The Boston Globe
Thursday, November 7, 2002
Voters' antitax sentiments seen altering agendas
By Corey Dade
Globe Staff
The unexpectedly strong showing Tuesday of Question 1 to
eliminate the state income tax and the election of Mitt Romney have underscored a potent antitax sentiment in the state that
could significantly strengthen the new governor's hand as he confronts the Legislature over
the looming budget deficit.
With 45 percent of voters approving the state income tax
measure - more than even supporters had predicted - many political observers now say the sentiment gives Romney
valuable public support in the absence of veto power against the Democratic-controlled
Legislature.
Romney, who opposed the measure, already has begun to recite
its narrow defeat as a mandate. "The response to Question 1, with so many people saying they wanted to see an
elimination of the income tax was, if you will, underlining the fact that
people do not want to see taxes go up in Massachusetts, and they'd like to see them come down," Romney said
yesterday. "That's one of the things that I think brought such support to
Kerry Healey and my campaign."
In turn, the Democrats are faced with adjusting their
legislative agenda after losing their fourth consecutive bid for the corner office.
"In everybody's polling, taxes were one of the top worries,"
said Democratic political consultant Maryann Marsh. "The Democrats failed to address those pocketbook issues, and
Mitt Romney was just hammering home the tax issue."
It appears that plans to bring back the House and Senate for
a lame-duck session are in doubt. Democratic legislative leaders privately had discussed using the session to raise
revenues that would include tax increases and expanded legalized gambling to address the
projected budget deficit. But legislative sources said yesterday there is little interest
among rank-and-file lawmakers to come back before the end of the year to tackle such
controversial issues.
The Democratic strategy was geared to an O'Brien victory;
dealing with taxes and gambling before she took office would have spared her the controversy of having to raise taxes
herself, legislative sources said yesterday.
"The whole thing was predicated on O'Brien getting elected,"
said an aide to a legislative leader.
Democrats also failed to anticipate voters' feelings of
uncertainty and fear regarding the economy, political observers said. While Romney resolutely refused to consider raising
taxes, O'Brien left open the possibility after exhausting efforts to wring savings from state agencies.
O'Brien, who admitted the issue helped swing the election to
Romney, said that when voters are "scared" about such issues, they look for a candidate who takes the strongest stance
against taxes.
"Mitt Romney did a much better job trying to convince people
he can avoid new taxes," she said yesterday. "I hope that he can succeed at that."
Tax issues may have helped drive Tuesday's strong turnout at
the polls, when 300,000 more voters showed up than the last time Massachusetts elected a governor in 1998, said
Secretary of State William F. Galvin.
Attack ads from New Hampshire's governor's race that aired
on Massachusetts stations, featuring strong language about taxes in the Granite State, fueled an antitax sentiment here,
Galvin said.
"It certainly reinforced the sentiment at least that somehow
taxes were bad," he said.
Expecting a resounding defeat of Question 1, opponents
mounted no organized campaign against it. In contrast, the Libertarian Party, which sponsored the question, took out
prominent newspaper ads and its gubernatorial candidate, Carla Howell, used her visibility
during televised debates to champion the cause often without having to defend it.
No elected officials would back the measure, viewing an
abandonment of state income tax as disastrous to the economy and state government. But without an organized campaign against
the measure, some political observers said voters went to the polls uninformed.
But supporters of the initiative said the vote demonstrated
a genuine desire for eliminating or reducing taxes.
"Voters in this state tend to be very well aware of what
they're doing," said Barbara Anderson of the Citizens for Taxation and Limited Government [sic], which sponsored the
rollback ballot question in 2000. "The people who are voting know that they voted two years
ago to bring the tax rate down to 5 [percent] by 2003. It hasn't gotten there yet, they know
it's not going to get there, and I think they're angry about that."
Frank Phillips and Rick Klein of the Globe Staff contributed to
this story.
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The Boston Herald
Thursday, November 7, 2002
Romney's revenue dilemma is huge
by Wayne Woodlief
So, after a long, tough and nasty campaign, Mitt Romney is
governor-elect of Massachusetts. Now the hard part begins.
Romney faces a gigantic revenue shortfall in 2003, up to $2
billion by some estimates. And since he won office partly on his pledge not to raise taxes during his first year, he must
propose some deep and daunting cuts in services. That could mean he might never be as
popular again as he is today.
Romney - and the Legislature - will be under enormous
pressure to resist higher taxes, in the wake of the stunning 45 percent vote in favor of abolishing the state income tax.
That's 881,738 citizens willing to strip almost $9 billion
out of a $23 billion budget if the tax had been ended this year. Carla Howell and her Libertarians, who sponsored
referendum Question 1, did their job. It's a strong message for lower taxes for the
Democratic-dominated Legislature, too.
"It sure is. It resonates up here, right along with the
Romney [reform] message," said a veteran Beacon Hill observer.
Romney also has an even more herculean task in rebuilding
the state Republican Party.
The GOP didn't even field candidates against most House and
Senate Democrats and there was virtually no change in a near-sweep by incumbents Tuesday. Now there are 135
Democrats, 24 Republicans and one independent in the House; 34 Democrats
and six - six - Republicans in the Senate.
That's nowhere near enough to sustain a veto by Gov. Romney
and barely sufficient to demand a roll-call vote.
Given that reality, Romney must make nice with House Speaker
Thomas Finneran and the likely new Senate president, Robert Travaglini (both of Boston), to govern.
Yet he must confront them at times and he needs a more
viable GOP to make his threats credible. Romney has to do a better job of party-building than his three Republican
predecessors. Otherwise he will accomplish little or nothing.
The conventional wisdom is that Speaker Finneran will eat
the new governor's lunch on lots of issues. Don't bet on it. Not because Finneran isn't one clever guy. He is. But because
he may find a greater affinity with Romney than some might think.
Take the fiscal issues. The speaker doesn't seem eager to
rush into any big new tax increase either. He told The Wall Street Journal recently that "there is little political
capacity" (or will) for the Legislature to raise taxes again so soon after last year's billion-dollar increase.
Finneran may be even bolder than Romney in cutting money
from sacred cows. "You can't deal with a $2 billion [shortage] without going after public education," Finneran said. "It's in
the target zone." And it will be in that zone without retiring Senate President Thomas
Birmingham to protect it anymore.
The speaker also could find Romney an interesting personality, just as Finneran was intrigued
by former Gov. William Weld.
Finneran, with an air of both admiration and amusement, once
told Herald editors that Weld got so much accomplished because "he was not one of us" - meaning the wealthy Brahmin
lawyer was outside the Legislature's culture and thus not easily captured
by it.
Maybe Finneran likes to play mind games with smart, rich
Republicans. If so, get in the game, Mitt.
As for rebuilding his party, GOP consultant Todd Domke said
Romney must be innovative.
He should recruit whole slates of legislators, as former
party leaders Ray Shamie and Alexander Tennant did in the late 1980s, helping Weld gain veto-safe margins in the Senate
by 1990.
"Run ads, go out and personally woo candidates, raise money
for them, build a farm team," said Domke.
"Maybe even change the name of the party," he said, since
the very term "Republican" has become so embarrassing that the party label almost never crossed Romney's lips nor
appeared in his leaflets.
As Romney will learn when he starts dealing with King Tom
Finneran, you'd better bring some strong suits to the table. Or you're a dead duck.
Wayne Woodlief is a member of the Boston Herald staff.
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The Boston Herald
Thursday, November 7, 2002
A Boston Herald editorial
Voters still show they're in charge
The word historic is often overused, but this time it fits.
President Bush put much on the line to pull off a rare
mid-term election gain on Capitol Hill for Republicans, and it worked. Much is at stake in the next session - the appointment
of federal judges that Democrats have enjoyed sitting on for far too long, the mindless flap
Democrats raised over whether workers assigned to a new Department of Homeland
Security should be unionized and the critical issue of who should be covered and how by a
prescription drug plan for seniors.
Of course, the president may have framed the issues, and
worked hard on the campaign trail for the GOP, but in some cases the issues, the names and ultimately the win were for
reasons unabashedly local. John Sununu's Senate victory in New Hampshire over Gov. Jeanne
Shaheen was one of those. (So too the two-man GOP sweep there of House seats.)
Living in Massachusetts and being bombarded constantly
(before, during and after the campaign season) with the demands of public employee unions (teachers, police officers,
state workers), we tend to forget at times that they do not represent the needs and the
desires of most voters. If there is a lesson out of Mitt Romney's solid victory it is that.
That and the fact that as another former Republican
governor, Bill Weld, so aptly put it, Massachusetts people want government "out of their bedrooms and out of their pockets."
We have only to look at the exceedingly narrow defeat of
Question 1 - the repeal of the state income tax - to realize that is as true now as then. Some 45 percent of voters (nearly
900,000 people) were perfectly willing to take $8.5 billion out of state coffers and put it
back in their own pockets.
Maybe it was just a protest vote, a shot across the bow of a
Legislature which thought nothing of repealing the last tax cut voters gave themselves. But there's a level of anger and a
healthy dose of fiscal conservatism out there legislators ignore at their peril.
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The MetroWest Daily News
Thursday, November 7, 2002
Did pols get the message?
By John Gregg
Earlier this year, some suburban Democrats on Beacon Hill
were talking about abolishing industry-specific tax breaks for employers and even changing Proposition 2½ to make it
easier for cities and towns to raise taxes.
With Mitt Romney's clean sweep through MetroWest and the
Milford-Franklin region, you would think that tax-hike express is off the tracks.
Local Democrats were stunned by Romney's showing in the
region, especially his 59-36 percent margin over Democrat Shannon O'Brien in Marlborough. And he also won
Framingham by a healthy 1,500 votes.
It's pretty clear that independent voters in the suburbs
carry a lot more clout than Boston Mayor Tom Menino, or all the special-interest labor unions who form the backbone of the
Democratic "machine," such as it is.
Those unions, from the Massachusetts Teachers Association to
the AFL-CIO, couldn't carry enough water for Senate President Thomas Birmingham in the primary, or for O'Brien on
Tuesday.
Alan, a car-phone caller to WTTK-FM radio yesterday, may
have said it best: "The people have spoken. They are tired of the b.s. They want results."
Curious if Beacon Hill incumbents got the message, I called
up several MetroWest Democrats and asked them what voters in their districts were really saying.
State Rep. Deborah Blumer, a Framingham Democrat who had
toyed with changing Prop 2½, said Romney's showing demonstrated real concern about jobs.
"I think the people elected Romney because he would be much
stronger on the economic issues than the O'Brien-Gabrieli team, and he needs to prove that," said
Blumer.
She also said the surprising support for a ballot question
to abolish the state income tax, even though it lost, was a "protest vote" over the Legislature's $1.2 billion tax hike
this summer. Asked if she sees that as a signal against future tax hikes next year, Blumer was eloquently
simple: "I sure do."
State Rep. David Linsky, D-Natick, said Romney's stands
against bilingual education, new taxes, and a "gang of three" Democrats ruling Beacon Hill, served as "wedge issues that
really resonated" with local voters.
And he acknowledged that Romney's anti-tax stand may carry
some clout.
"I can say it was going to take a lot for me to go out and
(vote for another tax hike) anyway, no matter what happened (on Election Day)," said Linsky. "I don't have a huge appetite to
go out and do it next year."
On the other hand, state Sen. David Magnani, a Democrat
whose district stretches from Franklin to Framingham, says neither Romney nor O'Brien took a no-new taxes pledge. He
saw no real mandate in Romney's election.
"I'm not saying I'm never going to raise taxes, but clearly
that's going to be the last place people are going to go," Magnani said. "I honestly don't believe on the tax issue he
came in with any different message than she did."
Magnani said O'Brien's support during the final debate for
abolishing parental notification for teenagers' abortions cost her dearly.
"I honestly don't think he won this thing. I think she lost
it," he said. "She lost a lot of Irish-Catholics that are supposed to vote for her almost on a knee-jerk basis."
State Sen. Pam Resor, D-Acton, said voters may have had a
"basic sense that somebody with Romney's business expertise may have more skills to pull us out of" a sluggish economy.
But like Magnani, she said, "I think both candidates were
saying raising taxes was the last thing they are going to do ... Romney didn't take a no-tax pledge either. I think there is
an understanding that we may not be able to get out of this (budget deficit) without some tax
increase."
The voters may have spoken, Alan, but if you ask me, I'm not
sure everyone was listening too keenly.
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The Boston Herald
Thursday, November 7, 2002
Mitt woos Dem pols: Targets budget gap
by David R. Guarino
Gov.-elect Mitt Romney tried to salve the wounds of a fierce
campaign yesterday, courting powerful Democrats he used only days before as props to tear down his now-vanquished
opponent.
His 5-point Corner Office victory only hours old, Romney
burned up phone lines to the State House wooing legislative leaders - including two members of what he dubbed the "Gang of
Three" - while setting an emergency budget briefing for today with acting Gov. Jane M.
Swift, whom he had shoved out of the race.
Romney said the huge budget gap gives him no time for rest.
"We're not taking a little vacation here with the election
over," Romney said.
While outwardly welcoming the governor-elect's olive
branches, leaders were quick to show they wouldn't immediately play along - delaying meetings and offering subtle jabs at
Romney's negative campaign.
"Welcome to the gang," likely new Senate President Robert E.
Travaglini (D-East Boston) greeted Romney.
Romney and Lt. Gov.-elect Kerry Healey dispatched Democrats
Shannon P. O'Brien and Chris Gabrieli 50 percent to 45 percent Tuesday, ending the Democrats' strongest
gubernatorial challenge in more than a decade.
A few hours after O'Brien and her staff held a weepy South
Boston press conference, Romney joked that he woke feeling a lot better than he did after his 1994 loss to U.S. Sen.
Edward M. Kennedy.
"I've tried winning, I've tried losing, winning is better,"
Romney said.
Romney met with senior campaign staff in the morning,
setting up the group that will lead the formation of a transition team in the next few days.
Romney appointed campaign manager Ben Coes to run the
operations of the transition and set his campaign policy director, Eric Kriss, to focus intensely on the gaping, $1.5
billion budget deficit the Romney administration will face next year.
Coes said a former Salt Lake City Olympic Committee
colleague of Romney's, Cindy Gillespie, will help Romney set up meetings with key dignitaries and members of the
Legislature.
Though he ran a campaign aimed at eliminating patronage,
Romney said some of his advisers and Cabinet secretaries likely will be politically connected. But he said he will keep his
promise not to make broad patronage hires for more basic government jobs - a historic norm
in Massachusetts.
"I look for people who get jobs based on what they know, not
who they know," Romney said. "And if somebody has political connections ... that will have to be something that's
overcome, that will not be an advantage, that will be a disadvantage."
For Romney, the budget will be task No. 1.
"The budget is a very high priority and that's something
we're working on immediately," he said.
Romney will meet this morning with House Speaker Thomas M.
Finneran and set up a budget briefing with Swift for this afternoon. Later, he will be part of a longer session with
Swift's fiscal team - Chief of Staff Steve Crosby, Administration and Finance Secretary
Kevin Sullivan and others.
Swift press secretary Jim Borghesani said the governor is
anxious to help Romney get up to speed and said there is no lingering ill will after Romney elbowed her out of the race
earlier this year.
"She wants to give them a very smooth start into their
administration," Borghesani said. "The first thing they are going to face is coming up with a budget (in February), which
is going to be very, very difficult."
In addition to asking for resignations from all her Cabinet
secretaries to clear the decks for Romney, Swift prepared large briefing books from each sector of the administration,
including everything from acronyms for state agencies and how computers work to a 12-year
report on everything they've accomplished.
Travaglini's staff said he was pleased Romney reached out
and said the "gang" reference was only a joke. But they delayed a face-to-face meeting until at least next week.
"The campaign's over, it's time to govern and meet between
the branches (of government)," said Travaglini spokesman Christian Scorzoni. "They will meet, sit down, see if they can
find some common ground between them."
Romney said he is confident his attacks on the legislative
leaders won't hurt their relationships.
"I think we all understand, in a democracy, that two voices
is better than one and that having two voices will allow us in a democracy to come to solutions that would be better for our
citizens," Romney said. "I certainly hope that the leadership, as well as the membership of the
Legislature, will adopt that same view."
But Romney quickly adopted a strong anti-tax stance against
the Legislature, which opted to approve more than $1 billion in tax hikes rather than make truly painful cuts this year.
"I will look at the widest array of options to solve our
fiscal challenges, but I would not look for quick-fix, one-time solutions unless we have also addressed fully and
comprehensively the structural changes which I believe are needed in state government," Romney said.
He said the narrow loss of a ballot question that would have
eliminated the state income tax shows a strong anti-tax sentiment among voters.
"I think it was more of a powerful message being sent to
elected officials, myself, (Healey), members of the Legislature, that taxes and increasing taxes are not the
solution to our problems," Romney said.
Romney also reached out to Mayor Thomas M. Menino, who,
despite his strong support for O'Brien during the campaign, pledged to work with Romney. "We all have to work together
with Gov. Romney," Menino said. "My agenda is to work with Gov. Romney over the next
four years to make sure there is (economic) growth."
Joe Battenfeld contributed to this report.
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The Boston Herald
Thursday, November 7, 2002
Election throws drug fee up in air:
Next gov's stand raises questions
by Jennifer Heldt Powell
A $36 million tax on prescription drugs is slated to go into
effect before the new governor takes over. But it could be short-lived as Mitt Romney makes his mark on the budget.
Romney hasn't specifically addressed the prescription-drug
user fee, but said yesterday he opposes new taxes.
"We have to find a way to balance our budget without making
people take on tax increases," he said. "We will fight taxes, and it means we will have to have a very serious discussion
with the Legislature about what the people want."
The prescription-drug user fee was adopted earlier this year
as acting Gov. Jane Swift and lawmakers struggled to close a growing budget gap. It would be assessed on non-Medicaid
prescriptions. State officials hope to use the money to get matching funds from the federal
government. If that happens, eliminating it would mean a revenue loss of $72 million.
But pharmacists say they may get stuck with the bill,
because it will be difficult to pass it on to health plans. Patient activists say they fear it will hurt those who have to
pay for their own drugs.
"While we understand states need to find alternative ways to
fund the Medicaid program, we are concerned that this policy will impact people who don't have prescription drug
coverage," said Allison M. Staton, Health Care for All spokeswoman.
Some lawmakers are already planning to work on repealing the
law.
"I think it was put in without enough study to determine
what the impact was and what it's going to do to the system," said Sen. Richard T. Moore (D-Uxbridge), chairman of the
Health Care Committee. "But there is a cost to repealing it."
"I think (Romney's) election is an opportunity to review
(the prescription drug user fee) and see if it still makes sense," said Michael Widmer, president of the Massachusetts
Taxpayers Foundation. "But he'll be in a dilemma, which is the contradiction between producing a
balanced budget without any significant service reduction and no new revenues - that's
really an impossible task."
The tax faces hurdles other than Romney. Once regulators
decide how to implement it, it must be approved by the federal government. A similar proposal by Missouri was rejected.
Without the extra money, Romney faces another challenge in
doing something else he said he wanted to during the campaign - preserving MassHealth Basic, a Medicaid program for poor
adults that is slated to end in April. The state expected to save $32 million with that cut.
He will also face pressure from advocates to restore the
Children's Medical Security Plan. Cuts in that program are expected to save about $1.5 million.
"We hope that the governor elect will recognize the
precarious situation health care is in and work with all parties - legislators, advocates and state agencies - to come
up with ways to ensure that people have access and they're not penalized because they're poor," Staton said.
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The Boston Globe
Thursday, November 7, 2002
Will they gut Question 2?
By Jeff Jacoby
Question 2 - the ballot initiative to scrap transitional
bilingual education - passed overwhelmingly on Tuesday, and the immediate response from Beacon Hill was a vow to gut
it. Robert Antonioni, the Senate chairman of the Education Committee, told
reporters to expect "potentially significant change" in the new law. "I think people just saw this as a quick
fix," he said, "and I don't think they ever got into the details of this
plan."
In other words, the voters were too dumb to know what they
were doing when they approved Question 2, so lawmakers needn't show deference to their decision. That
condescending attitude now pervades the Massachusetts State House, and if it isn't
vigorously challenged, it is going to doom the initiative and referendum process in this state to
extinction.
Think back to the most disgraceful episode of the political
season that just ended. It wasn't the Democrats' effort to knock Mitt Romney off the ballot on bogus residency grounds, or
Romney's implication that Shannon O'Brien was tainted by her marriage to a lobbyist, or the
anti-Question 2 rally at which Ron Unz was likened to a Nazi by the head of a Hispanic
lobby.
All of those were bad, but this was worse: The lynching of a
proposed constitutional amendment defining marriage as the legal union of a man and a woman.
Under Massachusetts law, before a proposed amendment can be
put before the voters it must go to a joint session of the Legislature; if it is approved by 25 percent of the lawmakers
in two separate votes, it moves to the state ballot. The sponsors of the marriage amendment
had amassed more than 130,000 signatures in support of their proposal and were
entitled to a roll call in the Legislature. But the Legislature ignored the law and adjourned without a
vote. That was worse than dishonest or shabby; it was a blatant show of contempt for
the electorate.
And it wasn't the only one. In the past year, the Legislature also:
Wiped out the tax deduction for charitable gifts, a
deduction the voters had created in 2000 when they sweepingly approved Ballot Question 7.
Pulled the plug on the rollback of the state income tax to 5
percent, a rollback the voters had mandated in 2000 by handily passing Ballot Question 4.
Attempted to starve the new "Clean Elections" campaign-finance system, which the voters
had established in 1998 by voting decisively for that year's Ballot Question 2.
Moreover, without ever saying so explicitly, legislators
made it pretty clear that they would repeal Question 1 - the proposed repeal of the state income tax - if the voters had the
audacity to pass it. In the event, the voters came close: Question 1 drew a
far-higher-than-predicted 45 percent of the vote.
Massachusetts is one of only 24 states in which citizens can
adopt or repeal laws by ballot. Direct democracy, as initiative and referendum are also called, was the fairest flower of the
Progressive Era; among its champions were Republican Teddy Roosevelt and Democrat
Woodrow Wilson. "For 20 years I preached to the students of Princeton that the referendum
... was bosh," Wilson said. "I have since investigated, and I want to apologize to those
students. It is the safeguard of politics. It takes power from the boss and places it in the
hands of the people."
Lawmakers tend to resent ballot initiatives - they infringe
on their monopoly, after all - and have used their rule making power to make it difficult for proposed laws to qualify for the
ballot. Those handicaps - everything from requiring a very high number of signatures to
allowing only a few weeks for them to be gathered - have taken their toll. This year, only 53
voter-initiated questions appeared on ballots around the country, the fewest since 1986.
In recent years lawmakers have gone beyond merely obstructing direct democracy; in some
states they seem bent on crippling it altogether. In Oklahoma, for example, they tried
to raise the signature requirement for amendments dealing with hunting and fishing to an
all-but-insurmountable 15 percent. The measure failed, but lawmakers in other states will
doubtless be encouraged to try the same thing. Or maybe they will take their cue from the
Massachusetts Legislature and simply begin killing proposed initiatives and even
voter-approved laws they don't like.
Ballot measures are an admirable expression of self-government; laws passed by voters are
almost always more carefully drafted and vigorously debated than those passed in
the state house. They are an important check and balance on political arrogance and an indispensable
vehicle for redressing citizens' grievances. But they cannot be any of those things if
legislators can trash them up at will - and get away with it.
If voters don't want to lose their right to adopt or repeal
laws through the ballot box, they had better start insisting on some respect. A loud, clear, vigorous demand that Question 2 be
implemented as written would make a good start.
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