In my latest for the Guardian, I argue that if Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick loses his re-election bid this fall, as seems very possible, it will tell us precisely nothing about President Obama, despite their surface similarities. The reason is that Patrick’s political troubles, largely of his own making, go back to the earliest days of his administration in 2007.
Category: Politics
Connecting the public-pension dots
Chris Cassidy reports in the Salem News that the state has appointed a replacement for Essex Regional Retirement Board chairman Timothy Bassett, whose reign of error may finally be drawing to a close — although Bassett, naturally, is fighting it in court. (Here’s just a small taste from the archives.)
Andrea Estes reports in the Boston Globe that Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson is passing out enabling taxpayer-funded pensions as if they were bags of popcorn, in one case awarding greasing the skids for a nearly $47,000 annual pension for someone who’d worked full-time for only three years.
And Mary Williams Walsh reports in the New York Times that states across the country are taking enormous risks with their public-pension funds, gambling that junk bonds and other dubious investments will help them catch up with their ballooning liabilities.
The question that doesn’t get asked often enough: Why are public employees still receiving pension benefits when virtually everyone hired in the private sector for the past 10 or 15 years has been diverted to a defined-contribution plan such as a 401(k)?
William Hudak checks in
In the comments.
David Axelrod and the wages of workaholism
Old friend Mark Leibovich has a profile of President Obama’s chief political strategist, David Axelrod, in today’s New York Times. The premise is that many Democrats are wondering if Axelrod is too much the star-struck Obama groupie to be effective. But what really caught my eye was this:
Mr. Axelrod’s friends worry about the toll of his job — citing his diet (cold-cut-enriched), his weight (20 pounds heavier than at the start of the presidential campaign), sleep deprivation (five fitful hours a night), separation from family (most back home in Chicago) and the fact that at 55, he is considerably older than many of the wunderkind workaholics of the West Wing. He wakes at 6 in his rented condominium just blocks from the White House and typically returns around 11.
Leibovich also finds Axelrod “tearing into a five-inch corned beef sandwich on rye with a Flintstone-size turkey drumstick waiting on deck.”
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that Axelrod really has lost his mojo. Don’t you think he might be doing a better job if he were working, say, eight to 10 hours a day, eating properly, sleeping eight hours a night and getting some exercise?
As it stands, his routine would bring most of us to the brink of a nervous breakdown. That can’t be good for the president or the causes he champions.
Was the moon landing faked, too?
What do global-warming deniers have in common with creationists? More than you might think. They got Charles Darwin trapped out there on Highway Five.
Moving beyond Al Gore
In my latest for the Guardian, I argue that Al Gore, his admirable qualities notwithstanding, has used up his political capital when it comes to climate change. By contrast, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina offers the hope of substantive progress.
The ghost in Mitt Romney’s machine
I’m always amazed when journalists find themselves unwilling to follow the simple ethical rules of our business. So this morning I find myself scratching my head over the news that Nina Easton, an ex-Boston Globe reporter who is still working as a journalist, helped former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney write his new book, “No Apology.”
Globe reporter Sasha Issenberg writes that Romney pays tribute to Easton’s contributions in the acknowledgments. And Easton, now Washington bureau chief for Fortune magazine and a commentator on Fox News, has this to say for herself:
Mitt asked me — as a friend and a book author myself — for some input on an early draft. I offered some writer’s advice on things like structure and how to better tease out themes in his writing. It wasn’t much.
No, not much. Just enough to disqualify her from commenting on the 2012 presidential campaign as long as Romney is a candidate. (And please don’t tell me that he’s not a candidate. Romney’s 2012 campaign began the day he dropped out of the ’08 race.) At least Easton left the Globe in 2006; it wouldn’t be good if her fingerprints were found on the paper’s massive 2007 Romney series.
Here, by the way, is Easton on Fox’s “Hannity” on May 28, 2009, talking about efforts by the Bush and Obama administrations to bail out General Motors:
How is it all possible, Sean? How is it possible is that the Bush administration punted on this. They punted by giving TARP funds, bailing out GM, and punting it to the next administration when, in fact, we should have gone through a Mitt-Romney-style plan, which was a government-managed bankruptcy, which would have left this company far more in the private sector.
Clearly the two presidents should have been wearing a wristband that said “WWMD?” — “What Would Mitt Do?”
Easton, of course, is hardly a pioneer. Perhaps the most memorable of such breaches took place in 1980, when columnist George Will helped Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan prep for his debate with then-president Jimmy Carter, and subsequently enthused over Reagan’s “thoroughbred performance” on “Nightline” without disclosing his role.
And, yes, Globe journalists have been known to lend a hand in various ways to Democratic politicians over the years.
But it’s a lousy practice, and I can’t understand why some journalists are so attracted to it. I mean, how did Easton ever get to the point at which she considered Romney a “friend” in the first place? This is someone she covers. Period.
More: I had not anticipated the demand for details I’ve received regarding the aid and comfort Democratic politicians have gotten from the Globe. I did have a specific incident in mind when I wrote that sentence, but it was a long time ago and I have my reasons for not wanting to get into it. Indeed, anything I could come up with would predate not just Marty Baron’s tenure as editor, but his predecessor, Matt Storin’s, as well.
For some insight into how the Globe and Democratic politicians once benefited mightily from each other’s favors, you might want to take a look at this piece I wrote some years ago (pay no attention to the date at the top of the page) about Jack Farrell’s wonderful book “Tip O’Neill and the Democratic Century.”
A tale of two — uh, one poll
Gov. Deval Patrick’s standing with voters is so weak that this year’s race for governor is shaping up as a contest between his two rivals, a new Suffolk University-7News poll shows.
Gov. Deval Patrick is leading Republican Charles Baker and independent Timothy Cahill in the latest public Massachusetts gubernatorial poll.
So who’s right? One answer is that the poll shows Patrick leading with 33 percent. Baker gets 25 percent and Cahill 23 percent. Score one for the AP.
Yet the Herald’s lede does accurately reflect the analysis of pollster David Paleologos, who says, “This race is really between Charlie Baker and Tim Cahill. Whoever emerges between the Baker-Cahill race is likely to be the winner.”
My gut tells me that Paleologos is being way too aggressive in reading the numbers, even if they are his numbers. It’s early. My suspicion is that Cahill will fade away, leaving Baker as Patrick’s principal challenger. Patrick’s political standing is pretty weak at the moment, but he’s a formidable campaigner.
Let’s see where this race stands on Memorial Day, the Fourth of July and Labor Day.
The Republican God Squad
In my latest for the Guardian, I take a look at the theocratic threat posed by Tim Pawlenty (“God’s in charge”), Mitt Romney and other potential 2012 Republican presidential candidates.
Decoding the Times’ Haig obituary
Tim Weiner of the New York Times weighs in with a harsh obituary of Alexander Haig. You should check out his description of Haig’s behavior after Ronald Reagan had been shot — he comes off as a power-mad general intent on staging a coup.
No, Haig did not speak with great precision that day. But do former Reagan aides like Richard Allen, who clearly hated Haig, really believe that Haig didn’t understand the vice president was next in line if Reagan were incapacitated?
The key to Weiner’s piece is this paragraph:
“His tenure as secretary of state was very traumatic,” John M. Poindexter, later Mr. Reagan’s national security adviser, recalled in the oral history “Reagan: The Man and His Presidency” (Houghton Mifflin, 1998). “As a result of this constant tension that existed between the White House and the State Department about who was going to be responsible for national security and foreign policy, we got very little done.”
Amazingly, Weiner does not identify Poindexter as (1) a central figure in the Iran-Contra scandal, which nearly brought Reagan’s presidency down, and which unfolded years after Haig left the Reagan administration; and (2) the mastermind of a surveillance system during the George W. Bush years called, in a nice Orwellian touch, the Total Information Awareness System, or TIAS.
Getting trashed by the likes of John Poindexter is a good thing. Too bad Weiner didn’t make that clear.
More: It gets worse. BP Myers notes in the comments that Weiner claims the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut, which cost the lives of 241 marines, took place in “the immediate aftermath” of Haig’s dismissal, as though his policies were somehow responsible. In fact, the date of the bombing was Oct. 23, 1983, a year and a half after Haig’s departure.