The Boston Herald
Thursday, October 4, 1990
Question 3 is a taxing one for Bay State voters
By Margery Eagan
This is voters’ dilemma: Whose shtick is closer to the
truth? Jim Braude’s, the anti-CLT virtue-crat? Or Barbara Anderson’s, the
pro-CLT mad housewife?
Gentleman Jim is supposed to represent forces of light. Babs is supposed
to represent forces of darkness.
But wait. Isn’t grim Dr. Silber – Braude’s main man – supposed to
represent forces of of darkness, too? Where does pro-CLT Bill Weld,
darling of the gay rights and “Greenpeace” set, fit in? And what about
pro-CLT Domenic Bozotto, Boston’s holiest working-class hero?
But wait again: Jim insists. He hasn’t just got big bankers and big unions
but average working families. Those illusive real, live, people,
but also decent, compassionate, able to see past the poison politics
sweeping the land. Plus, Gentleman Jim has a so-cool, anti-CLT rap song.
But wait yet again: Babs says she hasn’t just got the wild-eyed anarchists
but human service workers, too. Who’re leaking her tales of waste and woe.
They’re in the closet for CLT, like were in the closet, for Silber, until
he clobbered Frank. Indeed, it’s the liberal bourgeois establishment that
can’t bear the supposedly unschooled, ill-bred, CLT crowd. CLT’s defeat is
no big threat to the well-heeled. They’ve got bucks to pay the tax man.
Well, it all gets very confusing: Is this about class, greed, guild,
pedigree, compassion fatigue?
There’s Gentleman Jim, 41, so smooth, so eloquent, exuding noblesse oblige
in his runnpled blazers, like the heart throb of freshmen girls in Econ
101. He’s already the heart throb of the pro-Sandinista left. Can’t you
just imagine him in a battered, “Save the Whales” Volvo, sneaking off to
Crate & Barrel at The Mall at Chestnut Hill”
And then there’s Babs, 47, angry goddess of the up-by-your-bootstraps
crowd, the classic taxpayer tease, promising rollbacks without coming
clean on whose hide they’d come from.
She’s funky in earth tones and corduroys, buckskin boots and pant suits
and the occasional crystal round her neck, like some ‘60s earth mother
whose spiritual quest plopped her in the me-decade. Perpetually
disheveled, now she’s getting her free-form hair blow-dried “for the
campaign only.”
Ah, but she does know what ticks people off, doesn’t she?
What about it, Babs? Jim says you’re about hate, about tearing down, and
let them eat cake.
“I understand working people,” she says. “And don’t thing it isn’t fun to
see Jim Braude in bed with John Silber, big business and fat-cat union
leaders, like Sylvester Stallone's at the end of the movie.”
What about it, Jim” Are you just a sexier version of another
salt-and-pepper topped Duke czar, the MWRA’s Paul Levy? Are you, in fact,
a Duke guy?
“Oh, what a re you doing to me? I am nothing like that,” says Gentleman
Jim. “You would not see a pair of Birkenstock sandals on me if my life
depended it.” As for “Save the Whales” bumper stickers, Jim claims
whenever he sees one, he tears it off. With his teeth.
“I have been in the private sector. Let me make that clear. I ran a small
business. Understand that, please.”
All right. OK. So he lives in Cambridge. It’s Central Square, not
oh-so-trendy Harvard Square. And he doesn’t some battered black-and white
TV, like Bill Weld WASP wannabes. Jim has a regular-guy, great big color
and a VCR and yes, well, he may have an answering machine, unlike Babs.
But she got her car phone a week before he did.
Babs, meanwhile, lives in oh-so-precious Marblehead, aswarm with proper
yachtsmen, as in sail power, as in wouldn’t be caught in “powerboats.” So
... Swampscott. Plus, she drives an ‘89 Honda Civic, and used to drive a
Nissan.
But wait: she’s twice divorced, a single mother, former Navy wife and
swimming instructor at the YMCA!
But wait again: Braude, old union boy, drives a good ol’ union-made Olds
Cutlass, an ‘81. It’s overflowing with newspapers and fast-food wrappers,
some months old, leftover from the semi-anonymous, simpler days when he
and Babs bean their CLT roadshow debates, car-pooling o’er the highways of
Taxachusetts, stopping at Dunkin’ Donuts where Babs just loves those
broccoli croissants. They sure had some fine, gossipy conversations back
then, cementing, as Jim puts it, their “strange bond.”
But where does their strange leave the rest of us? What’s the bottom line
beneath the spin? Ah, there’s the rub.
Jim says CLT is Armageddon. Babs says it’s salvation. The truth is
somewhere in between, but it’s 1990, nobody’s taking truth, and most of us
can’t even tell who’s closer to it anymore.
NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this
material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior
interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes
only. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml