Tom and Joe Are Cranky Neighbors

Guest Post: Second Place is Still Up for Grabs

by Hale Champion

If Christy Mihos has fifteen million dollars and is willing to spend it, he could well finish second in the gubernatorial campaign – still far behind Deval Patrick but ahead of his GOP rival.

Kerry Healy made a nervously brave try in the opening debate, but Mihos was a lot happier and a lot feistier.  He may turn out to be a bantam-weight version of former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura.  Just like Ventura, Mihos seems to think that the old political maxim, “Give’em a show or give’em a fight,” should really be “Give’em a show and a fight.”  Mihos provided both in a single performance.

Unfortunately for both Mihos and Healy, Deval Patrick already looks like the Governor most of the voters in this state have been yearning for: friendly but firm; articulate but not garrulous; informed but not a wonk; a listener, but ultimately his own man.

Elections are never done deals until the polls close on the first Tuesday in November – and sometimes (alas) not even then.  But if Patrick continues to campaign as energetically and effectively as he has ever since he first came out of the blue less than two years ago, Beacon Hill denizens should start thinking about when instead of if.

More Cigarettes, Fewer Cell Phones

by Joseph E. Thompson

I escorted a friend to a wedding at which I knew no one very well. It was rather a formal affair. My job was simply to eat, fetch a round or two of drinks and be charming – all, save the last, easy jobs.

The affair was at a Cambridge hotel and must have cost the host a fortune but, in the spirit of good health and political correctness provided only an outdoor space for outcasts like me to relieve the tension of amiability with a quick smoking break. So, in between the cocktails and the toasts I availed myself of an opportunity to fortify myself by trotting downstairs to the courtyard and igniting.

As I sat puffing, a woman appeared, cell phone attached to one ear, MP3 detached from the other. She was probably about thirty, nicely dressed and apparently quite willing to treat both myself and anyone else within earshot to – well, why not join me in listening in to the cell phone conversation that cascaded over the entrance to the hotel?

“I can’t f-----g win.” Pause.

“I can’t f-----g win.” Pause.

Silence – about a minute.

“I just can’t f-----g win”

“This is just f-----g bulls---.”
“This is just f-----g bulls---.”

Silence.

I disposed of the cigarette in the attenuated urn provided, and preceded back up the escalator to my mushroom ravioli and filet mignon.

As I did so, several things occurred to me about this incredibly rude woman: the first simply that her ten-word vocabulary apparently exceeded her brain cell count; the second that her, to be kind, lack of skill with the language might narrow the range of her thinking, and that perhaps this mental constriction was not limited to her.

So between the tomato and basil salad and the ice cream cannoli, I devised a theory that will take up the next three posts.  Here’s the first installment:

On Terror: It’s the Uniform, Stupid

For all of the talk about “freedom” and “democracy” that we have heard lately from the Bush administration, it seems odd to me that we have been so willing to become slaves, and at great cost, to a single word – terror.

No, I am not going to call our addled Vulgarian-in-Chief a terrorist – which puts me one moral leg up on the Bush administration official who used that epithet to label the teachers’ union. But I am prepared to guess that she, along with many others, has swallowed the Bush hook along with the line and sinker.

According to the Idiot Prince, terror is what other people to do to us. Just as we never torture anybody (waterboarding, stress positions, extreme cold notwithstanding) so also we never inflict terror.  No, we prefer to shock and awe.

According to the Emperor Shrub, terrorists are defined by what they do; motive and context are completely irrelevant. If you oppose anyone who claims to be against terrorism then you are, ipso facto, on the side of the terrorists (which give us the right to tor-, I mean, interrogate you strenuously).

But if that Bush official were here – or even that sparkling conversationalist on the cell phone – I would pose the following pop quiz:

Here is a short list of historical events:

1. The burning of Atlanta
2. The firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo
3. The nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

For thirty points, what do these events have in common?

Answer? Each was an act of terrorism directed against civilian populations by the United States. Each resulted in the mass killing of what we – depending on our mood – call “innocent civilians” Casualty estimates range from the most conservative of 20,000 to the highest of 105,000 for each occasion.

Those few instances come to mind purely because they are the most obvious and because our own people were the ones with their fingers on the triggers. Others, requiring a deeper grasp of history, had more or less the same effect – although the most obviously dirty hands in many of those cases belonged to the surrogates who, with U.S. encouragement and support, undertook the torture, killing and overthrowing of elected governments.

In Chile (I would hasten to inform the young lady who helped open this essay that, beyond being a bowl of spiced beans, Chile is also a country in South America), after we sponsored the assassination of Salvador Allende, we helped install General Augusto Pinochet who miraculously made 76,000 of his own people disappear. Our response? Utter silence.

We could go on with similar stories ranging from Nicaragua, Guatemala (United Fruit anyone?), Iran – where in 1953 we installed the Shah – to Iraq. Knowing full well that Sadaam was using chemical weapons against his own people, we sent Donald Rumsfeld over to shake his hand and re-supply him.

Lest we go too far afield, it also bears mentioning that the KKK and other organized lynch mobs retained their power though tactics that can only be described as terror against their fellow citizens. (Recently there was a museum exhibition of postcards published from photographs taken of the lynchings of African Americans. Despite many efforts, the federal government refused to condemn these – dare I say it – terrorist acts, and only apologized for this “oversight” two years ago.) 

The point I am making is that terrorism is a tactic, a time-honored tactic, that the United States, our allies and our enemies have employed again and again. Our criticism of that tactic revolves largely around the uniform worn – or not worn – by the perpetrators. In U.S. history, the propriety of terror derives from the circumstances under which it is inflicted and not from any particular aversion to the tactic itself. Oh I suppose it is true that we can be offended viscerally by the cruelty of the executions – the beheadings, building collapses, etc., but the victims of our terrorist acts are no less dead.

The relentless invocation of a single word without any honest exploration of its meaning is a form of demagoguery that – if used to maximum effect – gets idiots elected, sends us to ruinous wars, kills and wounds hundreds of thousands and, most importantly, blinds us to the sometimes obvious solutions to problems that are intractable only because we are too busy name-calling to see them.

Guest Post: Early Returns

by Hale Champion

Let me offer a final word (give or take a few) before Tuesday's Democratic primary.

Actually some of what follows really comes originally from Tom, but he's been more than busy elsewhere recently.  And since I don't intend to identify which of us is responsible for any small beam of light or incidental error of fact, judgment or spelling, you'll just have to guess which thoughts are mine and which are his.

Here, however, is our combined take on the race for Massachusetts Governor:

Unless the polls and the pundits are completely wrong – which happens less often than some might like to believe – Deval Patrick will emerge as his party's chosen candidate.  Since all trends also point to a November rejection of the Romney-Healey tradition of economic royalism, that means that Massachusetts will have a remarkably good chance to say an unfond farewell to almost two decades of do-little (and sometimes do-worse) Republican governors – and to the "same old, same old" culture of Beacon Hill.

One of the most crucial and overlooked factors in that likely (although by no means guaranteed) outcome has been the Patrick campaign.  It’s easy to make fun of political campaigns: they’re long, expensive, loud, nasty and can often veer off the most important issues to focus on irrelevant trivia.  But campaigns matter – a lot.  They tell us a lot, too, especially about the leadership capacity of the candidates.

The primary campaign just ending was remarkably revealing, much more so than its recent predecessors. Despite all the political maneuvering, the costly avalanche of look-at-me commercials, and the yammering of the debates, this campaign showed clearly who had the organizational skills, the capacity for leadership and the street smarts to lead a complex and diverse state like Massachusetts.

Forget the résumés and the fancy packaging.  Look at how these candidates handled their current job – running for governor.  Who has assembled the resources, organized the support, honed the message, created a broad-based alliance, and triumphed at every milestone – the caucuses, the convention, the debates?  Who has gotten results?

Clearly, the answer to all those questions has to be “Deval Patrick.”  The other two candidates each brought some personal merits and credentials to the contest, but just as Patrick's campaign revealed his balanced strengths, theirs exposed important weaknesses.

Patrick, a little-known outsider, was almost alone more than two years ago in believing that anybody could be competitive with two- term Attorney General Tom Reilly, his four million dollar war chest and his longtime relationships with the state's major political and business insiders.  Patrick saw a need and desire for new blood in the State's Democratic leadership.  After consulting with apparently just a few likeminded people, he decided that the new blood could, and should, be his.

His chosen strategy was not to begin with the state's traditional power brokers, most of whom had already agreed that it was Reilly's "turn".  He rolled back the astro-turf of modern politics and replanted a truly grass-roots movement among those who felt shoved aside, rolled over or just plain ignored.  He listened and responded with the skills developed in a successful career in both public and private life.  He gradually assembled a precinct-level organization which proceeded last winter to dominate the party’s local caucuses in almost every part of the state.  The delegates chosen there rewarded him at the state convention in the spring with a resounding first-ballot endorsement – despite the fact that most Massachusetts voters knew little or nothing about him at the time. Then he went anywhere and everywhere to introduce himself – to listen some more, and to raise enough small-contribution money in the early summer to pay for TV ads in the late summer and early fall.  And all along the way he won endorsements and formed powerful partnerships with his campaign slogan, "Together We Can".

Compare Patrick’s campaign performance to those of his rivals.

Reilly's was unusually defective both in design and execution.  Patrick seems to have taken him totally by surprise, and he just never caught up.  He didn't plan or organize for the caucuses and even such powerful allies as Boston Mayor Tom Menino failed to anticipate the strength of the Patrick insurgency.  By the time of the convention, he had conceded the endorsement to Patrick, making clear to the press and the public that only his ties to the so-called super-delegates (people who held government or party offices rather than being elected at the caucuses) assured him of enough votes to qualify for the primary ballot.

In the meantime, Reilly made a huge, panic-driven mistake.  At almost the last moment, he pulled out of discussions with Christopher Gabrieli to be his running mate as a candidate for Lieutenant Governor.  Instead, he chose a minority woman state legislator and Menino favorite, Marie St. Fleur.  Within 48 hours, public stories about fiscal problems involving her and her family forced her withdrawal and soon thereafter there was another candidate in the Governor's race: Gabrieli himself.  It's been all downhill for Reilly ever since.  He's gone negative on both his opponents, taken tax and other positions usually associated with Republicans and fallen into third place in the polls.

Gabrieli is an unusual case.  A very wealthy man who set a fifteen million dollar cap on his primary campaign spending, he had already spent millions in two prior, and unsuccessful, efforts to win public office.  This time he thought that his past problems (generally ascribed to deficits of charisma and dynamism) would be solved by getting a not-so-free ride on what then were thought to be the long, strong coattails of the Attorney General.

Now, to Gabrieli's credit, he saw an opportunity in Reilly's suddenly visible weakness.  He had more than enough chips to afford a new roll of the dice. If he could wheel and deal for the l5 per cent vote of convention delegates needed to get on the primary ballot (which he did with the connivance of some Reilly voters looking for a potential backup), then he could buy a virtual campaign without having to go to the trouble of building any real political base.  If Reilly continued to make more mistakes like agreeing to help get Gabieli on the ballot, the latecomer's saturation TV campaign could be aimed at Reilly's lapsed adherents as well as the inattentive voters who weren't even tuned in yet.

Gabrieli could also hope that his own great personal wealth would discourage Patrick's fundraising efforts (which it didn't) or that Reilly's negative attacks on Patrick would take a heavy toll on both the attacker and the attacked while leaving Gabrieli largely unscathed.

Gabrieli"s campaign met some tests, but it failed on a big one.  He has the resources to buy a lot of persuasion and he has a plan, but he hasn’t been able to build up or organize support because either he just doesn't know how,  or he hasn't got the patience, to do all the necessary listening and responding and working it out on a personal one-to-one basis.  As any salesman can tell you, mass media advertising can get you in the door, but it can’t close the deal.

Of course, the real test comes on Tuesday.  But based on what we’ve seen in this campaign, who has shown the insight, the inspiration, the elbow grease, the wisdom, the organizational skills and the willingness to buck the system that we claim to want from a governor?

To become governor, first you have to campaign for governor.  And Gabrieli is right about one thing: it’s all about getting results.