Gov. is Baker's to Lose Again

Saddle up your swayback horses with cliché tack. The MA governor's race will be the wheezing GOP-for-balance one.

Lordy, that's tired and stupid!

Do-nothing state rep and senator, then fizzling firecracker fill-in US Senator Scott Brown said he would not run for MA governor next year. At least this time he seems to have finally learned not to jerk his party around until it was too late for other candidates to raise money.

That likely was a race he might have won. He hasn't failed at this race. His probable Dem opponent, Steve Grossman or a slimmer chance of Juliette Kayyem, face the dual disadvantages of that one-party paranoia and less celebrity glow.

The badly aging former teen model suffers from his own dual problems brought by ego and vanity. Someone he trusts needs to alert him to the reality that he is already making more money than he deserves to and that his occasional appearances on TV and in other media let him pretend to be wise and observant — traits he has never shown. He can play that online and on air without challenge.

Now the empty-bench MA GOP turns over in their political bed back to their old companion, Charles D. Baker Jr. Supposition, already in the Boston tabloid, is that the nomination for next year's race is his already.

 I have to agree that's almost certain.

Oddly, there may be other, better candidates, but they are hiding as Dems. The fairy tale here is that progressive, very left Dems dominate the politics, indeed the whole world of the Bay State.

If you are simpleminded and literal enough, sure, you can make that case. Both houses of the legislature are rife with Dems and have only a few Republicans. You can point to an over 3-to-1 party enrollment among voters as well.

Yet, numbers as well as even cursory analysis show a different reality. Consider that party registration is 35.7% Dem and 11.1% GOP, with a half percent Green-Rainbow and political designations (not officially parties but still a voter registration choice). Wait, you say, that's less than half. Sure enough, over half the MA voters do not choose a party — 52.6%.

The unenrolled as the official term has it regularly vote Democratic Party but have their pretense. They love literally to shout at polling places that they are "not unenrolled. I"m independent!" It's sort of silly but not too bad as adult foibles go. I've written on this before.

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The One-Party Game

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The game we play here is pin the governor on the statehouse. We've had up to 18 running years with Republican governors, while we vote solidly for Dem presidential candidates and keep that Dem balance on Beacon Hill otherwise.

The unproven, unprovable fantasy is that if we have a one-party system both legislative and executive branches, something terrible will happen. Specifically, voters across parties are wont to tell pollsters that Dems will ride the state with their spurs digging in, implementing all manner of extreme left-wing laws and expenditures. Voters are apt to chant, "It's only common sense."

That phrase is a verbal and political tic. Almost invariably that and "let's not reinvent the wheel" mean "I got nothing. I'm about to make wild, unsupported assertions and don't expect to have to justify them."

Back to reality, both major parties here are full of moderates and wishy-washy liberals. A few Republican legislators over the years have been nutty anti-choice types and such, but not many.Moreover, former Gov. Willard Mitt Romney constantly had to dance around his leadership in implementing universal health care for us while he was in office, arguably the most liberal act of any MA gov.

I contend that most Republican voters hide in the unenrolled ranks. Likewise, I contend that most Republican legislators hide as Democrats. There's general truth to the idea that except for governor or legislature from very conservative districts, you need a D next to your name for election.

That written, Left Ahead co-host Ryan Adams and I are among the legion lefties who want a more vibrant MA GOP. We end up speaking in political and economic code here instead of having substantial discourse and debate, both in campaigns and in the statehouse.

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Guts, Anyone?

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Lackaday, we seem to have a courage deficit here. Many Dem pols are willing to say they are fiscally or socially conservative but none switches to the GOP. For the Republicans, I can't even get a state party chair to chat it up with us on Left Ahead.

I had hopes for Jennifer Nassour. Three times when we met, she said how much she looked forward to coming on the show. Twice she asked for my card, took it and swore she'd make it happen. She never returned calls or email afterward.

Now I've tried the current one, Kristen Hughes. As close as I've gotten was to her scheduler guy. I called repeatedly to get him. I admit it was amusing when he heard the name of the show and asked whether we were left-wing. I told him both Ryan and I were progressive sorts, but that we let guests speak their piece without badgering them, pulling out surprise adversaries or using trick questions. He swore he'd get back with me but never has. No guts, those elephants.

I'd very much like to ask Hughes what chance she has of flipping conservative voters from unenrolled and conservative pols from Democratic.  I do see that as the positive future of the GOP here. Then again, that would require both insight and courage.

Franken Carries Liz' Portfolio

Al Franken, no longer funny guy but still stand-up in the other sense of the term, stood in for Elizabeth Warren today in Cambridge. Yeah, he was still funny, even though he's seriously the U.S. Senator from Minnesota.

Truth be told, a friend and I intended to have a pint across the street from the Warren-for-Senate HQ on Mass Ave. out of Harvard Square before the sked announced she and he would appear there about the same time. We're both pinkos about her age, so we were delighted.

Cambridge Common is a fine place for reasonably priced brews, particularly IPAs. I doubt that is why Warren's campaign planted her office directly across the avenue. However after increasing our wisdom, we were ready for the scrum.

Turns out that Warren must have been at another locale. Franken appeared and charmingly carried the afternoon. I was fine with that, having met her numerous times as well as hosting her on the Left Ahead show. I'm decidedly one of her groupies and my wife has been canvassing and phone-banking for her. When we went to her West Roxbury office opening, she threw her arm around me and said, "I love this guy!" My wife allowed as she did too. It was all good.

Lackaday, my chum, who is also a Warren supporter, had not and still has not met her. We tried to get the tap puller to join us, but she pleaded work duties. Just as well...

Al Franken was in town and around for four or five events promoting his potential colleague. He did well.

The room was astoundingly deep for a Cambridge storefront. We packed it with several hundred very decided voters.

Oddly enough, the speakers who prepped the crowd for Franken's arrival were all women and concentrated heavily on LGBT issues. Obviously, this blog has long been gay-rights/marriage-equality oriented. Yet, it was strange that as far as Marjorie Decker (Cambridge City Councilor and candidate for state rep) and Denise Simmons (Cambridge Vice Mayor) and others were concerned, Warren's LGBT positions were start, middle and end. They didn't talk about equal pay, jobs, the economy or the other big issues in play. Meh.

Franken arrived jolly but coy. He stood by his claim that he did not criticize colleagues, as in Sen. Scott Brown. However, he did note the facts about interactions with Brown. Specifically, he cited a bill, the Student Non-Discrimination Act,  he introduced and collected 39 cosponsors for that would provide anti-discrimination for LGBT teens. This would protect kids like the ADA does for the disabled and Title IX does for girls and women. He said he asked Brown to join the cosponsors. Brown said he'd get back with him, which turned into his staff saying no.

Franken preferred to gush rationally about Warren. He noted that control of the Senate is at stake this year and that "is so important." He added that "Elizabeth Warren is so great."

Then he blended his two public personalities to urge those in the room "get off your butts" for the next two and one half weeks before the election. He said that they might have jobs and families, but that they should forget them for the next 18 days.

He joked that 8-year-olds were perfectly capable of using a microwave, while their parent(s) were canvassing or calling for Warren. He added that the 8-year-olds could also teach the 4-year-olds, and that kids really like being on their own for dinner.

He concluded more seriously that you don't want to wake up on November 7th thinking that you could have and should have done more to elect Warren.

Cappy Calls It For Obama and Warren

"I like politics. It's the most difficult thing you can do without hitting each other."
— U.S. Rep. Michael Capuano

Last evening on Hyde Park's Fairmount Hill, Capuano introduced himself to his new constituents. Under redistricting, he now has the whole of Boston's HP as well as down to Randolph. Starting January, he's the guy in D.C. for a lot of folk in new places.

While much of his homey, candid chat to about 40 of us was about his background and politics, he did not shy way from questions about the pending elections. Below are two clips about the U.S. Senate and POTUS races. Click on the players to hear.

The short of it is that he figures both Elizabeth Warren and Barack Obama will win. Warren will have to get out of her comfort zone and speak more to voters who don't agree with her. Capuano said, from experience, that it's easy talking to friends, neighbors and others who share your views. "It gets tough when you talk to people who want to poke their finger in your chest ad say you're wrong about these ten things."

He also noted that Sen. Scott Brown has the advantages of being handsome and a nice guy. But Capuano said that "everybody has to decide what he wants. I want someone who's going to fight for values that we share. I'm not looking for a friend. I'm looking for a Senator."

He thinks Obama is also in for a battle, but that "A year ago, I didn't think Barack Obama could win reelection. Now I don't think he can lose." He admits that Obama did not do well in the first debate but "he'll do fine" in the next one.

On the other hand, "I want the Barack Obama I voted for the first time." That would include one not afraid to push for the right goals.

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Debates: Decisive v. Perfunctory

A truly crude publisher at a magazine I edited had a way of describing the pro forma. "It's like peeing in a blue serge suit. It gives you a nice, warm feeling, but nobody notices."

Modern debate-like objects may well fall in that class. They aren't the classic rhetorical contests from city-state times or even the pre-U.S. Civil War era. Back when free-form, one-to-one, open-ended agones let two contenders go at each other for as long as it took to exhaust their arguments.

Now the candidate fora and even the two-person so-called debates offer little opportunity for cogent policy or even brilliance. Seemingly dull-witted moderators and questioners serve up predictable topics to which candidates respond just as you'd expect. The only revelations or joys come when a candidate says something ignorant or stupid, the old gaffe track that the media live to report. These events are best suited for tweets.

How powerful?

Grousing about the inferior format aside, we have to wonder how meaningful these are and whether they truly influence elections.

The self-interested love to claim each election hinges on debates. This is particularly the case from the sponsors. Consider the October 1st spectacle between Sen. Scott Brown and challenger Elizabeth Warren.

It will be at UMASS Lowell, co-sponsored by the Boston Herald, and broadcast on cable TV at NECN and two AM radio stations, WBZ and WRKO. So, this allegedly crucial debate is likely to have a limited Boston-area audience for a statewide race.

The contest itself is unarguably a big deal. Dems need this seat to retain control of the U.S. Senate. Also, politically and emotionally there's the issue of whether to give the self-promoting wastrel a full term in a seat long held by an activist progressive. Whoever wins this go could well hold this seat for 12 or 24 or more years or more.

Writing of the self-interested, the promo for the debate, as reported in the Herald, includes hyperbole. WBZ's director of news and programming, Peter Casey, said, "(We are) looking forward to carrying this debate between Elizabeth Warren and Scott Brown, because it’s a critical Senate race for the WBZ audience and also for control of the Senate. Debates have become a major element and deciding factor in modern campaigns, and we are proud to take part in the process of letting the people choose."

Any Proof?

Those are oft-repeated assertions, but almost entirely without proof. Like with better-safe-than-sorry posits, most of us likely do not question its validity.

Nosing around in books and clicking around the net, there's little to support the power of the modern debate or forum. The best background and analysis I saw was at Franklin and Marshall College's Center for Politics & Public Affairs. Several of their professors, notably Dr. G. Terry Madonna and Dr. Michael Young, took the subject on from the Presidential level.

They include the conventional political wisdom — "Historically, debates played that role in 1960, 1976, and probably 1980." Certainly for the first, we love the idea that a sweating, sneaky looking Nixon lost the election debating the calm and candid Kennedy. Yet with only three likely examples, each of these is questionable.

Kennedy was already overtaking Nixon. Then in 1976, Watergate's effect may have doomed Ford. Debates of 1980, 1988 and 1992 sit in popular political mythology as being won and lost in debates, but each was likely decided by events and trends instead. As the profs conclude, "In fact, the evidence suggests that modern debates only rarely determine the outcome of elections."

There may be no relationship between debate performance and job performance. While the ideal leader should shine in both, how many pols can you think of that do?

Modern debate traits include:

• Small attendance, even with media coverage and broadcast
• "Viewers are voters with the keenest interest in politics or the party activists themselves."
• Most attend or watch to reinforce their decision on a candidate
• The undecided rarely watch or listen
• Neighbors, coworkers and news snippets are more likely influences

Still, the idea of debates is attractive. Many of us love the concept that we are wise, rational and open-minded, that we come into October deserving to have candidates perform for us, sway us.

High and Low

It's likely too that debates are most powerful influences on the top and bottom. This time at the POTUS level, there's greater than normal interest. At the least, we all have serious stake the recovery and the extrication from war. So the top will get pretty good views, at least of the next day snippets if not the full debates.

Farther down, a few statewide races, like in Missouri and Massachusetts, are contentious enough and covered enough by fragmented broadcast and the asthenic print media. At least in the predigested, next-day bites, these debates will get some notice.

At the local level, the Tip O'Neill true platitude that all politics are local can work. Where there are rare open seats, officials accused of incompetence or corruption, and hot cultural issues at play, voters wants lots of mini-shows. Candidates have been going from one debate-like-object to another covering their neighborhoods and whole districts. Voters demand they perform.

So on all three levels, fora and debates can be big. It's just that in most cases, there's scant evidence they sway voters at all. For the vast majority of races, debates don't seem to do anything beyond feeling good.

As a lover of politics, I don't mind that we beat the drums for debates. Pretending each one is crucial to that contest or even to the whole of the democratic process is almost always an incredible exaggeration. I'll give that a pass, as it is for the good cause of getting for keeping voters engaged.

Brown/Warren note: There are actually four variations on broadcast debates. This may well lead to voter fatigue. In addition to 10/1, there is a 9/20, 10/1 and 10/30. Only one is West, in Springfield, one is only with Jon Keller, and one gets lots of Boston-area media, including sponsor the Globe.

Timorous Senate Candidates

Secondary sex characteristics are frequent hallmarks of pols. As my wife is fond of saying from her consciousness-raising group days of early feminism, if brave men can be said to have balls, brave women must then have tits to spare.

Alas, I don't sense the courage we saw, even in Barack Obama's first campaign for President. Here in the MA race for U.S. Senate, the donkey/elephant yoked pair wage sniper wars by proxy and inference. Tonight I saw my darling of the contest, Elizabeth Warren again, and heard again how she shied from the battle.

As usual, I showed at Boston Mayor Tom Menino's self-celebratory July 12th event of his ascendancy from City Council to majesty. At his Chesterfield digs, a couple of thousand of us elbow and grin for handshakes, good vibes and free ice cream. As a podcast/blog slut, I was there for the pols and politics, as usual.

This evening, I chatted up Menino (left), Warren (above), Councilors Arroyo (below) and Yancey, MA Treasurer/Receiver General Steve Grossman (below Arroyo) and more.

Amusingly enough, previous Left Ahead podcast guest Grossman was happy to agree to another session and called over his executive director to start planning a date. Warren's campaign lackey in contrast was horrified that I'd even ask. Among that group, we'd already had Arroyo, Menino several times and others. The once-burned Warren was the one with no guts.

If you aren't a regular, you might wonder what toxin I carry. Start with the coverage of the elite-hick podcast. Warren and I were both born in OK about the same time, long ago, and found that humor fodder on her podcast. The evil and rapacious wingers tried very had to turn our comments into some slander, which in turn found its slimy way onto Fox News, the NYT and such.

Not being too subtle, I showed up this evening with my handmade HICKS FOR ELIZABETH campaign button.Of course, as my yellow Ray-Bans were singular on Chesterfield Street, so was my button.

I went straight to Warren pulling out my button for effect. She pounded my back and shoulder saying, "I love it," as well as re-affirming her affection for my glasses, as she has before.

As any social-media slut would, I careered among pols. I found myself back before Warren a few times. She was insidious in making her own rounds, going from hamburger stand to music stall and beyond. She is a real master of the personal. Wingers like to proclaim that Scott Brown is the guy you want to have a beer with and the homey one. They clearly have never spent a few minutes with Warren. She is as our mutual roots suggest, real folk, with none of Brown's smarminess.

Regardless, one of Warren's minions saw me taking pix of pols and asked if he could take a pic of her and me together. Amusingly enough, in all my years of photography and newspaper and magazine work, I'd always avoided any shots of me with a celebrity. This time though, it felt right. I agreed. I took off the hicks button and held it forward when her campaign lady pushed it down. She said Warren would do BlueMassGroup for an interview but certainly never Left Ahead again. The elite-hick incident was before her time, but she new the story. As Scientologists would have it, she'd been engrammed.

Therein lies the gist of this. Where are this year's balls, tits, guts, vision?

In 2006, Deval Patrick got social media. He leveraged us bloggers and used us as press as part of his grassroots/netroots victorious campaign. His good chum Barack Obama followed suit two years later.

What's happened? Where is the vision and courage of the current crop of pols?

What we're seeing and hearing with such as the Warren and Brown campaigns are shallow and sallow versions of the heroics of yesteryear.

Having underlings tweet the predictable and self-serving is not savvy new-media usage. Picking a few friendly, non-taxing interviewers is not gutsy

One of the times I was next to Warren on Chesterfield Street, I handed my hicks button to her. She said again she loved it, but her lackey glared at her. Warren then retreated by saying to give it to her later.

That's pathetic.

She grew up in OK. I was born there and spent much of my childhood in my mother's turf of the eastern panhandle of West Virginia. Warren and I are hicks to the core, not matter my decade living in Manhattan or  our many years living in Boston and Cambridge. We are ordinary folk, grounded in honor and honesty, candor and simple values, good manners and respect — traits that transcend intelligence, experience and credentials.

I am doubly embarrassed for Warren.

While I surely shall endorse here (disclaimer: my wife has already contributed), I'd like to see the guts I know she has. People may well disagree with my strong positions on this or that, but they won't have to wonder what my opinion is. I expect the same from her.

Moreover my Left Ahead co-host Ryan Adams has decried the dreadful shrinkage of local blogs and other netroots folk. The vitality that the likes of Patrick and Obama brought to new media is nowhere to be seen in the current pols. With Facebook, G+, Twitter and more free and for the direction, what the hell are they thinking...or not thinking?

Regardless, back to my wife's hoary allusion, where's the courage?

Bring Scott His Brown Trousers

Just when I thought Sen. Scott Brown could not be shallower and sillier, he bottoms out deeper. Word today is that he's doing his best schoolyard bully and simultaneously being yet another Republican who spits on the Bill of Rights, particularly Freedom of Speech.

All reports, as in the brief in the Globe, are that after trying to get any debates with Dem challenger Elizabeth Warren only on right-wing talk radio, he agrees to at least one neutral one. Yet, he soils it like a tom cat marking territory.

Brown asserts that Ted Kennedy widow Vicki Kennedy would be forbidden from endorsing Warren — even after the debate! He also begrudgingly accepts the bland Tom Brokaw as moderator, but only under the condition that MSNBC not be a sponsor of the debate.

Of course, or of coarse, that is outrageous. The current GOP, Brown most definitely included, seems to have missed civics classes or failed them.

Brown wants to censor and stifle even-handed commentary. He'd rob Kennedy of her free speech. He'd determine how dispersed the debate is. In short, he'd be a Republican.

I'd like to feign surprise. I can't.