If they’d only listened to Dukakis . . ????
Make him go aWAYYYYY
We are going to do an “institutional memory release”
every time we see or hear Dukakis attempting to rewrite history.
This week it happened on “Greater Boston” with John Carroll, who did a
pretty good job expressing appropriate amazement, albeit low-key, as the
Duke blamed Romney-Healey for the Big Digaster. If they’d only listened
to me, he insisted, everything would have been fine. He wanted Weld to
keep Salvucci on to oversee the project that he got started.
I remember thinking the same thing at the time, but had to take into
account that Salvucci had been lying to everyone about cost and time
required in order to get approval; didn’t seem an auspicious beginning
for the taxpayers.
Dukakis and Salvucci used the Robert Moses New York playbook (read the
Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Power Broker, Robert Moses and the Fall of
New York,” by Robert Caro.) Excerpt:
“If ends justified means, and if the important thing in building a
project was to get it started, then any means that got it started were
justified. Furnishing misleading information about it was justified; so
was underestimating its costs......what if you didn’t tell the officials
how much the projects would cost? What if you let the legislators know
about only a fraction of what you knew would be the projects’ ultimate
expense? Once they had authorized that small initial expenditure and you
had spent it, they would not be able to avoid giving you the rest when
you asked for it... If they refused ... what they had given you would be
wasted, and that would make them look bad in the eyes of the public. And
if they said you had mislead them, well, they were not supposed to be
misled ... that would mean they hadn’t investigated the projects
thoroughly, and had therefore been derelict in their own duty...” There
are other sections on how to ridicule or buy off opponents.
Yeah, Duke, keep the Moses guy to lead the state into near-bankruptcy.
Not that you didn’t do pretty well on your own. Keep doing media
appearances and remind everyone why we must not EVER have a Democrat
governor again.
As for your accusation that Romney-Healey have ignored the state’s
infrastructure: I was in Gardner Auditorium when your public works
department came to a Taxation Committee hearing carrying chunks of
concrete that they said fell from a bridge. They were looking for a
thing called MassBank, funded by new taxes, to repair the crumbling
Dukakis infrastructure. The entire Taxation Committee, including House
chairman Richard Moore rolled their eyes in unison, then said No. Ask
Moore’s then chief of staff, Mike Capuano; bet he remembers too.
I was also around when the Mass. Municipal Association asked the Dukakis
administration if the Big Dig would take money from other state
projects. They were assured that it would not (see Moses, above).
Barbara Anderson –
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