A Fair Characterization

I'm not quite sure why this is news, or "new" at any rate, but the AP had a story where Governor Mitt Romney went on the record as saying he was looking into running for President. Only, he didn't really come right out and say it, he did the typical Romney thing and tried to leave some weasel room -- in case he finds himself "in a different place" later on, I'm sure. Here's the quote from the AP:

"If someone said, well, you know, the governor's testing the national waters, that's a fair characterization," Romney said. "But I'm planning on running for governor. Time will tell, I'll make a final decision and an announcement in the fall, and we'll go from there."

In other words, it would be fair for someone else to say that he's running, but it's too much for him to admit that he's interested himself.

In the meantime, Mitt is on the verge of hanging the state GOP out to dry. I noted back in February that some state Republicans were getting antsy for the governor to make up his mind. The longer he waits, the harder it's going to be for potential gubernatorial candidates to raise money for a run of their own. Well, candidates other than Kerry Healey, of course, who Romney has already endorsed should he decline to run again. Maybe that's his plan -- wait as long as possible to make sure that Healey (who would already be the frontrunner) is a shoe-in for the Republican primary. That's fine with me, because I am not convinced that Healey will be a particularly good candidate, but wonder if the Republican rank-and-file are going to like having no say in who their nominee is going to be.

Preserving the Community: Half-Price

I learned last week that there is a group of people here in Watertown trying to gauge support for the Community Preservation Act. The Watertown Tab describes the CPA thusly:

The Community Preservation Act places a 1 to 3 percent surcharge on property taxes. The money is matched by the state and must be used for programs that either preserve a town's historical and natural assets or create affordable housing.

One hundred Bay State communities have passed the CPA, including Newton, which added a 1 percent surcharge. A 2 percent surcharge in Watertown on the average property tax bill of about $4,000 would cost homeowners another $80 per year, but Town Councilor Susan Falkoff said exceptions could be made for low-income and elderly homeowners.

On a whim, my wife and I went to Councilor Falkoff's reelection campaign kickoff on Friday. Former state Senator Warren Tolman was there, and he spoke briefly about the CPA. The most salient point he brought up, in my opinion, was that since the state matches the funds, towns that don't enact the CPA end up subsidizing the towns that do. That pretty much sold it for me. I don't want to pay for a hiking trail in Agawam -- I want my state taxes to go to connecting East Watertown to the Minuteman Bike path. Watertown is in pretty good financial shape compared to other cities and towns, but that doesn't mean we should turn down free money from Beacon Hill, even if it means raising property taxes. Eventually, we're going to have to maintain our historical spots and open spaces, and under the CPA, we can do it at half price.

Mitt Back on the Marriage Ban Wagon

About a month ago, I noted that Mitt Romney probably didn't want to have anything to do with the gay marriage compromise amendment that created civil unions and could potentially be on the ballot in 2006, the same year he'd be up for reelection.

Well, according to the AP (via the Globe), Romney has now thrown his support to a citizen's initiative that would propose a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, and could potentially be on the ballot in 2008 -- by which time Romney could potentially be long gone from Massachusetts politics. Unlike the amendment that will be voted on at this fall's constitutional convention, this one would not create civil unions. Here's what Romney has to say about it:

"I believe it's superior to the amendment which is currently pending before the state Legislature, and hope that this amendment will ultimately be the one which the citizens have the opportunity to vote upon," he said.

Notice that he is implying here that he hopes the compromise amendment does not reach the voters. My feeling is that without Romney's support, the civil unions amendment is dead. The legislators who voted against it in 2004 because they were against civil unions have no incentive to switch and the cadre of Republicans and conservative Dems who were convinced by Romney to vote for it last time won't have any reason to vote for it.

In addition, this citizen's initiative will not hit the statewide ballot (if it makes it that far) until 2008. By then, hundreds more same-sex couples will be legally married and I can't imagine that Bay Staters will be particularly keen to force them to divorce. In addition, after four years of no apocalypse with marriage equality, the chances that the anti-marriage amendment will pass are much worse than they would be in 2006.

Thanks to Kristen at The Fray for pointing this out. Marry in Massachusetts has his own take on the events.

Polling the Cape and Islands

In May, the Cape Cod Times and WCAI commissioned a telephone poll of residents in Barnstable, Dukes, and Nantucket Counties. You can find detailed results here. The Cape Cod Times has the story:

In the Times/WCAI survey, 43.2 percent of respondents say they approve of Romney's performance - moderate support in a region that tends to vote Democratic - but only 20.5 percent said they would give him their vote for the White House. Half of the respondents said they would not support a presidential bid by Romney.

Of course, the statement that the Cape and Islands tends to vote Democratic is a little misleading. When you combine the 2002 results from Barnstable, Dukes and Nantucket Counties, you find that Mitt Romney won the Cape and Islands by fifteen points (55.5% to Shannon O'Brien's 40.2%). While O'Brien did win Dukes County by a comfortable margin, Romney slaughtered her on the Cape -- with Provincetown the notable exception. There just aren't enough people who live on Martha's Vineyard or Nantucket (which Romney won anyhow) to make up for it.

Even those much talked about Independents are lukewarm on the governor. When self-reported unenrolled and Independence Party voters are combined, about 45% of them approve of the job Romney is doing, with 26% disapproving and 28% having no opinion. Those are pretty poor numbers for an incumbent who won those people two and a half years ago.

The poll also asked about opinions on Marriage Equality. As I'm sure will surprise no one, support for equal marriage rights was high on the islands and the Lower Cape but residents of the Mid and Upper Cape were roughly split on the issue.

[Update]: Cape Cod Works shares his thoughts on the poll.

Senatorial Approval Ratings

Following up to their gubernatorial approval ratings last month, SUSA has compiled polls on all 100 Senators. You can find the full results for our Massachusetts senators here. After yesterday's discussion about how Massachusetts politicians can appeal to Independents, I thought it would be interesting to see how self-described Moderates and Independents viewed our two Senators.

	Moderates		Independents
	Approve	Disapprove	Approve	Disapprove
Ted Kennedy	64%	30%	56%	39%
John Kerry	56%	40%	50%	44%

It's interesting to note that both Moderates and Independents not only prefer Kennedy to Kerry, but also disapprove of him less. It might just be because he's a Kennedy, and Kerry is coming of a losing presidential race, but it might be because you at least always know where Kennedy stands. I'll let you draw your own conclusions.

Speaking of Senator Kennedy, it looks like the state GOP still can't find anyone to run against him. GOP consultant Charley Manning was practically begging ambitious Republicans to challenge the Senator to build on a future run. Still, that hasn't stopped Kennedy's team from jumping all over the Wall Street Journal Op/Ed which advised Governor Mitt Romney himself to take on Kennedy. From a Kennedy fundraising e-mail:

[Romney] wants to run for President in 2008. But along the way, he has a decision in 2006 -- whether to run for governor again, or take on Senator Kennedy.

As Romney plots his rise, conservative commentators say that if he can "defeat the brother of JFK," he will have done more to "add momentum to a run for the presidency than anything he could accomplish as governor." That's the empty ambition of Republicans like Romney. A race against Kennedy would be, in the words of the Wall Street Journal, to "gain political capital" for a White House run.

It's only fair -- after all Romney has been using Kennedy's name in fundraising letters for months (probably years) now and Romney's popularity among Massachusetts Democrats is not getting any higher with the Governor's recent rhetoric.

The Article 8 Road Show

Brian Camenker of the Article 8 Alliance, a group with the stated goal not only fighting marriage equality in Massachusetts but also of removing the judges who decided in favor of it, has taken his show on the road.

[David] Parker and Camenker spoke at the invitation of the Christian Civic League of Maine, which recently launched a "Wake Up, Maine" tour to generate enthusiasm for its people's-veto signature drive and to alert Mainers to what's happened in other states with progressive gay-rights laws.

David Parker, you'll recall, was the Lexington parent who was arrested at his son's school in protest of a book (which depicted a family with two mothers, among many others) that his son brought home one day. Marry in Massachusetts had the best rundown on his saga, back when it first happened in April. The gist of Parker's argument seems to be this: "My child brought home a book that had gay people in it, therefore you should deny any and all partnership rights for homosexual couples in Maine."

It's one thing to be against marriage equality because you honestly believe that marriage is a special institution that should only be between a man and a woman and if same-sex couples want similar rights they should call it something else. That's a position I can respect, if not understand. It's a completely other thing to say that it should be okay to discriminate against homosexuals because your child may one day encounter a homosexual person in real life or in the media.

Light Reading

Here are a couple of articles and blog posts that I found interested and wanted to point out. Enjoy!

Yesterday's Globe had a profile of Michael Murphy, the political consultant who claimed that Governor Romney is 'faking' his position on abortion. Of course Murphy says that all this talk of Romney for President isn't going to hamper Mitt's potential re-election plans, but then again Murphy is paid to make his client look good.

Willard's Waffle File: The Mass Democrats have compiled a sampling of Governor Romney's now infamous turnarounds. None of these wavering positions should be a surprise to either longtime reader of this blog, but it's good to see them all in the same place.

Herald Columnist and talk radio blowhard Howie Carr is becoming obsessed with the fact that Attorney General Tom Reilly and family rents their apartment. Way to stick to the real issues of the campaign, Howie. Don't you have a Bulger to hassle or something?

David Eisenthal has a great post responding to Jeff Jacoby's timely column about slavery reparations. In addition, he's engaging David Young, regarding Young's nearsighted op/ed on Prop 2 1/2 overrides. Read David's piece here, and Young's response here.

Appealing to Independents

While I was wading through some things that piled up while I was away last week, I came across this post by Digby, which alerted me to Rick Perlstein's week old guest post on Political Animal. Here's what I saw as the most interesting part of Perlstein's essay.

Here's a riddle: what is a swing voter? More and more, it is an American who thinks like a Democrat but refuses to identify as one.

...If it is true that party identification -- which, as Stan Greenberg argues, is a form of social identity that endures over the long term -- is the best predictor of voter behavior, isn't getting this selfsame public to identify with the Democratic Party much, much more than half the solution?

So how to do it? Democrats must stop looking leaderless, fumbling, unfocused, disorganized, and confused. They must give voters something to identify with. They must no longer judge themselves sophisticated when they cancel all the old long-term dreams. They need new long-term dreams.

If the idea that swing voters or independents are Democratic sympathizers is true anywhere, it's true here in Massachusetts; after all, roughly 85% of the population is represented by Democrats on the state level and 100% on the federal level, and Democrats generally dominate state-wide offices, excepting of course the Governor's. I touched on this theme earlier, when I noted that independent voters are not necessarily in the political center. From voting patterns, it would seem that independents in Massachusetts are generally friendly to Democratic causes, however the conventional wisdom is that they do not want to hand over control of the entire state government to what they see as an unaccountable, entrenched, Democratic machine.

This brings me to Joan Vennochi's editorial last week. In her discussion of Deval Patrick's candidacy, she opines that "on paper, [Harvard Pilgrim CEO Charlie] Baker and [Attorney General Tom] Reilly both appeal to independents." Presumably, this is because of their so-called centrist positions on various issues. Now, Baker's positions are unknown to the majority of Massachusetts voters at this point, but on some level his positions hardly matter. A Republican governor -- even a popular one -- can only do so much 'damage' to the Commonwealth before the legislature stops them. I think voters are aware of this, so while they may prefer Democratic policies, they also don't want their taxes raised. so they are content to have Republicans in the corner office.

On the Democratic side, of course, the dynamic is completely different. I think that where a candidate stands on various issues is much less important than whether or not the candidate is perceived as part of the existing political apparatus. That is, where a candidate falls on a left-to-right axis is not nearly as important as where they fall on an inside-to-outside axis. My unscientific guess is that if you asked a dozen people off the street whether Shannon O'Brien was a liberal, moderate or conservative, you'd get more "I don't remember" than anything else. On the other hand, if you asked whether she was a Beacon Hill insider or outsider, most people would remember her as the former.

It's this inside-outside dynamic that makes it hard to say who, of Reilly or Patrick, will appeal to independents. Reilly has taken some middle-of-the-road positions, but he seems almost embarrassed by them sometimes. He also can somewhat credibly take the mantle of a Harshbarger-style outsider, who is willing to take on entrenched Beacon Hill interests. The bigger question is whether he has the political skill to do so. As for Patrick, most of his appeal to Massachusetts progressives is not so much that he's more liberal than Reilly, but that he is a charismatic outsider who happens to be a liberal. It's for that reason that I think Patrick, could appeal to independents as much as, if not more than, Reilly. That said, I'm not yet ready to bet the farm on Patrick -- his candidacy has not really been battle tested yet. Aside from defending himself against a couple of snipes from the Herald, all Patrick has been doing is travelling around the state, talking and listening to people. I think that's great, but at some point all that talk is going to have to turn to action -- even if it's just taking leadership on one or two issues -- and that will be when we'll see the make-or-break moment in his campaign.

That and $1.25 Will Get You a T Token

So says the Boston Globe:

Governor Mitt Romney has promised to endorse Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey in the 2006 gubernatorial race if he decides to run for president, a top Republican Party official and a Healey adviser said.

Ask James Rappaport how much a promise from Romney means. He could have had Healey's job if Romney had kept his pledge to remain neutral in 2002's GOP Lieutenant Governor primary. Instead, Romney got all in a snit when Rappaport mentioned his name in a TV ad, and immediately endorsed Healey, breaking his promise. Keep in mind, that this happened even before he was elected governor. Since then, he's broken his promise to support stem cell research, failed to deliver on his promise to attract business to Massachusetts, hidden tax increases by calling them 'fees', 'faked' his position on reproductive rights, and broken countless campaign pledges.

For the sake of argument, let's say that Romney doesn't turnaround on his promise to Healey. This is good news for state Democrats, for many reasons. For one, Healey is a much weaker candidate than Charlie Baker. Though Baker has no electoral experience, he at least has some executive experience, and Healey has been a complete non-entity these past few years. Sure, if Romney bails (which is looking more and more likely) he could give her a bit more to do, but remember that she'll be campaigning at the same time. The other thing is that Romney's support for Healey pratically guarantees a Republican primary for governor. If Romney had tapped Baker instead, I think that would have been too big of a blow for Healey to recover from, and she might have just tried to keep her job as gubernatorial sidekick. Though both Healey and Baker have gobs of money to spend, it's better for Democrats to have them focused on each other while we're sorting things out in our own primary.

[Update] Chimes at Midnight reminds me that Romney also pledged not to run against 'a sitting governor,' all the while elbowing Jane Swift out of the GOP nomination. The same could be said about Patrick Guerriero, Swift's choice for Lt. Governor. The moral of ths story: Mitt's only reliable promise is that he will do what's best for Mitt. If it becomes politically expedient for him to drop Healey, he'll do it in a heartbeat.

Globe On the Housing Crisis

More evidence from Sunday's Globe that you can't solve the state's job crisis without addressing the housing crisis.

[T]he biggest problem in Boston is not pay but housing. In other words, companies can't pay employees enough to compensate for the area's ultra-high housing prices. The Massachusetts Medical Society's most recent economic survey identified housing costs as a major deterrent to bringing new doctors to Boston and keeping old ones from leaving. Doctors here actually earn less than they do in other parts of the country, but have to pay far more for housing, the survey found.
[...]
Housing prices are a double negative. They create affordability issues on their own and they push up salaries as employers try to compensate workers for the region's high cost of living.

Faking It

It looks like "Ben" was right all along, Romney is a fraud. Count me among the unsurprised.

One of Romney's aids uncorked this gem during an interview with the National Review (as reported by the Boston Globe)

"He's been a pro-life Mormon faking it as a pro-choice friendly," Romney adviser Michael Murphy told the National Review in a cover story hitting newstands today titled "Matinee Mitt."

That, ladies and gentlemen, is a perfect example of Howard Dean's definition of a gaffe: when somebody tells the truth when they really shouldn't have.

I've twice commented now on Mitt's rhetoric on reproductive rights, and it just seems to get murkier and murkier for the governor. Now that it seems that Romney was being dishonest with the people of the Commonwealth when he claimed to be pro-choice, one has to wonder just what else has he been dishonest about? We know, of course, that he was for stem-cell research before he was against it. Could it be that he's faking his enthusiasm for the death penalty? Tax cutting? Insurance reform? How can we trust him?

In his defense, Romney says the following:

I am opposed to abortion, but I indicated that I would maintain the laws as they exist in Massachusetts, and I've done exactly that.

That's all well and good, but I've got news for the governor: if you don't want to change the laws you are pro-choice. One's personal feelings about abortion do not enter into the equation -- if you think abortion should be legal even if you don't think anyone should ever have them, you are still pro-choice. If you are, let's say, elected governor and you believe that abortion should be outlawed, but you tell everyone you won't fight to change or even restrict access, you are either a liar, a coward, or pro-choice. I'll let Mitt take his pick.

Blue Mass Group and Chimes at Midnight have their reactions, and the Mass Dems are having a field day.

A Clue From the Weekly Standard?

Thanks to Dan Kennedy for pointing out the Weekly Standard Cover Story on Mitt Romney. The bulk of the article focuses on Romney's religion and whether it would be a liability in his presidential campaign (although they also manage to fit in the requisite dig at Ted Kennedy). I think they underestimate the problems that Romney will have because of his being a Mormon in some of the Southern primaries, particularly against a Frist or a Santorum, but most interesting to me was the brief discussion of 2006 which preceded the religion talk.

Romney says he's been told "the demands of running for national office today are such that the two years prior to the general election you are basically running full time. There are probably some states where the people would say, 'Hey, we are going to elect you as governor and we don't care if you do something else full-time for two years.' But Massachusetts isn't one of those states, New York isn't, Michigan isn't, Ohio isn't." (Texas is one, where George W. Bush ran for reelection in 1998 having told voters he might run for president in 2000.) Romney also has noticed that some rumored 2008 candidates wouldn't be constrained by obligations of office--Bill Frist, who's giving up his Senate seat in 2006, and Rudy Giuliani, who has been the former mayor of New York City for over three years now. "If we look back in history," says Romney, "Ronald Reagan wasn't a sitting governor" when he ran for president, "Howard Dean wasn't a sitting governor. They had finished their responsibilities and were able to focus on the race." Romney also happened to criticize John Kerry for not resigning as senator while he ran for president. "My guess," says Romney, "is that if I were to try that, someone would notice what I'd said before."

It would appear, then, that Romney is at least aware of the problems he'd have running for Governor of Massachusetts and President at the same time. Not only that, but his competition will be free at that point to campaign full time, while he will be stuck in Massachusetts (as much as he ever is), should he be re-elected. It seems that starting his run for president might cost him the governorship, but winning re-election puts him at a disadvantage when seeking the presidency. Given that, it seems unlikely to me that the ambitious Romney would seek a second term. There's just too much at stake, and the payoff -- an extra half-term as governor of a state where the legislature will try to trip him up at every turn -- isn't worth it. If I were a Republican now, I'd start raising my public profile because as the Romney for President buzz increases, so too does the likelihood that he will abandon his post.

Jacoby and the So-Called Liberal Media

The ever crapulent Jeff Jacoby defrosts the old 'liberal media bias' canard in today's column. He spends the entire column describing how liberals like Kerry, Gore, Hillary Clinton and Eric Alterman are just whiners because they think the media tilts conservative. Everyone knows, Jacoby claims, that reporters are liberal, therefore the media is liberal and anyone who says otherwise just can't stand a diversity of views. Of course, Jacoby does not bother to explain why, if liberals can't stand conservative viewpoints, he himself is allowed to spew forth right-wing talking points in a supposedly liberal newspaper, but I imagine irony was never taught at the Leadership Institute. From the column:

Kerry, Gore, and Clinton, by contrast, benefit from a news media that is overwhelmingly liberal, as countless surveys have shown. To cite just one: When a New York Times reporter polled journalists covering the 2004 Democratic National Convention, those from around the country favored Kerry over Bush by a ratio of 3 to 1. Among the Washington press corps, the results were even more lopsided -- 12 to 1 pro-Kerry.

Okay, so what if reporters voted for Kerry? No study has ever definitively proven that they gave any personal bias to their news stories or news coverage in general. In addition, it is the editors who make decisions about which stories get covered, and they are more likely to be concerned with how advertisers are going to be affected by content. Of course, to say that Clinton benefited from a liberal news media is to ignore that his administration was hounded by that same so-called liberal media from day one. Clinton's entire presidency was plagued by fake scandals trumped up by so-called mainstream journalists and opinion writers. I mean, Travelgate? Even the whole Monica Lewinski scandal was uncovered because Ken Starr couldn't dig up anything on Whitewater. Meanwhile, President Bush has faked (or at least misrepresented) intelligence that lead us to war, Dick Cheney conducts energy policy meetings in secret, someone in the White House leaks the name of an undercover CIA agent, and countless other scandals but none of which have lead to any serious investigation by the press. Sure, there are articles here and there, but nothing like the frenzy when conservative commentators found out that Clinton let donors sleep in the Lincoln bedroom (something Bush also does -- just ask Mitt, he's stayed overnight at the White House).

In any event, when you leave the world of reporters and enter the world of commentary, you find that conservatives vastly outnumber liberals. Conservative syndicated columnists (of which Jaoby is one) outnumber left-leaning columnists. What about talk radio? I can count the number of nationally syndicated left-leaning talk-show hosts without taking my shoes off. On the cable TV talk shows, conservatives again dominate. There is no question, to my mind, that news commentary tilts conservative in both the opinions of hosts and the guests they have on.

The bigger danger is that people like Jacoby are trying to destroy the concept of objectivity. Their ultimate goal is to undermine not only the news media, but anyone who releases information they don't like. Just look at what's going on with the Deep Throat revalation -- Novak today says that Felt's motivation for leaking to the Post was that he was passed over for promotion, implying that he couldn't be trusted. This is just the most recent example of the "attack the messenger" tactics that have been used by the right against anyone who speaks out -- Paul O'Neil, Joe Wilson, Richard Clarke, General Eric Shinseki just to name a few high-profile examples. Attacking the messenger shifts the conversation from whether or not allegations are true to whether or not the source is trustworthy. What happens when no sources are trustworthy? Well, then people will be left to assume that the truth is somewhere in the middle.

Romney Officially Irrelevant

In one of the week's least surprising moves, the state Legislature has overridden Governor Romney's veto of the stem cell research bill. Not only that, but Romney could only manage two votes against the override in the Senate and neither chamber considered any of his proposed amendments. That the Governor had no effect on the outcome of the most publicized act of the Legislative session shows that he has become completely peripheral to the process of governing in Massachusetts.

I've said it before, and I'll repeat it here. You can't claim that you want jobs in Massachusetts, but just not those kind of jobs. I'm not a scientist, so I can't speak to whether somatic cell nuclear transfer creates a viable human embryo and on some level, I'm not really interested in the ethical questions surrounding this research. All that I know is that this research is going on and is going to happen somewhere, and I want it to happen in Massachusetts. We don't have coal mines or oil fields here, and what factories that haven't already moved to cheaper states are just as likely to move to China as to stick around. What we do have are excellent universities, hospitals and biotechnology firms. Stem cell research -- or any medical research -- is a perfect fit here and it's unfair to handcuff Bay State firms while California and now Connecticut are ready to throw money at researchers to lure them to their states.