion to partisan politics. (The fact that most voters here are registered independents, or "unenrolled," tells you that.) But independence and non-partisanship is somethng that current-day Washington has no room for. And if Maine's Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe is going along with the strategy of denying President Barack Obama legislative victories on anything, I have no doubt that Scott Brown will do the same.
Whatever individual voters' intentions, Massachusetts has decided, on behalf of the entire country, that Barack Obama needs to curb his ambitions. Maybe he can emulate the most successful Democratic president of the past generation and use his next State of the Union address to tout the benefits of school uniforms.
Has there ever been a more important special congressional election than the Senate race in Massachusetts on Tuesday? I honestly can't think of one.
Hub Blog has a great roundup of coverage, including a lot of agonized comments about how they want their votes to be interpreted by the political punditry. One reader: "Let me say emphatically that my vote for [Republican Scott] Brown isn't a vote against Obama." Good luck with that. The Globe's Jeff Jacoby has already written the national spin:
A year ago, Americans were enchanted with their new president. Today they are suffering from severe buyer’s remorse. Massachusetts may be the bluest state, but voters here are fed up too.
The Globe's Joan Vennochi dissents by saying that voters may punish Democratic nominee Martha Coakley because they're dissatisfied with local Democratic pols like Deval Patrick and Sal DiMasi. (Maybe so, but Jacoby's spin is what will play in Washington.)
If I had to predict, I'd say Coakley will pull out a win, but only because a Brown victory would be such a jolt -- like NASCAR eclipsing the Boston Red Sox in this state, or chitterlings becoming more popular than clam chowder.
Andrew Sullivan calls the surge for Brown the manifestation of a "nihilist, populist, primal scream." I think of it as another example of a "nuclear option" (a term first coined here) in its extreme political effects. What could they be?
1. The end of health care reform. Even if the current legislation passes (which is a huge "if"), a Brown victory would be a loud repudiation of the idea that the federal government has an interest in making sure that all citizens have basic health insurance, as well as the idea that the federal government is the only entity big enough to force down health care costs. Following a Brown victory, the US Congress would be terrified to touch health care in any significant way for at least eight years. Reforms would have to come at the state level (and Massachusetts is way ahead of any other state), and the private sector would have get a handle on cost control.
2. The crippling of the Obama presidency. Brown would be the 41st vote against Obama in a Senate where it takes 60 votes to pass anything of substance (not something that the Founding Fathers envisioned and something that's been true only in the past couple of years, thanks to the filibuster). The phrase "even in Massachusetts" will be repeated ad infinitum to show that Obama has no political clout.
3. Poor odds for any piece of big, complex legislation at the federal level. Health care reform lost popular support as it went through the legislative process, at least partly because each individual senator had enough clout to force changes (see Joe Lieberman nixing the lowering of the eligible age for Medicare) or win parochial concessions (see Ben Nelson and the "Cornhusker Kickback") But any sweeping legislation -- whether it's to address climate change or to regulate banks -- is going to go through the same messy process. Why bother if there's inevitably going to be a public backlash against any legislation that runs more than 1,000 pages?
4. Tax cuts as the consensus choice to address economic problems. Again, this is an "even in Massachusetts" effect. The Obama administration has argued that the best approach to the recession is to create and preserve jobs through government spending (i.e., a stimulus package), accompanied by small tax cuts for middle-income households. If Massachusetts voters reject that premise in favor of the idea that major tax cuts for all income levels -- and cuts in government programs -- is a better way to jumpstart the economy, it's hard to think of many states where Keynesian economics can prevail.
5. A re-assessment of the legacy of Sen. Edward Kennedy. The late senator will always be regarded by historians as a skilled strategist, thanks to his shepherding of such legislation as the Americans with Disabilities Act and the No Child Left Behind law. But his powers of rhetoric and persuasion with the voting public will take a big hit if the electorate in his own state replaces him with someone with an opposite philosophy in almost every area of public policy.
6. The red-blue divide in national politics may dissolve. Split-ticket voting has actually been declining in recent years, and states and congressional districts now almost always vote for the same party in presidential and in congressional elections. A Brown victory could mean one of two things. Either people are becoming more unpredictable in their voting patterns -- or the map is about to turn overwhelmingly red.
Contradicting a Boston Globe poll of a few days ago that showed Martha Coakley ahead by 15 points and a slim plurality in favor of the health care reform bill now in Congress, Suffolk University has just released a poll with Scott Brown ahead by 4 points and a clear majority against health care reform.
If true, I wonder if the real reason "liberal lion" Ted Kennedy got re-elected all those times was that he was good at steering defense contracts to Massachusetts.
Is the state really going to pull an Emily Litella and say "never mind" after giving Kennedy 47 years in the Senate? We'll find out on Tuesday.
Andrew Sullivan weighs in on our US Senate race and offers the following explanation for the new conventional wisdom that Republican Scott Brown has a shot at victory: "perhaps Martha Coakley is a machine hack who doesn't deserve elevation."
I'm not sure that Sullivan (no relation) is following Bay State politics that closely. The knock on Coakley doesn't seem to be that she's a machine pol (she's never even served in the Legislature!) but that she's bland and overcautious. That is, she's more Michael Dukakis than James Michael Curley.
UPDATE: Sullivan takes a look at Brown and is even more scathing: "He is, in other words, a parody of the brainless bush Republican, mixed with Romney-like cynicism."
This is fairly depressing to read in 2010. The Dallas Morning News has an analysis of an upcoming debate among the GOP candidates for governor in Texas, including incumbent Rick Perry and US Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison. Christy Hoppe drags out the old Mars vs. Venus trope and says that Perry "must stay steady and calm." As for Hutchison:
Kay Bailey Hutchison, in her fervor to score political points, must not come across as too "shrill" – a word reserved almost exclusively to describe women in debates.
She must avoid a high-pitched tone and anything that resembles scolding. What comes across as forceful for a man is sometimes seen as churlish in a woman.
Are journalists still getting paid to come up with reinforce the idea that confident women are "shrill"? Why not go all the way and say that women candidates must be careful not to come off as heretics?
The American Spectator's Jeffrey Lord compares Republican Senate candidate Scott Brown to Harris Wofford, the Democrat who won a special Senate race in Pennsylvania in 1991 by focusing on the need for health care reform -- and whose victory presaged a Democratic win in the 1992 presidential election. In this case, however, Brown is standing athwart the current health care reform bill yelling "Stop!"
From the Spectator:
What does the emergence of Scott Brown really mean?
It means that win-lose-or-draw, Scott Brown is already the Harris Wofford of 2010. Like Wofford he has played the role of the little-known, no-chance David going up against a political Goliath with health care as his sling-shot. But unlike Wofford, Brown's sling shot is the promise of effectively stopping government-controlled health care in its tracks, while tying it Wofford-like to corruption -- an argument made easy by the Ben Nelson "Cornhusker Kickback." [See explanation here.]
One slight problem with the analogy, however, is that Brown does support "government-controlled" health care in Massachusetts, at least in the form of our 2006 law mandating that every citizen obtain health insurance (and setting up a state agency to help people do so). From Brown's campaign website:
I believe that all Americans deserve health care coverage, but I am opposed to the health care legislation that is under consideration in Congress and will vote against it. It will raise taxes, increase government spending and lower the quality of care, especially for elders on Medicare. I support strengthening the existing private market system with policies that will drive down costs and make it easier for people to purchase affordable insurance. In Massachusetts, I support the 2006 healthcare law that was successful in expanding coverage, but I also recognize that the state must now turn its attention to controlling costs.
UPDATE: As Ezra Klein notes succinctly:
Coakley has to be running a pretty bad campaign if she's losing ground to a Republican who wants to kill Ted Kennedy's popular legacy bill.
The Globe's Adrian Walker thinks he knows exactly when things started to go downhill for Gov. Deval Patrick:
It isn’t hard to pinpoint the day Patrick lost control of his image. It was the infamous afternoon in 2008 that the Legislature voted down casino gambling and the governor was nowhere to be found to talk about it. He was in New York selling a book deal, and giving rise to the idea that he really isn’t that into this job.
It's an intriguing notion. Is Patrick's governing style (or lack thereof) a bigger liability than his policies? If so, he didn't help himself last month by admitting that he considered not seeking a second term because of the "wear and tear" he's gone through on Beacon Hill.
Ironically, he might never have become governor in the first place if his chief rival for the Democratic nomination in 2006, Tom Reilly, hadn't voiced a similar kind of squeamishness about what really makes things run on Beacon Hill, infamously saying, "Politics are not my strong suit."A state judge has ruled that Regis College can't skirt local zoning laws in building a 362-unit retirement village in Weston. The Catholic school had argued that the development was covered by a state law giving religious and nonprofit institutions the right to build. Jonathan Saltzman reported in Saturday's Boston Globe:
After more than four years of litigation and fierce town-gown tensions, Land Court Judge Alexander H. Sands III ruled that the development was primarily a housing program, not an educational one, even though elderly residents would take college courses. As such, he said, the 750,000-square-foot project was not entitled to bypass zoning regulations under the state law known as the Dover Amendment.
CommonWealth magazine's Ray Hainer reported on the dispute in 2007, when local officials anticipated the Land Court ruling:
“The general belief is that wrapping a commercial undertaking in the guise of an educational endeavor by claiming there will be classes offered to residents and a learning experience for some of the students is misrepresenting the actual undertaking,” says Selectman Harrity, a commercial real estate broker who teaches real estate and finance courses at Babson College in Wellesley. “It would be like Babson College saying, ‘We’re going to build a Wal-Mart outside because we have marketing and managing courses, and it’ll be an educational undertaking since we’ll offer management classes to the employees.’”