The Boston Herald
Sunday, July 21, 2002
King Tom's bad heir day:
Clean Elections upstart might overthrow
one of the Speaker's own
by Wayne Woodlief
Dedham Selectman Bob Coughlin - the most serious threat this
year to House Speaker Tom Finneran's leadership fiefdom - has one of those old-fashioned campaign headquarters. It's
long and narrow, one wall draped with an enormous American flag and others festooned
with photos of John F. Kennedy and other heroes, including one Coughlin had helped
re-elect to Congress: the late Rep. J. Joseph Moakley.
A clipping from the Herald, headlined "Bacon Hill," is
pinned up, too, a jab at pork-grabbing by Coughlin's opponent, state Rep. Maryanne Lewis (D-Dedham), an assistant majority
whip on Finneran's team, and other members of the House.
But one of the most striking pictures at headquarters is a
painting of the State House, its golden dome gleaming. Looking at it, Coughlin pointed to a place about six inches below the
frame - underneath the building, under the grass, under everything - and he said, laughing out
loud: "If I win, my office is going to be somewhere down there!"
Humor aside (and humor is one of Coughlin's winning traits),
King Tom might not be quite so cruel to a fellow who knocked off one of his loyal lieutenants. Yet Finneran surely would
neither forget nor forgive even such a slight rebuke to his reign.
This might be the least competitive legislative season in a
quarter of a century. More than 70 percent of the House seats and 75 percent of the Senate seats are uncontested. Yet there
are some highly competitive campaigns. And a few fresh faces are certain to emerge:
● Brian Wallace, a longtime South Boston civic activist and
former aide to ex-Boston Mayor Raymond L. Flynn, is favored to capture the seat former Rep. John Hart left to win the state
Senate seat of now-U.S. Rep. Steve Lynch (who moved into Moakley's old seat in
Congress). Shawn Murphy, a young lawyer, is making a spirited run, too. But he lacks
Wallace's credentials in politics, in local media, in charitable work,
against drug abuse, you name it. Brian's been all over Southie for years. He deserves to win.
●
Mike Rush, running for an open rep seat in the West Roxbury area, gained valuable
experience from his two unsuccessful runs for Boston City Council in 1999 and 2001. At
28, Rush knows a lot about the city and its needs. He's a teacher at Catholic Memorial High who
listens and learns. Brian Kenneally is making a credible run for the seat, too. But this
is Rush's year.
But the Lewis-Coughlin race in the Dedham-Westwood House
district is the main event. It marks the most serious challenge Finneran has had to a member of his leadership team in
years.
Now, Finneran's power is by no means in question. His
putting the Clean Elections system on a starvation diet and discouraging challengers to House incumbents helped see to
that.
Yet if a top member of his team goes down, it is at least a
tweak to Finneran. And perhaps much more than that to members in marginal districts who might face tougher competition
next time.
Lewis is being squeezed from two directions, right and left.
The conservative Citizens for Limited Taxation has targeted
Lewis for defeat, incensed that she and the rest of the speaker's team worked so hard to freeze the final phase of the
$1 billion income tax rollback that voters approved in a 2000 referendum.
"We're going to take her (Lewis) out and send a message to
the rest of the Finneran flock," said CLT's Chip Ford.
On the left, Massachusetts Citizens for Clean Elections are
rallying support for an advisory ballot question in Lewis' district (and 19 others) asking voters to "instruct" their reps
to fully fund a law that passed 2-1 in a 1998 referendum but repeatedly was sabotaged by Finneran
and his crew.
(That question will be on the November ballot, but the
energy created by Clean Elections supporters is spilling over into the Sept. 17 Democratic primary, and stirring support for
Coughlin, who counts himself one of their number.)
It didn't help that the House and Senate leaders produced a
phony "compromise" on Clean Elections funding on Thursday. They allowed $3.8 million in funding for this election cycle.
That's just crumbs for a system which - if it had been funded on time and encouraged a large
number of legislative challengers - would have cost about $22 million. And the fine print to
this new deal actually renders the compromise a very bad deal.
See, the wise guys (and gal, depending on how deeply Lewis
was involved) made it so only a handful of legislative candidates will get a relative pittance of public cash after
playing by the rules and raising small amounts of money from many donors.
That's because the bulk of the money would go to gubernatorial candidate Warren
Tolman.
Yet Tolman (and some of the legislative contenders) are
going to get their money anyway, under court-ordered auctions of state property. And the poison pill in this alleged
"compromise" is that it includes an advisory referendum question for November stacked
against Clean Elections.
The referendum asks if voters would "support taxpayer money
being used to fund political campaigns for public office in Massachusetts." Not a word, of course, about the law's limits
on spending and big-donor contributions for those who accept public funding.
A message to acting Gov. Swift: Veto this garbage, as you
promised to do to anything that weakens Clean Elections.
Lewis - trying gamely to defend the indefensible in such
cynical defiance of the voters' will - said: "Dozens of voters I've talked to in my district say that things have changed in
our economy since that 1998 referendum. And that if they had that vote to do all over again
today, they'd vote differently."
Maybe some would. But that's not how they voted then.
Lewis also is vulnerable to labor anger within her district.
The state AFL-CIO has endorsed Coughlin. "Bobby's the labor crowd's kind of guy," said Chuck Raso, a union spokesman.
Yet Lewis is a tough and resilient campaigner. And the flip
side of Finneran's unpopularity outside his own district is that he's good to his lieutenants.
Her clout in leadership has helped Lewis bring in millions
of dollars in education funds to her district - money for "new early intervention programs ... strong MCAS, remedial programs
and so on," said Lewis, 39, who has children ages 7 and 5.
On her wall she has proudly framed the document she signed
two years ago - "while I was temporarily presiding in the speaker's chair" - that provided a huge tax cut, doubling the
personal income tax exemption.
Coughlin, however, is the toughest rival she has had since
her election in 1994. He is extremely popular in Dedham, the heart of her district. And he has been working the outlying
suburbs in Westwood hard, promising tax relief and "an independent voice on Beacon Hill."
One woman in Westwood told him: "You want my vote? Fix my
dryer." He came in and did it, finding the fuse that had been screwed in wrong and jammed. He's become known in that
neighborhood as "the guy who fixed the dryer."
Now - 40 pounds lighter and minus three pair of shoes worn
from trooping door to door since he began his campaign - Coughlin wants to fix some things on Beacon Hill. He seems a
good bet to do that, too.
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The Boston Herald
Sunday, July 21, 2002
They didn't even wait until the sun went down to rob us.
That's how much contempt the hacks at the State House now
have for the voters of Massachusetts. Once upon a time, whenever the Legislature was scheming to do something
particularly rotten, the bosses would restrain themselves until after dark, preferably after
midnight, when most of the members were good and drunk.
Not Friday. They just rammed through $1.14 billion in tax
increases in broad daylight, thumbing their noses at the inert masses. They no longer have the common decency to be
ashamed.
The sad thing about what happened Friday is that, in a
democracy, the people ultimately get the government they deserve.
This is the government we deserve.
They nixed a cut in the income tax that 60 percent of the
people voted for less than two years ago. They killed charitable deductions, which had been approved by 67 percent of
the electorate. They jacked up the tax rates on capital gains, which they'd cut back in 1994 as
part of a deal for a pay raise.
Of course, they're not taking any pay cuts. They never will
again. Their pay is tied into the constitution now, which means even if every voter in the commonwealth signed a petition to
cut their outrageous salaries, it still would have to go through a "constitutional convention,"
where the vox populi has a mere whisper compared to vox perverti.
It used to be, if the voters OK'd a referendum issue, the
hacks abided by the result - at least for a while. More recently, they would allow questions to go on the ballot, but
then repeal any new law the first chance they got. Now they've decided it's just too darned dangerous to
let people who actually work for a living vote at all.
Who will overthrow this rancid dictatorship? Surely not the
media. Did you hear their descriptions of this bloated budget Friday? It was "bare-bones," the newsreaders said. It
was "spare."
Spare? Please, spare me. It's $600 million higher than last
year's budget. That works out to an average of $317 in tax increases per taxpayer. Spare? Only in the sense of taxpayers
wailing, "Brother, can you spare a dime?"
Two years ago it cost nothing to renew your driver's
license. Now it's $40. They gave cities the option to jack up the meals tax another 16 percent - as if you already didn't
have enough reasons not to drive downtown.
Then there's the cigarette tax. It goes up a mere 100
percent, from 75 cents to $1.51. And don't forget, you now have to pay sales tax on the excise tax. With a carton of smokes now
costing close to $50 here, and about $30 a few miles away in New Hampshire, where do
these fools on the Hill think their constituents are going to shop, if they're not already buying
on the Internet?
In the House, this billion-dollar baby of tax increases
swept through on a 122-28 vote. Of the 134 Democrats, only six voted against it.
"Do you suppose," said House Minority Leader Fran
Marini, "that maybe those six Democrats who voted no have opponents in
the fall?"
Exactly. That's one of the major problems here. No opposition - 62 percent of these
tax-fattened hyenas are unopposed in November. Who in his right mind would want to be
institutionalized in the sheltered workshop that the Legislature has become? Ninety percent of
the solons are in the special-needs program, and the handful that aren't morons are
crooked.
Eighty years ago, a corrupt governor's councilor named Dan
Coakley was running amok. A Brahmin named Godfrey Lowell Cabot decided that, for the good of everyone, Coakley had
to go. But no one would help him, not the GOP, not even the white-shoe law
firms downtown.
Later, long after Coakley's demise, Cabot mused on the
difficulties of raising a posse.
"You can go out and kill a lion and get lots of people to
help you," he said, "but when you go out to kill a skunk you've got to do it yourself."
The State House is so overrun with skunks that they now dare
to come out in the sunlight. If you know anything about skunks, you know that can only mean one thing. They're rabid.
They're rabid, all right, on Beacon Hill. And working people
have only two alternatives left. Raise a posse, or move to New Hampshire.
Howie Carr's radio show can be heard every weekday afternoon on
WRKO-AM 680, WHYN-AM 560, WGAN-AM 560, WEIM-AM 1280, WXTK-FM
95.1 or online at howiecarr.org.
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The Boston Herald
Sunday, July 21, 2002
Budget empties Mass. savings
Analysis/by Elisabeth J. Beardsley
Lawmakers smashed the piggy bank to balance a state budget
awash in red ink - a quick, neat political fix that's sparking warnings of dire consequences.
Staring down the barrel of a $2.5 billion deficit that's
exploded in the last 10 months, House and Senate lawmakers have gobbled up 92.6 percent of the state's $2.3 billion "rainy day"
reserve fund.
State leaders had predicted the savings account - once one
of the amplest in the nation - could be stretched to last through three or maybe even four years of economic hardship.
But the fund has been depleted to $170 million in less than
a year, after state leaders dipped deep to patch up last year's post-Sept. 11 balance sheet and this year's even nastier
situation.
"That's dangerously low," Rep. Charles Murphy (D-Burlington)
protested on the House floor Friday, as the $22.93 billion budget was whipped through the Legislature. "Next year is
going to be awful."
With very little margin for error, every penny of new
deficit will have to be sliced from programs already in a squeeze, said Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation senior analyst
Cameron Huff.
If tax collections continue to fall below projections - as
they have for 12 consecutive months - or if runaway costs like Medicaid exceed projections, as they routinely do, the state
will be forced to make drastic service cuts and mass layoffs, he said.
"We still have a hole in the budget," Huff said. "We're
going to hit the wall."
In unveiling their compromise spending plan this week, House
and Senate budget-writers seemed to reel between stark acknowledgment they've blown too much of the savings kitty
and a laundry list of reasons why it couldn't be avoided.
"Anytime you rely on one-time revenues, you just postpone
the day of reckoning, and that's exactly what we're doing," House Ways and Means Chairman John Rogers said.
Rogers (D-Norwood) and Senate counterpart Mark Montigny
hastened to tick through an array of justifying factors - the first and foremost being they're still stinging from
rank-and-file lawmakers' wrath after last year's highly unpopular closed-door program cuts.
Having already slashed $1 billion from programs this year,
the chairmen said they succumbed to advocates who called up and pressured them to use rainy-day funds to ward off further
damage.
Rogers tersely added that reserves were the only viable
option, given the House would never agree to senators' pleas for tax hikes beyond the $1.14 billion already imposed.
Rationales notwithstanding, Montigny admitted legislative
leaders have set up the state with a "very dangerous structural deficit."
"I can't argue it's the wisest course of action," Montigny
(D-New Bedford) said. "This is our product. We don't love all of it."
That's something of an understatement, coming from the
Senate - where President Thomas Birmingham, by all accounts, has been wielding his budgetary power with his sputtering
gubernatorial ambitions very much in mind.
Birmingham, who was not available for comment, secured an
$88 million boost for school funding - small by recent standards, but a victory nevertheless in a year of defeat. He
also fought, but then caved, on a top priority - a House plan kicking 50,000 people off health
care.
And when it became clear that negotiators couldn't find the
last $300 million in cuts needed to plug the deficit, House and administration officials say Birmingham insisted on papering
over the shortfall with rainy-day funds, so at least the document would look balanced when it
landed on acting Gov. Jane Swift's desk.
In a deal hammered out at a secret Cape Cod summit, sources
say Swift agreed to do lawmakers' dirty work by vetoing their rainy-day fig leaf, then balancing the budget herself
with cuts and possibly alternative revenues.
That allowed lawmakers to cut their losses and flee - a
happy prospect for many who are anxious to shed business for a summer of full-time politicking.
But others left the negotiating table angry that sound
fiscal policy gave way to political expediency.
"We should be able to come to some resolution," Republican
conferee Rep. John Lepper (R-Attleboro) said on the House floor. "But with the Senate president running for governor,
there's no way that could happen."
In capitulating to the Senate's demands for an illusion of
balance, House leaders did an abrupt about-face on months of their own rainy-day rhetoric.
Speaker Thomas Finneran, who single-handedly forced the
decadelong stockpiling effort, has preached long and loud about the money's "judicious" and "prudent" use.
The conservative speaker spent all spring cruising cross-state on his "Straight Talk Express"
tour, lecturing everyone who would listen about the fiscal crisis and prominently praising the
House's "focus and foresight" in socking away the rainy-day cash.
Finneran, who was not available for comment, also blitzed
Democratic activists, union leaders, politicos and members of the media with 6,000 videotapes of a speech in which he
pronounced the good-times dead.
Rogers, as Finneran's top lieutenant, has faithfully and
frequently delivered the party line on reserves, along with austere instructions on their "responsible" handling.
He was asked this week whether he and other legislative
leaders behaved responsibly when they conducted what Rogers himself described as a "raid" on the rainy-day fund.
"There are so many definitions to the word 'responsible,'"
Rogers said. "Am I comfortable with the level of reliance? No."
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The Boston Herald
Sunday, July 21, 2002
The Buzz
Pork to go
State House leadership porked out on a $222 million
transportation bond bill last week, with Speaker Thomas M. Finneran grabbing more than $1 million for street improvements
in Milton; Rep. Lida Harkins, majority whip, snatching $2.4 million for Needham; Rep.
Maryanne Lewis, a division chairwoman, picking off $500,000 for Dedham; and Rep.
Joseph Sullivan, chairman of transportation, directing $1.9 million to
Braintree.
Assistant Majority Whip Thomas Petrolati grabbed $1 million
for Belchertown. Haverhill, which scored $3 million, is represented by Rep. Harriett Stanley, chairwoman of health
care, and Rep. Brian Dempsey, chairman of public service.
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