CITIZENS   FOR  LIMITED  TAXATION
and the
Citizens Economic Research Foundation

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.


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