Why Charlie Baker has succeeded (so far)

Joshua Miller, of The Boston Globe, had a nice summary of the success (so far) of Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker:

“His wonky, straightforward style stands in stark contrast to that of his party’s bombastic leader, President Trump.

“What’s more, Massachusetts’ economy is strong, and unemployment is low; there’s a sense among voters that the state is generally headed in the right direction, while the nation is on the wrong track; Baker has crafted a likable media persona; he’s presented himself as a fiscal check on the Democratic Legislature; and there’s been an apparent dearth of crises in state government.

“’He’s not an ideologue, and voters here, at least in their governor’s office, prefer managers and problem solvers,’ said political science professor Peter Ubertaccio, dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Stonehill College. ‘He’s like the uncle who is always glad to see you and give you good advice, even if you’re not going to take it. He strikes folks as a decent guy and a good manager, and that just fits the moment.’”

Most GOP governors (which means now most governors) govern with far more practicality and cooler rhetoric than members of Congress. They have to, in order to get anything important done. Actually governing/administering, and coming up with the compromises and solutions to do so, is a hell of a lot tougher than bloviating on Capitol Hill, where people are rarely held responsible for much of anything, as long as they’re good on TV.

Federal legislators spendremarkably little time actually legislating, as opposed to raising money and giving speeches. In recent decades they ‘ve spent less and less time working according to their constitutional job description and much less time working across the aisle to craft bipartisan bills.

James P. Freeman: Charlie Baker is sort of Nixonian

In his marvelously insightful book, A Man and His Presidents: The Political Odyssey of William F. Buckley Jr., Alvin S. Felzenberg recalls the 1960 presidential contest when the National Review founder saw then-candidate Richard Nixon as “less the leader of the GOP than as the ‘amalgamator’ of all the forces that composed it.” More than a half century later, a sensible survey of the Republican Party reveals that Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker and President Donald Trump are, likewise, “amalgamators.” They share similar Nixonian propensities.

Despite the differences in their personalities and philosophies, Baker and Trump understand 2017 politics:  Recalcitrant Republicans — particularly conservatives — can be circumvented in the political process, and more importantly, in the creation of public policy. Baker and Trump exhibit a marked disdain for  real conservatives. As did Nixon.

Writing for National Review in 2013, commemorating Nixon’s 100th birthday, John Fund reasoned that the president “governed more as a liberal than anything else.” Nixon, he wrote, “didn’t really like or trust conservatives, even if he hired a bunch of them.” Furthermore, “he used them and freely abandoned their principles when convenient.”

Fund cited Nixon’s numerous liberal domestic initiatives, such as creating the Environmental Protection Agency and calling for universal healthcare. These initiatives also included sweeping regulations on the economy (wage controls), affirmative action (employment quotas), and massive increases in welfare (Food Stamps). And international initiatives (opening up to China). Such actions reflected Nixon’s own background and association with what Nixon himself called the “progressive” wing of the party.

Fund concluded that “at best, it’s the record of a progressive Republican who, in the end, didn’t view conservatism as a valid governing philosophy — even though it was the basis of the republic created by the Founding Fathers.”

Today, a political amalgamator is understood as one who feels compelled to forge bipartisan coalitions with the hope that it produces suitable progress for those believing that government — at all levels — is dysfunctional. The urgency for bipartisanship is especially acute for Baker and Trump, neither of whom who hold a core political philosophy other than a kind of modulating progressivism, which floats from one issue to the next. They must know — especially Baker — that while this may be a glamorous way of governing, it is a hazardous way for securing their future. For Baker, this is strategic; for Trump, it is more tactical.

But the message is clear:  Amalgamate Republicans incinerate conservatives.

Last year, Robin Price Pierre, writing in The Atlantic, believed that Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign bore a “striking resemblance to the 2016 presidential race:  Both have highlighted primal American fears.” The 1968 election, Pierre suggested, offered insight into why Trump’s supporters identified themselves as the “Silent Majority,” a term that Nixon employed to describe the electorate “whose fears and insecurities he successfully rode into the White House.”

Both elections ultimately signaled that “America, its values, and its power structure were under threat by a violent, liberal agenda.” Like Nixon in 1968, Trump in 2016 came into office after eight years of progressive governing. And those respective elections heralded shifts in political power and rhetorical discourse.

This past March, conservative commentator Mark Levin, on Facebook, asked, “Is Trump channeling Nixon?” On his syndicated radio show he said that there is a “Nixonian aspect to this administration.” Massive spending proposals on infrastructure and family-leave entitlements, coupled with talk of severe protectionism have fed Levin’s frenzy. He bemoaned the lack of any constitutional conservatives in Trump’s most senior policy and political circles. Those closest to the president include nationalist populists and progressive liberals, he noted. But no conservatives.

In the wake of Trump’s Sept. 6 agreement with Democrats — not Republicans — on spending (the continuing resolution), the debt ceiling, and Hurricane Harvey aid, Levin again spoke of the president’s “Nixonian habits.” Trump’s recent actions were “lurching left,” raising fears that he would continue in that direction.

Levin warned that “radical progressives,” including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, with whom Trump has suddenly and surprisingly become friendly — “have absolutely no intention of supporting bipartisan government.”

At the White House, on Sept. 13, with Trump speaking to a “bipartisan group” and working in a “bipartisan fashion” (his phrasings), the real news wasn’t a purported deal he sought on DACA, over dinner with Pelosi and Schumer. The real news was Trump declaring, in response to a reporter’s question about skeptical conservatives: “Well, I’m a conservative,” and “if we can do things in a bipartisan manner that will be great.”

Conservative?

Like Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency, Trump is a cryptoconservative:  virtual, speculative and fleeting. A novelty. But  the megalomaniac Trump is intent on using cryptographic techniques to strike any deal; whether or not a good deal, whether or not with Republicans, is irrelevant.

Baker suffers no such grandiose illusions. But he also tears a big page out of the Nixon playbook. Only more emphatically.

His first attempt at purging the party of conservatives began during the 2014 primary season, at the Massachusetts Republican Party nominating convention, in a nasty fight with Tea Party member Mark Fisher. The party ultimately settled a lawsuit in early 2015 with Fisher, for which he was paid $240,000.

The lawsuitcame from this situation: In Massachusetts a GOP candidate must receive 15 percent of the vote of delegates at convention to secure a position on the primary ballot. Baker’s people say that Fisher never achieved that threshold but Fisher’s people asserted that Baker suppressed convention votes on Baker’s favor, effectively manipulating the vote against Fisher. So Fisher sued. He ultimately got on the primary ballot but it made no difference. The settlement was reached after the 2014 gubernatorial general election.

In the March 2015 issue of The Atlantic, Molly Ball called Baker a “technocrat” who, during the 2014 gubernatorial election, “aggressively promoted his liberal stances on hot-button issues.” Boston liberals, Ball wrote, “seem grateful to Baker for being a Republican they can get behind.” Shortly after Baker’s victory, he assembled a bipartisan cabinet “that included several Democrats and independents.” No mention of conservatives. (A Boston area blogger observing the transition said Baker’s team took “a nonpartisan approach to state government and its problems.”)

Ball wondered if Baker’s election augurs a return to liberal Republicanism reminiscent of Nelson Rockefeller. But the governor did not see himself as a model for others. He is not a model. Rather, he is an anomaly:  A progressive masquerading as a Republican, who enjoys a 71 percent approval rating (higher than Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s) in a progressive state with a legislature dominated (over 80 percent) by Democrats.

Baker has described his governing style as “relentless incrementalism,” which may have inspired National Review in August 2016 to conclude Baker “resembles an older variety of conservative.”

Conservative?

That characterization now needs a thorough reassessment. Today, Baker resembles a Nixonian conservative, which is to say progressive Republican. Which is to say not a conservative.

In retrospect, Baker is about as affectionate to conservatives as sharks are to seals; his lurch left over the last 12 months has been remarkable. He appointed a progressive, Rosalin Acosta, as labor secretary. He angered conservatives for vowing to replace Planned Parenthood funding with state dollars if Washington pulls its support for the program. And incrementalism will not fix the troubled MBTA transit system or the state’s towering indebtedness and unfunded pension obligations. These problems were indeed created by partisan progressives over decades, who certainly did not consider bi-partisanship while committing such grand malfeasance. These problems desperately need definitive conservative solutions. What happened to fiscal conservatism?

There are worrisome challenges looming on Baker’s horizon.

Just last month, Joe Battenfeld in the Boston Herald alarmingly reported that some leading conservatives simply won’t vote for Baker in next year’s gubernatorial race. And last June, Jim O’Sullivan, in The Boston Globe, wrote that the governor “recently told his fund-raisers that he wants nearly a third of Democrats and almost three in five independent voters to support him.” Baker, O’Sullivan admitted, “holds greater appeal among moderates and less among the GOP base.” He won in 2014 by a margin of only 40,000 votes, or less than 2 percent. His political calculus may discount Republicans and conservatives in 2017 but Baker will need every one of the state’s 479,237 registered Republicans, who still account for nearly 11 percent of all registered voters, in 2018 to win reelection.

With perverse irony, it is possible that Baker and Trump might, at their peril, galvanize conservatives. Classical conservatives, furious at being sidelined, could coalesce with libertarian progressives to forge a new political partnership, a disruptive third party. There is still time in Massachusetts to do this as a form of protest, to punish Baker’s leftward drift. He surely loses with substantial vote-splitting.  

Conservatives could simply stay home, too. As Felzenberg summarizes Bill Buckley’s thinking during the 1960 presidential election between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon:  “‘We actually increase our leverage,’ Buckley told a friend, ‘by refusing to join the parade’.”      

James P. Freeman is a New England-based writer and former columnist with The Cape Cod Times. His work has also appeared in The Providence Journal, newenglanddiary.com and nationalreview.com.

James P. Freeman: RINO Baker drifts left along with the anti-Trump Bay State

For many Massachusetts Republicans, Gov. Charlie Baker’s administration is the advancement of a dishonest marketing campaign:  Baker and Switch. (Run as a Republican, cozy up to Democrats, disown the Republican Party.) Rejected Republicans, perhaps feeling duped from day one, should take note. Baker’s dispiriting drift to the left may just prove to be a stroke of genius for re-election in 2018. It’s a plan without Republicans — the abandoned, fatherless children of Massachusetts politics.

The plan was actually hatched well before President Trump skunked The Party of Ronald Reagan. As  a Baker senior adviser, Tim Buckley, told The Atlantic, the governor’s campaign in 2014 focused from the beginning on “showing he could say ‘screw you’ to the Republican Party.” Those words have proven to be prophetic and strategic.

The cold calculus of political reality, as Baker’s team knows, does not favor any Republican in the Commonwealth, let alone an incumbent Republican governor. As of February 2017, there were 4,486,849 registered voters in Massachusetts, with just 479,237 registered Republicans (11 percent of the total). Unenrolled voters numbered 2,424,979 (54 percent) while registered Democrats numbered 1,526,870 (34 percent).

Since the 2014 election, unenrolled voters have increased by 133,824, while Republican voters have increased by only 9,973. Increased unenrolled voter registration is trending upwards, and may accelerate, as Trumpism (a governing style resembling the Coney Island Cyclone) roars through the land.

Even though Baker beat Martha Coakley by just 40,165 votes in 2014, the election was a blue lagoon of civility.

Next year’s election, by comparison, will be a dark pool of uncertainty but will certainly feature a rabid anti-Trump sentiment and, by extension and association, Republican defensive posturing. And in the Commonwealth — what fun! — the proselytizing progressive Sen. Elizabeth Warren will also be on the ballot. Republicans will be the expendables. Something the governor, understandably, wishes to defy for himself.

Baker is an elusive electoral enigma.

He is a social liberal and a fiscal conservative who has melted the cryogenically frozen corpse of {Nelson} Rockefeller Republicanism into new life. He enjoys a 75 percent approval rating in a state where Democrats control 79 percent of the House and 83 percent of the Senate, and Hillary Clinton overwhelmingly won last November (61 percent to Trump’s 33 percent). He maintains a working relationship with House Speaker Robert DeLeo (where massive power resides), whose understated temperament is like his own. And,  he operates without a political base, given the minuscule minority status of his party.

Seemingly harboring zero national ambitions, Baker would be the first Republican Massachusetts governor to be re-elected since William Weld, in 1994 (who resigned in 1997 after being nominated as U.S. ambassador to Mexico – a nomination killed by right-wing North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms).

Baker’s survival instincts are validated by this paradoxical fact:  Even as prospective Democratic gubernatorial candidates (Setti Warren, Jay Gonzalez and Bob Massie) rightly cite his lack of grand vision for Massachusetts, many Democrats on Beacon Hill quietly concede that state government is functioning better under the bipartisan executive leadership of Baker than it did under his predecessor, Democrat Deval Patrick (who, with contempt for hands-on management, always spoke with a grand vision).

As The Boston Globe noted the other week, “State Democrats turn attention to Trump, not Baker, at convention.”

Still, for conservatives (a fringe of the fringe in the Commonwealth) hoping there might be some application of conservative ideas in this playground of progressivism, there is deep dissatisfaction with the governor. His risky political plan (popularity is perishable; a large unenrolled bloc can shift allegiance quickly) is, some believe, at the expense of foundational principles.

Howie Carr recently wrote in the Boston Herald:  “As his first term in the Corner Office  {of the State House} continues, it seems that the Republican-in-Name-Only (RINO) governor finds himself more and more ‘disappointed,’ not just with his party affiliation, but also with the drift of public affairs in general.”

That might explain Baker’s puzzling appointment last week of Rosalin Acosta, a Lowell bank executive, as his labor secretary. Acosta (a progressive activist and anti-Trump enthusiast) and her husband this year founded Indivisible Northern Essex, a liberal advocacy group that began supporting progressive candidates around the country. Should a progressive run against Baker, whom would Acosta vote for?

James P. Freeman, an occasional contributor to New England Diary, is a New England-based essayist, former Cape Cod Times columnist and former financial-services executive. This piece first ran in The New Boston Post.

Find a good governor to run for president

Adapted from an item in Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com

Hillary Clinton should fight her combative instincts and keepa low profile so as not to take the oxygen out of potential Democratic presidential candidates for 2020, such as  the highly effective and popular Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper and Delaware Gov. Jack Markell. Then there are New York Sen. Kristin Gillibrand and New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, both smart, articulate and fast on their feet politically.

And wouldn’t it be nice if the very able and popular Republican governor of Massachusetts, Charlie Baker, ran for his party's presidential nomination? Of course, in the current rendition of his part, he’d probably have little chance.

As a general rule, it’s better to elect someone who has run a state than someone who has just served in Congress. Executive experience in a political and public-policy environment is invaluable for would-be presidents. It’s easy to spout off as a legislator, but a lot tougher to oversee administration.  The record ofpeople running a state government gives voters quite a bit of useful information in how they might run the federal Executive Branch.

The public’s immune system needs a rest from the Clintons. The kids predictably loved her at Wellesley College’s commencement this year but I suspect that a large majority of the American electorate wants her to take a lower profile.

Mass. and N.H. top US News's "Best States'' rankings, winter and all

Apple orchard in Hollis, N.H. New England winters help keep out the worst bugs and tropical diseases.

Adapted from an item in Robert Whitcomb's 'Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com:

Yet again, after many decades of Sun Belt hype, we have another measure of how the generally northern and mostly Blue States are, by important metrics, the best states to live in. That’s largely because of their tradition of strong education and infrastructure. US News & World Report’s first ranking of the best states list in the top 10: Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Washington State, Iowa, Utah, Maryland, Colorado and Vermont. (Connecticut was 12th, Maine 18th and Rhode Island 21st.)

The publication said:

“Some states shine in health care. Some soar in education. Some excel in both – or in much more. The Best States ranking …draws on thousands of data points to measure how well states are performing for their citizens. In addition to health care and education, the metrics take into account a state’s economy, the opportunity it offers people, its roads, bridges, Internet and other infrastructure, its public safety and the integrity and health of state government.

“More weight was accorded to some state measures than others, based on a survey of what matters most to people. Health care and education were weighted most heavily. Then came the opportunity states offer their citizens, their crime & corrections and infrastructure. State economies followed closely in weighting, followed by measures of government administration. This explains why Massachusetts, ranking No. 1 in education and No. 2 in health care, occupies the overall No. 1 spot in the Best States rankings. And it explains why New Hampshire, ranking No. 1 in opportunity for its citizens, ranks No. 2 overall in the Best States rankings.’’

The low-tax (except for their regressive sales taxes) low-public-service Red States in the South generally did very poorly.

Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican and a very able executive who’s expected to run for re-election next year, said:         

“We have a lot of really smart people, we have a lot of great schools. That has led to a whole series of terrific what I would call ‘ecosystems’ around technology and health care and finance and education. And you put it all together, and in this day and age, in this kind of global economy and global world we live in, it’s a terrific mix.” Of course, Massachusetts has had some great institutions since the 17th Century; it had a running start.

Mr. Baker will probably get some credit for the ranking, but the essentials of the Bay State’s health have been in place for a long time.  Governors and U.S. presidents have remarkably little impact on the economic health of their jurisdictions;  there are far too many variables.

As for New Hampshire, it has the overwash of wealth from the very rich Greater Boston area, the Granite State’s good public education, political integrity, local  and state civic-mindedness, a tradition of  having many well-run small and medium-size companies and industrial craftsmanship. And as  befits a state that is mostly suburban, exurban and rural,  lower taxes than Massachusetts’s.

US News folks did note that Massachusetts, despite of, or because of, its very low unemployment rate, had too little “affordable housing’’ (whatever that means exactly) and very wide income inequality. But the latter is due largely to the vast wealth collected by the senior execs and shareholders of very successful enterprises founded in, based in or with major operations in the Bay State and the large number of well paidvphysicians, engineers, financial-services honchos and other very highly skilled professionals.

Another advantage of New England: It's so far north that tropical diseases rarely make it to the region. There are some advantages to having the cool snap we call "winter.''

Gary Sasse: Do four governors presage Republican renaissance in New England?

Calvin Coolidge, Massachusetts governor, and then vice president and president, was often seen as the quintessential old-fashioned, flinty New England Republican. In fact,  his views and his personality were complex and in many ways he was very modern.

New England is often described as a solidly Democrat region. When one looks at the numbers, it is easy to see why. Only one of New England’s 33 congressional seats is held by a Republican, and Democrats control eight of the 12 state legislative chambers. And yet as a result of last November’s general election, Republicans now serve as governors in four of the six New England states — Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont.

While nobody can predict the future with any certainty, all signs suggest that the 2018 gubernatorial races in both Connecticut and Rhode Island are eminently winnable. The ascendency of New England’s Republican governors has not gone unnoticed. A recent article in The Washington Post was headlined, “Governors lead a Republican renaissance in New England”. The question facing Republicans in the region is whether GOP victories at the gubernatorial level can usher in a new political order at other levels of government, as well.

Political success will require many things. Rather than talking about the economy in broad terms, for example, GOP governors must be ready to focus on specifics that place state government on the side of both working families and small business. Rather than being critical of social programs, Republican governors must lead and promote those that foster work, opportunity and self-sufficiency. Rather than imposing state mandates, Republican governors must deliver services based on the principles of choice and devolving responsibilities to communities.

Finally, New England’s GOP governors must contrast their “fix it” solutions for failing schools, unsafe streets, economic stagnation, over-taxation, costly regulation and cronyism to the Democrat’s identity politics and liberal overreach.

If there was ever a time to make these changes, it is now. Indeed, the economic dogmas of the New Deal have been insufficient in addressing the economic concerns of working families, recent graduates, and small businesses in New England today. From the rise of technology to the impact of globalization to the decline of manufacturing, the region has found itself lagging behind the rest of the country in its ability to compete.

A report released last month by the non-partisan New England Economic Partnership reflected this, finding that the region’s overall growth is expected to drop below the national average, and the region’s employment growth is expected to be below national employment growth through 2018.

The question facing Republicans in the region is whether GOP victories at the gubernatorial level can usher in a new political order at other levels of government, as well.

In light of these failures, it is not enough for Republicans to merely point out how Democratic policies have come up short. Instead, voters must be convinced that GOP initiatives can work and make a real difference in their lives. Massachusetts Gov.  Charlie Baker summed the situation up this way in an interview with The Washington Post: “Our job is to focus on what matters most to people. Is my neighborhood safe? Do I have a good job? Are the schools I send my kids to going to prepare them for the future.”

Maine GOP Chairman Richard Bennett agreed, saying that, “Republican governors are successful candidates when they roll up their sleeves and propose practical ways to fix things and not focus on ideology.” Put another way, Republicans win when they are viewed as “can do” problem solvers who are addressing the needs of the people, rather than the needs of elites, cronies and special interests.

To achieve this moving forward, GOP governors and gubernatorial candidates should adhere to the following fundamental best practices:

First, set a few key priorities and try not to be all things to all people. The National Governors Association advises “that success in the governorship depends first and foremost on focus.” The focal point must be a strategy to make the most productive use of people, capital and natural resources. States compete to have the most productive environment to keep and grow jobs.

Second, gain control of the center. A governor’s effectiveness depends on the cooperation and goodwill of others. As Governor Baker said in that same interview, “If you’re going to get into a debate or an argument, be soft on the people and hard on the issue.”   To accomplish things, it is essential to establish a good working relationship with the legislature. Conflicts are inevitable in partisan politics. How a governor manages these conflicts and controls the center can determine if his or her agenda is enacted.

Third, make effective use of the bully pulpit to mold opinion needed to garner public support for making tough decisions. What a governor can do, that no other state leader can do as well, is to tell the people where the state is, where it needs to be, and when it gets there. One of the most important powers a governor has in that regard is the power of communications. Effective and direct communication is critical, and broad popular support is essential to make the fundamental structural reforms that special interests and their legislative allies have long opposed.

Fourth, understand that good policy and good politics are linked. To achieve sustainable political success, New England GOP governors have an important role to play in party building. Voters will support Republican ideas if the party recruits excellent candidates, gets the message out and has the organization and resources to win the battle of ideas. In a 2006 essay in The Ripon Forum, then-Mississippi Gov.  Haley Barbour wrote that voters do not get involved with political parties and elections because of the delight of knocking on doors and raising money. They engage and support candidates who will propose and implement programs to help their families prosper consistent with their values.

It is problematic to predict the outcome of elections. However, if New England’s Republican governors can make a lasting difference in the economic and social well being of their citizens, then we may in fact witness a revival of a strong two-party system in New England. And perhaps someday soon, blue New England will turn red.

Gary Sasse is the founding director of the Hassenfeld Institute for Public Leadership at Bryant University. Previously, he served as diirector of the Rhode Island Department of Administration and Department of Revenue. From 1997 to 2007, he served as Executive Director for the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council, a public policy research organization. This piece was originally published in the Ripon Forum

James P. Freeman: Charlie Baker's quiet reinvention of state government

As the national Republican Party self-immolates as a consequence of its traumatic homage to the incendiary and self-destructive Donald Trump, Massachusetts Republicans should seek solace in knowing that Gov. Charlie Baker is quieting reinventing state government and, in the process, creating a model of New Republicanism.

Baker – and Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito – are governing in style and substance that is moderate, pragmatic and unpretentious (there are no hints at being a “compassionate conservative,” for instance) which, even in the firmly progressive commonwealth, is highly effective. It should be considered a new form of Republicanism and a model of success -- especially for the few national Republicans vocalizing an oath of fidelity to the party’s core values.

Even The Boston Globe has taken notice. In a front page story on Aug. 8, it noted that Baker has -- “without grandstanding for the media or waging partisan battles – successfully courted the overwhelmingly Democratic Legislature, declaring victory on many of the major issues he’s tackled in the past 19 months with rarely a word of opposition from longtime lawmakers.”

Citing “no bold agenda but with a potent combination of high-level government experience, a strong grasp of complicated public policies, and just plain charm,” Baker, remarkably, has emerged as “the dominant figure on Beacon Hill.”

Among his achievements: slowly (it took decades to reach this point; dozens of legislative sessions and eight governors since the1970s) repairing and reforming the troubled MBTA; addressing the opioid crisis (in March he signed into law limits on opioid prescriptions); increasing tax credits for low-income workers; creating fairness in the workplace with equal pay for comparable work; reducing the state workforce as a means of balancing the budget; and, just the other week, celebrating completion of a $1 billion economic development bill.

And the work continues…

Baker-Polito, a political synchronized diving team, are now plunging into the swampy green pool of state regulation in search of efficiency and efficacy, not accolades. As reported by The New Boston Post, their administration is “eliminating nearly 15 percent of Massachusetts state regulations and amending at least another 40 percent in a top-to-bottom overhaul aimed at making state government more efficient and business-friendly.” These are waters that the previous administration, under former Gov. Deval Patrick, never dared wading into, given the progressive proclivity that more and greater government regulation is better and best for its citizens.

When the governor launched this regulatory initiative, he laid out three options for all executive office departments to consider during this methodical promulgation process: either retain, amend or rescind regulations. Those deemed unnecessary and obstructive in making the commonwealth a “better place to live, work and grow a business,” would be amended or rescinded, according to Brendan Moss, Baker’s deputy communications director.

Thus far, 336 regulations are slated to be amended and 122 are to be rescinded, with hundreds more under the hot white spot light of review. As Moss further explains, “members of the administration met with municipalities, businesses, and individuals at over 100 listening sessions across the state and we look forward to finalizing this comprehensive review in the near future.”

Baker’s best act of 2016 is, actually, inaction. He rightly decided not to immerse himself into the presidential contest; he neither embraced Trump or attended the convention in Cleveland, thereby immunizing himself – unlike so many so-called “principled” Republicans -- from association with the embarrassing national ticket. Instead, he has quietly gone about the people’s business. According to veteran observers, reports The Globe, Baker “listens and wants to understand everyone’s views – and is willing to adjust his own.”

As a testament to Baker’s sensible reforms and keen political instincts, he is, for the second year in a row, the most popular governor in the country. For many this development would have been simply unimaginable just two years ago during the gubernatorial race. But for those listening in 2014 it was inevitable.

Two years ago, while at a campaign stop at The Pilot House in Sandwich, Mass., he spoke of the practical agenda he intended to implement, relying heavily on a theme of restoration and repair. As far as his latest projects -- reducing the saturation of codes, rules and regulations along with economic development – they are rooted in his pronouncements from 2014. Back then he said that Massachusetts “is a complicated place to do business” and that Bay Staters need “to think differently about economic development.” Baker is proof that one can be successful in linking campaigning with governing. A lesson lost on many Republicans today.   

With much work to do (such as state debt and pension reforms), one fact will, however, emerge by the end of the day on Nov. 8: Charlie Baker will be seen as the top of the presidential class of 2020. And perhaps more importantly, his brand of governing – and the heavy lifting of effecting sensible policymaking -- will be seen as a model for the national party and should be emulated by members of the national party to ensure that the Grand Old Party retains its grandeur.

As Labor Day 2016 approaches, Baker’s New Republicanism must be a novel concept to those Republicans still pledging allegiance (without a trace of buyer’s remorse) to its two national candidates, who are positioning themselves, ever so effortlessly and recklessly, for massive electoral losses.

James P. Freeman is a New England-based writer and former columnist with The Cape Cod Times. 

Charles Chieppo: Undergoing treatment for sick sick-leave policies

BOSTON

The aftershocks are still being felt in Massachusetts from the case of a state university president who received a payout for unused sick and vacation time of nearly $270,000 upon his retirement last year -- in addition to an annual pension of more than $183,000 and a $100,000 consulting gig. Proposed fixes are taking shape that, though imperfect, are steps in the right direction.

The problem is very real for many state and local governments. In Massachusetts alone, as of last year taxpayers faced about $500 million in liability for unused sick and vacation time.

The outcry over former Bridgewater State University President Dana Mohler-Faria's golden payout has already had an impact. Mohler-Faria refunded the state for 15 weeks of improperly accrued vacation time and agreed to terminate his lucrative consulting contract.

For the longer term. Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican, has proposed legislation that would limit executive-branch employees' accrued sick time for to 1,000 hours, or about six months of work. The about 5,800 executive-branch workers who already have accrued more than that would be grandfathered, though their sick time would be capped at the hours accrued at the time of the legislation's passage.

Another bill, this one filed by Democratic state Rep. Colleen Garry, is tougher, limiting payouts to 15 percent of an employee's annual salary. Regardless of what you might think of her proposal, Garry made a point that public officials everywhere should heed, saying that government should "pay public employees fairly during their working years and not push compensation into retirement packages."

Mohler-Faria was one of 10 state and community-college officials who received six-figure vacation and sick-time payments between 2011 and 2015. Just this week, the Board of Higher Education eliminated the practice of rolling unused vacation time into a sick-leave bank and will gradually reduce the maximum vacation allowance to 50 days, still over 50 percent more than the limit for most state employees.

The University of Massachusetts, which is not governed by the Board of Higher Education, had previously limited accrued time off to 960 hours for non-union employees, but it remains unlimited for union workers -- yet another reminder of why post-retirement benefits should never be subject to collective bargaining.

The Board of Higher Education's new policies eliminate the worst abuses, but challenges remain when it comes to reforming policies around accrual of unused sick and vacation time. For one thing, whatever emerges from Massachusetts' legislative process is likely to cover only-executive branch employees.

Perhaps state and local government officials everywhere should be guided by Gov. Baker's simple point: "Sick leave is a benefit designed to deal with health and family issues, not a retirement bonus. Bringing … sick-leave accrual policy in line with other private- and public-sector employers just makes sense and is the fiscally responsible thing to do." What a concept.

Charles Chieppo  (Charlie_Chieppo@hks.harvard.edu) is a research fellow at the Ash Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School. This piece first ran at governing.com.

James P. Freeman: Mass. in '15: A state of hope and (fiscal) peril

It is right there
Betwixt and between
The orchard bare
And the orchard green

— Robert Frost from “Peril of Hope”

With an eerie prescience, the Jan.  9, 2015, front page of The Boston Globe captured perfectly the mixture of fear and anticipation associated with the hope a new year brings. Two headlines above the fold – “Boston picked to bid for Olympics” and “Baker promises firm fixes, sensitive touch” – would set the tone for 2015 in Greater Boston.

Boston 2024 Partnership, the consortium of business and political interests (so-called “thought leaders”) to bring the 2024 summer Olympic games to The Hub, underestimated Bostonians’ capacity for common sense and overestimated Bostonians’ tolerance for large municipal projects. (Didn’t anyone remind planners of the Big Dig experience?) Residents rightly feared costs would be socialized and any profits would be privatized by special interests. The bid was rescinded in July.

Charlie Baker was sworn in as Massachusetts’ 72nd governor within hours of the Olympic announcement. No politician campaigned on the Olympics but it consumed precious time and energy from more mundane and serious matters, such as the opioid emergency, which rages on unabated (1,256 people – likely more this year – fatally overdosed in Massachusetts in 2014). Alarmingly, more people die  in Massachusetts from overdoses than from car crashes.

Boston broke the record for snowiest winter on record, with 108.6 inches. But the MBTA was broken long before 2015 from decades of incompetent government oversight. With melting irony, man could not make the trains run during the blizzards but a train actually ran without a man this December in Braintree, due to “operator error.” Baker must restore the entire system to ensure a second term.

The New England Patriots earned their fourth Super Bowl championship in February, amidst the faux-scandal of Deflategate (which is now being taught as a class at University of New Hampshire). A federal judge determined that the NFL went too far in suspending quarterback Tom Brady. In May, some suggested that Salem State University went too far in paying him $170,000 for a one hour “lecture.” But don’t tell that to the local media, which cover the team by way of sports jingoism, not journalism.

It took a jury in April nearly 26 minutes just to read the “guilty” verdict on all 30 counts against unrepentant terrorist Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, in the Boston Marathon bombing trial.

Irish rockers U2, who lived through the terror of “The Troubles,” charmed the town with four sold-out concerts this summer, as “#BostonStrong” was featured prominently on a massive vidi-wall during their encores.

Pedro Martinez was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame and David Ortiz announced this post season he would retire in 2016. Their recognition and retirement mark the perilous end of an era of Boston baseball dominance. Perhaps no other players were better catalysts of hope for a despondent Red Sox Nation before 2004.

Two films about Boston’s ugly underbelly proved to be, in many respects, largely for Boston; another cathartic exercise in order to exorcise criminality. “Spotlight” chronicled the unspeakable and unimaginable clergy sex abuse cover up, and “Black Mass” showcased Whitey Bulger. Each affirmed that evil can reside both in men of the cloth and the cleaver.

After nearly a century, Cambridge-based Converse unveiled the long-awaited Chuck Taylor II sneakers.

After 20 years since the first charter school was opened in Massachusetts, with some municipalities having reached their quotas, many want a reset, a Charter 2.0.

Atty. Gen. Maura Healey, prodigal progressive, concluded that more regulation (of course) would be best for Boston-based fantasy sports league website DraftKings (and FanDuel). But former Gov. Deval Patrick, promiscuous progressive, discovered free enterprise by joining the investment firm Bain Capital.

In November, the financial news Web site 247wallst.com ranked Massachusetts as the best place to live among the 50 states. General Electric thinks so, as it imagines what a world headquarters might look like in Boston as it contemplates relocation from Connecticut for lower taxes and closer proximity to the area’s innovation ecosystem.

This autumn, the Oxford Dictionaries determined that its word of the year was, in fact, not a word, but a pictograph. The “Face with Tears of Joy” emoji according to Oxford lexicographers, “best reflected the ethos, mood and preoccupation of 2015.”

In retrospect, then, Frost got it partially right. Time — and 2015 — might best be defined as an alloy of peril and hope.

James P. Freeman is a New England-based writer and a former Cape Cod Times columnist. This comes via the courtesy of The New Boston Post. 

For some of his previous columns, read:

- See more at: http://newbostonpost.com/2015/12/30/the-year-2015-and-the-peril-of-hope/#sthash.VrgyiQQu.dpuf

Suzanne M. Bump: The myth of privatization as a panacea

BOSTON When it comes to regulating the privatization of government services, it seems that one person's mindless bureaucratic obstacle is another's essential accountability mechanism. Thus it is in Massachusetts, where an exemption from a state law governing privatization is being sought in the name of fixing Boston's troubled mass-transit system.

The policy debate over privatization in Massachusetts, which raged during the 1990s and 2000s, calmed down during the past two terms of a Democratic governor but returned to war-cry mode when the new Republican governor, Charlie Baker, proposed repealing the law as it pertains to the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA).

As the state official charged with enforcement of what is known as the "Pacheco law," and from that perch rather than from the legislative battlefield, I offer these thoughts in contrast to those

While it is true that the intent of the law was to slow down outsourcing, it is not the blunt instrument depicted by its opponents. As I have noted elsewhere in response to other critics of the Pacheco law, it prevents agencies from basing outsourcing decisions on political philosophy by forcing them to explore alternatives to their current models and then base their choices on costs, desired outcomes, competitive bidding and value. A privatization plan can be approved when an agency is able to demonstrate that a private company can perform a government function at a lower cost without compromising quality, safety or effectiveness.

And contrary to the assertions of critics, the law has not made privatization all but impossible. Since its passage in 1993, 12 of the 15 privatization plans reviewed by the state auditor holding the office at the time have been approved, and of the three that weren't approved two had been advanced by the MBTA.

The law's critics say that the standard for calculating the public-private comparison is at fault, but that was not at issue with the MBTA's proposals. Privatization of bus-shelter maintenance was rejected because of the MBTA's inability to say how many shelters would be covered by the contract, making it impossible to determine a fair price for the work. Proposals to privatize two bus operations and maintenance facilities were also turned down because the MBTA could not demonstrate that privatization would actually save money or improve quality, since its plan also called for shifting some work to other MBTA facilities. The MBTA could have sharpened its thinking and its pencils and re-submitted plans that could have passed muster, but it chose not to.

While my review of these proposals does not weigh this factor, I hope that policy-makers also would consider how effective the MBTA's oversight of any new privatization contracts is likely to be. Its recent record is one unlikely to inspire confidence. Audits subsequent to the 1996 privatization of the MBTA's real-estate-management operations, for example, questioned millions of dollars of payments to the private company performing the work that were either improperly billed or went to projects that were never completed.

The list goes on. Other audits have uncovered huge cost over-runs and delays in MBTA station-modernization projects; $15 million worth of undocumented fuel payments to the private operators of the MBTA's RIDE paratransit program; and a $94 million automated fare-collection system that for five years could not accurately count the day's receipts.

That kind of performance should give those who reflexively advocate privatization a lot to think about. It's important to keep in mind that nothing is free: When a government operation or service is outsourced, the taxpayers will still be paying the bills. They deserve the kind of accountability that laws like Massachusetts's are designed to provide.

Suzanne M. Bump is the state auditor of Massachusetts.

On Newbury show today

  New England Diary overseer Robert Whitcomb  chatted with Bruee Newbury on the latter's "Talk of the Town'' show on WADK-A.M. (1540) this morning.

On the show, which you can hear on wadk.com, they talked about the Providence International Arts Festival; the tendency of rich people to give money to already rich institutions such as Harvard so they can wrap themselves in institutional prestige; the gas tax and repairing the roads and bridges with truck toll money, and Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo and Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker lunching today at Angelo's Restaurant  on Providence's Federal Hill.

James P. Freeman: Baker's budget and the culture wars

   “I’m running outta change

There’s a lot of things if I could

I’d rearrange”

-- U2, “The Fly”

In his recent collection of columns, Mark Steyn offers what should be a new political maxim: “You can’t have conservative government in a liberal culture, and that’s the position the Republican Party is in.”

Rather acutely, that idea resonates in the commonwealth. Here and across the liberal hinterland “culture trumps politics,” observes Steyn. Surely Gov. Charlie Baker, no conservative but a pragmatic Republican, is discovering this with his first budget for fiscal 2016, given the howls of disapproval upon its release.

It helps explain why undue attention and undeserved amplification of cultural hubris distort and diminish attendant serious fiscal – hence, political – matters in government, particularly on Beacon Hill. It is a morally superior but overly sensitive culture that detects minutiae in certain behaviors deemed offensive that, in its sole judgement, retards greater progress, all in the name of gauzy tolerance and acceptance. It not only demands greater access to progress, but expects the costs to attain that progress be borne by others (known as “the law of concentrated benefits and diffuse costs”).

Consider what goes viral and reaches “trending” status today just in Massachusetts.

A study conducted by Northeastern University of just 27 pairs of undergraduates playing Trivial Pursuit discerned “benevolent sexism” by male participants acting chivalrous. A Massachusetts inmate continues to demand “gender reassignment” surgery be paid by taxpayers. A Lexington high school has to think twice before hosting a dance with the exclusionary theme “American Pride.” A careless – ultimately harmless – social media posting by state Rep. Timothy Whelan was immediately found to be “racist.”

Former Gov. Deval Patrick was a master technician at blurring the lines between culture and politics when he said in 2013 that national healthcare reform was a “values statement.” What exactly are the values in Patrick’s progressive legacy? Chronic, uncontrollable fiscal dipsomania in the form of high debt, deficits, unfunded pension liabilities and taxes. Not to mention a bizarre philosophical underpinning whereby government’s role is to merely expand rather than simply fix. Like transportation infrastructure. As surely commuters and Boston 2024 organizers are understanding.

Against this feverish backdrop is the chilly backdraft greeting Baker’s new budget. Today he is confronting a $768 million shortfall in the current fiscal year that ends June 30 and a projected $1.8 billion shortage in 2016, legacy gifts from Patrick. In spite of these developments, Baker calls for $1 billion in new expenditures or 3 percent in overall spending next year, including a 20 percent hike in transportation funding. Thus far, taxes and fees will not rise nor is it expected that he will draw down on the stabilization fund. He is relying upon tax amnesty, capital gains tax revenue and targeted surgical cuts in appropriations to balance the budget.

“We’re going to have a big debate with the legislature about our priorities,” Baker says.

But as an act of enduring fiscal stability, nevertheless, he must realize this budget is still dressed up like a car crash. However, it is the start of restoring discipline to the process. Everyone must realize, with his experience in financial management, that he will employ a strategic view of budgeting, relieving the commonwealth of perennial stop-gap measures.

The Health and Human Services Department budget is fast approaching one half of all state spending, which is unsustainable. Romneycare, its largest line item, was hailed in 2006 by caring classes. But it is neither universal nor cost-effective.

Which brings us to the professed faux-outrage masqueraded as constructive criticism by self-important interest groups, ironically eager for greater community, understanding and accustomed to excess; but not used to meager constraints. Today’s culture knows no bounds. And budgets limit and arrest impulses of supposed limitless possibilities, among the hallmarks and drivers of progressivism and pan-culturalism.

State aid to public school districts would actually increase by 2.4 percent (or $105 million) and to state public colleges and universities by 3.6 percent. Tell that to Massachusetts Teachers Association President Barbara Madeloni. The budget is, she claims, “troubling for its lack of vision and absence of meaningful investments in education and other vital community services.”

As regards Hollywood – the ultimate arbiter and distributor of culture – the elimination of the state film tax credit is entirely defensible. According to the  state Department of Revenue, since 2006, it has cost the state about $118,000 per industry job created. There are 5,700 workers involved in the film and television industry.

If travel and tourism comprise the third largest industry in the commonwealth, why should the state subsidize it at all? Baker rightly reduces by $8 million its funding and cuts assistance to regional tourism councils by 90 percent. Predictably, Wendy Northcross, CEO of the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce and chair of the  state Regional Tourism Council, expressed “shock” at the reductions. “Marketing works. Advertising works. To go backwards at this time doesn’t seem logical given the needs of the state.” And state Rep. Sarah Peake – whose business is an indirect beneficiary of such marketing – found the cuts “disturbing, short-sighted and misguided.”

Baker also proposes saving $4.7 million by replacing state-employed mental health crisis teams with contractors. Despite $727 million (a 1.7 percent increase) allocated for the state Department of Mental Health, the savings, in the words of a board member of a local mental health advocacy group, is “bad fiscal policy.”

Remember the federal sequester requiring 1-2 percent reductions in spending across certain bureaucracies? That was described as devastating and draconian. Today’s new austerity – barely anchored in fiscal realism – is not even as severe by comparison.

The new governor seems willing and able to address the most rudimentary structural and operational fiscal dilemmas now and, more importantly, for the future. For the precious few realists left in the commonwealth, take comfort. Baker’s budget is the beginning of a predictable miracle against untethered progressivism and unbridled cultural extravagance.

James P. Freeman is a Cape Cod-based writer

Tim Faulkner: Will Baker embrace solar power?

By TIM FAULKNER/ecoRI News staff Municipal official across Massachusetts want Gov.-elect Charlie Baker to keep solar energy a priority when he takes office next month. Last week, the environmental advocacy group Environment Massachusetts released a letter signed by 340 officials from 135 cities and towns asking Baker to support solar energy, a sector they say improved dramatically under outgoing-Gov. Deval Patrick.

The letter, dated Dec. 9, was signed by officials from 18 of the 20 largest cities in the state, including mayors Jonathan F. Mitchell of New Bedford and William A. Flanagan of Fall River.

Baker hasn’t yet responded to the letter, nor did he respond to an ecoRI News inquiry, but Environment Massachusetts is upbeat. “We delivered the letter to Baker's transition team and had a positive conversation about the benefits that solar has brought to Massachusetts,” said Ben Hellerstein, campaign organizer for Environment Massachusetts.

On the energy front, Baker has so far selected Rep. Matthew Beaton (R-Shrewsbury), as the secretary of the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, the top environmental post in the state. Beaton will oversee six state agencies, including the Department of Energy Resources and the Department of Environmental Protection. He owns a green-design and energy-efficiency consulting business for home construction.

The trade journal Solar Industry recently reported on the high praise Patrick has received for increasing the state’s solar capacity from 3.7 megawatts in 2007 to 580 megawatts today. Massachusetts now generates the fifth-most solar power in the country.

The Green Communities Act and the Global Warming Solutions Act, both passed in 2008, are credited for creating the programs and incentives that propelled the state's solar industry. In fact, according to Environment Massachusetts, the state's solar-energy capacity has grown 127 percent in the past three years. The sector employees about 12,000 workers, according to the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center. Southeastern Massachusetts has experienced the most significant growth — 22 percent — since 2010.

Environment Massachusetts wants the new governor to embrace the goal of generating 20 percent of state power from solar energy by 2025. Currently, less than 2 percent of the state’s power comes from solar. The organization estimates the state has some 700,000 rooftops suited for solar panels. Combined with landfills and other sites, solar power has the potential to double the state’s electricity demand, according to the group.

The federal National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) says falling prices will help solar continue its popularity. Photovoltaic (PV) system prices dropped 12 percent to 19 percent nationally in 2013 and are expected to fall as much as 12 percent this year. NREL projects that if pricing trends continue, PV prices may soon reach grid parity, or even pricing, without federal or state subsidies.

John O. Harney/Carolyn Morwick: Taking stock of N.E. mid-terms

  This comes courtesy of our friends at the New England Board of Higher Education.

BOSTON

The recent midterm elections brought New England two new governors. Rhode Island elected its first woman chief exec in Gina Raimondo (D). Massachusetts elected Charlie Baker (R), a former Harvard Pilgrim CEO and official in the Weld and Cellucci administrations. Otherwise, the New England corner offices cautiously welcomed back incumbents: Democrats Dannel Malloy in Connecticut, Maggie Hassan in New Hampshire and Peter Shumlin in Vermont, and Republican Paul LePage in Maine.

In higher education, a national pickup in Republican governorships and legislative chambers “will result in lawmakers placing an enhanced focus on state-provided inputs (funding) and the institutionally generated outcomes of public colleges and universities (degree production, graduation rates, etc.),” according to the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU). “Fiscally conservative lawmakers will ask what the state is receiving back from its investment in higher education, and how students, graduates and employers are benefitting in the process. Performance-based funding and other metric-driven accountability systems will receive continued attention.”

The national newspaper Education Week offered a poppier rundown of the midterms and education policy, noting for example, that "the teacher unions had a really tough night," and "Arne Duncan and the Obama team at the U.S. Department of Education are in for a rough ride."

Ultimately, New England's winners may envy their vanquished opponents who will be spared the tasks of governing in an age of sneaky budget gaps, job market mismatches, an aging population and growing uncertainty in the region’s once-untouchable industries: the so-called “eds and meds.”

Connecticut. Connecticut voters re-elected Malloy over Republican Tom Foley in a rerun of the 2010 election. Nancy Wyman (D) was re-elected lieutenant governor. Before becoming governor, Malloy was mayor of Stamford for 14 years—the longest serving mayor in the city’s history. Before that, he was assistant district attorney in Brooklyn, New York.

In the Connecticut General Assembly, the House and Senate stayed Democratic, although Republicans picked up 10 seats in the House. Senate President Don Williams retired and joined Connecticut’s largest teachers union. Current Senate Majority Leader Martin Looney is expected to succeed Williams as Senate president. In the House, Speaker Brendan Sharkey was re-elected for another term, For the first time, GOP lawmakers chose a woman to be minority leader with Rep. Themis Klarides replacing former Minority Leader Lawrence Cafero, who did not seek re-election.

Following his reelection, Malloy ordered nearly $48 million in emergency budget cuts, including about $7 million to public colleges and universities to help close a projected $100 million deficit.

In his first term as governor, Malloy reorganized the public higher-education system, making massive cuts to the system. He subsequently restored most of the cuts to the system’s state universities and community colleges by funding Transform CSCU for more than $125 million, which was later cut.

Malloy also succeeded in passing additional initiatives in his first term, including "Go Back to Get Ahead,'' a program designed to help students who left college without finishing their degree, to return to the classroom. In an effort to make higher education accessible to all Connecticut residents, the state was among the first to pass a version of the DREAM Act, which provides that undocumented students will have access to an affordable higher education.

Malloy also secured $1.5 billion to expand educational opportunities, research and innovation in the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) disciplines over the next decade at the University of Connecticut. He received the support of state lawmakers to subsidize a genomic medical research institute on the campus of the UConn’s Health Center. The institute, which recently opened, will be operated by the Bar Harbor, Maine-based Jackson Laboratory to transform medicine by improving healthcare, lowering costs and increasing lifespans. The partnership between Jackson Laboratory and UConn’s Health Center and the research institute is the basis for a statewide plan to build a bioscience industry cluster. Malloy has predicted that the bioscience cluster will create some 4,000 bioscience jobs alone while spinning off 2,000 more jobs in related fields.

Malloy has been a strong supporter of precision manufacturing vocational programs at three community colleges to better equip workers and businesses for success in the manufacturing industry.

To reduce student debt, he has proposed creating a student loan tax credit to allow residents to take up to a $2,500 tax credit on student loan interest, allowing students to refinance student loans at lower rates and increasing the Governor’s Scholarship Program to give high-achieving students additional student aid.

Voters made no changes in Connecticut’s congressional delegation.

Maine. Maine voters reelected LePage to a second term. LePage, the former mayor of Waterville, Maine, and a former member of the Waterville City Council, also worked as general manager of a discount store, Marden’s Surplus and Salvage.

Asked at a debate about deep cuts at the University of Southern Maine, LePage said the University of Maine System “needs to reinvent itself.” He suggested looking at the University of Maine at Fort Kent for its outreach to high-school students as a model. He also said he thinks the state’s community colleges should focus on trades as opposed to liberal arts.

On student debt, LePage has expressed interest in the “Pay it Forward” model which originated in the state of Oregon. However, the plan has never been implemented in Oregon due to a lack of funding. On remedial education, LePage noted that 55 percent of students who enter community colleges need remedial education in math and English. He supports a proficiency-based diploma.

LePage’s midterm challenger, U.S. Rep. Mike Michaud (D), proposed “Maine Made” which would build Maine’s economy partly by making the sophomore year at any school in the University of Maine system tuition-free. It would cost $15 million a year, which Michaud suggested, would help address the college debt issue. He also proposed lowering in-state tuition by 25 percent.

Challenger Eliot Cutler, an Independent candidate for governor, proposed a “Pay it Forward, Pay it Back” plan. Students would attend a public two-year or four-year college tuition-free and pay a small portion of their income for approximately 20 years into a state fund. The state would have to borrow money initially but eventually, the plan would become self-sustaining.

Democrats maintain control of the Maine House of Representatives while Republicans control the Senate. Maine is the only state where the Legislature elects the constitutional officers of attorney general, secretary of state and the treasurer (though a rejected 2013 bill called for the statewide election of the secretary of state and treasurer every two years and the attorney general every four years). Legislators elected former state Rep. Terry Hayes, a Democrat-turned independent, state treasurer. Democrats re-elected Secretary of State Matt Dunlap and Atty. Gen. Janet Mills.

Michaud’s old Maine 2nd district congressional seat will now be held by Bruce Poliquin (R), who defeated New England Board of Higher Education chairwoman, and former state  senator,  Emily Cain (D). Poliquin will serve on the House Financial Services Committee.

Massachusetts. Bay State voters elected Baker (R) to be governor over Atty. Gen. Martha Coakley (D) in the narrowest race for Massachusetts governor in the past half century.

Baker appointed Steven Kadish to be his chief of staff. Kadish was senior vice president and chief operating officer of Northeastern University and executive vice president and chief financial officer at Dartmouth College.

Karyn Polito (R) was elected lieutenant governor and ran Baker’s transition team. Baker also appointed education reformer and charter school advocate Jim Peyser to lead his transition team. Peyser is managing director of New Schools City Funds in Boston and former chair of the state Board of Education. Baker appointed University of Massachusetts Lowell Chancellor Marty Meehan and Phoenix Charter Academy Network founder Beth Anderson to chair the transition committee on schools.

Baker wants to pursue more online learning, three-year degree programs and expanded co-op programs as part of a larger plan to reduce the cost of higher education while increasing access for students. He said he would direct the state Board of Higher Education to establish a competitive grant program for public colleges and high schools to set up or expand co-op programs where students can earn academic credits through courses and work experiences with local employers which he says would produce a cost savings of 25 percent.

Less than a month after the election, The Boston Globe called on Baker to “not only protect the Commonwealth’s competitive advantage in tech, but address regulatory roadblocks and cultural issues that could limit the sector’s future job-creation potential.”

Baker will succeed two-term Gov. Deval Patrick, who did not run, and according to reports in the Globe, is considering an offer to be a scholar at MIT. (The path from New England governors'  offices to academia is well-worn by Michael Dukakis (Mass.), Walter Peterson (N.H.), Bruce Sundlun (R.I.)  and others.)

In another highlight of the Massachusetts gubernatorial race, Evan Falchuk, who ran as the United Independent Party candidate, earned nearly 72,000 votes—more than the 3 percent needed to be recognized as an official party in terms of election and fundraising laws.

In the Massachusetts legislature, Democrats continue to control the House and Senate. Republicans added seven new lawmakers in the House, increasing the number of Republicans to 34. The Massachusetts Senate added two Republicans, increasing their ranks to six. Senators will elect a new chamber president to replace Sen. Therese Murray (D) who did not seek re-election. The favorite is Sen. Stan Rosenberg (D), whose district includes the college-rich Pioneer Valley.

Massachusetts 6th congressional District will now be represented by Seth Moulton (D), replacing fellow Democrat John Tierney who served for 18 years, including a stretch as New England’s only member of the House Education and Workforce Committee.

New Hampshire. Granite State voters re-elected Hassan for a second term. Hassan’s late father, Robert C. Wood, was a president of UMass and U.S. secretary of housing and urban development. Her husband is the principal of Phillips Exeter Academy. She will face the challenge of working with a legislature controlled by Republicans. The House elected Shawn Jasper as speaker. A coalition of Democrats and Republicans came together to reject the choice of the Republican caucus, former speaker Will O’Brien after a series of votes.

When the legislative session gets underway in January, Hassan will face an uphill climb in funding public higher education. Funding for the University System of New Hampshire was cut by 50 percent in fiscal years 2012 and 2013. In September 2014, University System Trustees voted unanimously to submit a funding request to the governor and state legislators that restores state support to 2009 levels. In exchange, the System would freeze tuition for two more years. The system is requesting $100 million in 2016 and $105 million in 2017.

Hassan also restored funding to the New Hampshire Community Colleges, which allowed tuition to be cut by 5 percent. Hassan said the state needs to focus on keeping New Hampshire students in the state in the face of students opting for less expensive higher education options out-of-state.

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen defeated challenger Scott Brown, who had earlier beat Coakley to represent Massachusetts in the Senate, but then lost to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D). New Hampshire’s 1st congressional district will be represented by Frank Guinta (R), who defeated incumbent Carol Shea-Porter (D).

Rhode Island. Former State Treasurer Raimondo was elected to be the state’s first woman governor. A Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, Raimondo clerked for U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood and served as senior vice president of fund development at Village Ventures before co-founding Point Judith Capita. In 2010, she was elected general treasurer of Rhode Island, where she implemented comprehensive pension reform.

During the campaign, Raimondo proposed:

• Creating a new scholarship fund for any academically qualified student who lacks financial resources and wants to pursue a post-secondary degree at one of Rhode Island’s public colleges. To be eligible, a student must have a grade point average of 3.0 or higher. The scholarship would cover all tuition and fee expenses after all other financial aid is applied. The scholarship fund is based on The Tennessee Promise, which offers “last dollar” scholarships that are intended to bridge the gap after all financial resources are exhausted. The cost is estimated to be between $10 million and $15 million a year. The new funds would come from the Rhode Island Higher Education Assistance Authority’s reserves.
• Creating a loan-forgiveness program for Rhode Island students who have graduated from one of the state’s colleges or universities with student debt and continue to live in the state. Business will have access to a talent pool in exchange for paying off some of the students' debt. The program is based on New Hampshire’s “Stay Work Play” initiative.
• Opening an office at the Community College of Rhode (CCRI) dedicated to bringing businesses to the table to identify the needs of employers and design curricula that reflect those needs, while equipping the college with programs, equipment and facilities needed to put students on a pathway to a job in a high-demand industry.
• Doubling the graduation rate at CCRI by working with administrators, counselors and educators to identify why the school’s graduation rate is so low. A model initiative to accomplish the latter is the Accelerated Study in Associates Programs (ASAP) at the City University of New York (CUNY).

Raimondo has also proposed establishing an innovation institute that would translate ideas from Rhode Island colleges and universities into products manufactured in the state.

Daniel McKee (D) was elected lieutenant governor, succeeding  Elizabeth Roberts (D), who was term-limited. In the Rhode Island General Assembly, Democrats maintain control of the House and Senate. Republicans picked up six seats in the House, while the Senate remained unchanged.

Vermont. While Shumlin won the governor's race over Republican Scott Milne, he did not receive 50 percent of the vote. The Vermont constitution provides that in such instances where no candidate achieves 50 percent the election is decided by the Vermont General Assembly, which is overwhelmingly Democratic. The formal election of governor will be the first order of business as lawmakers begin a new session.

Lawmakers and the governor will have to tackle an unanticipated shortfall of $17 million. This follows a previous shortfall during the past summer of $31 million. State agencies will have to reduce their budgets by an additional $15.5 million. Revenues are off by approximately $12 million, according to Secretary of Administration Jeb Spaulding, who coincidentally was tapped to become the next chancellor of Vermont State Colleges (VSC).

There is little doubt that Shumlin will have to rework his agenda for the coming year. In higher education, the governor initially proposed a $2.5 million increase in the allocation to the University of Vermont, VSC and the Vermont Student Assistance Corp—a move which would have kept tuition rates at Vermont public institutions frozen for the current academic year and expanded of dual-enrollment and early-college programs. However, in August of this year, the funding increase was eliminated due to a budget shortfall, and appropriations for VSC and UVM will be level-funded.

Plans to address student debt are likely to be put on hold. Previously, Shumlin suggested the possibility of students getting two tuition free years of college. The savings would come from two areas: college dual enrollment and a scholars program that provides for reimbursement of tuition for students going into STEM fields.

Ballot questions. Among New England ballot questions, Massachusetts voters chose not to repeal the casino law. They also approved guaranteed paid sick days for workers, echoing national election trends that saw large Republican wins coupled awkwardly with victories for populist causes such as minimum wage hikes.

Rhode Island voters OK’d bond issues for a new engineering building at URI, while Maine voters OK’d $50 million in state borrowing included in six bond questions—one to build a research facility devoted to research on genetic solutions to cancer and age-related diseases. LePage, however, has delayed release of voter-approved bonds in the past.

In D.C.: Nationally, Republicans won a majority in the U.S. Senate. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), a former governor of Tennessee and U.S. secretary of education in the George H. W. Bush administration, is expected to chair the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee. Rep. John Kline (R-MN) is expected to continue chairing the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. He has proposed reducing the number of questions on the FAFSA to two and prioritizing deregulation of higher education. Republicans are likely to fight the administration’s plans to create a “college ratings system” and use a “gainful employment rule” to target the for-profit sector.

The Education Dive newsletter recently posted a piece on "10 ways a Republican-led Congress could impact higher ed in 2015."

The National Association of State Boards of Education offered a state-by-state analysis of changes in membership of state boards of education, noting, among other things, Connecticut Education Commissioner Stefan Pryor’s August announcement that he wouldn’t seek a second term.

The messaging and spinning is partly done. The fat lady has sung. Now it's time to govern.

John O. Harney is executive editor of The New England Journal of Higher Education. Carolyn Morwick handles government and community relations at the New England Board of Higher Education and is former director of the Caucus of New England State Legislatures.

James P. Freeman: Miracle on Cape Cod?

Congressional candidate John Chapman bristles at the suggestion that the most exciting electoral race in Massachusetts is somehow unexplainable, unexpected, surprising and not “exactly clear.” Rather, to him, it is fundamentally explainable, expected, unsurprising and crystal clear. After all, Chapman, from often foggy Chatham, is only attempting to be the first Republican elected to Congress in the commonwealth since Peter Torkildsen and Peter Blute both won seats in 1994. That campaign—also a mid-term, like 2014—was a national referendum on presidential imperialism and unpopularity.

A Chapman triumph would be redundant evidence in refuting Tip O’Neill’s long held axiom:  All politics is local. Except every breaking wave election, which 2014 may just prove to be (interestingly, a second Republican, Richard Tisei, is also competitive in a Massachusetts congressional race). Chapman hopes history will repeat itself and that this year will mirror 1994.

A lawyer, moderate and mollifying, Chapman is aiming to synthesize his executive experience in fields as diverse as labor, healthcare and finance.

Sitting down with him after an event on a brisk autumn Sunday on Cape Cod recently, he explained quite simply why he is seriously challenging a two-term incumbent Democrat, William Keating. “The people here are starved for representation,” he said. His opponent is “invisible and ineffective.” Chapman—who cannot remember the last time he had a day off since announcing his candidacy last January—recalled meeting a number of residents in the 9^th District who did not know who their Congressman was or that they had a choice in this election.

Chapman is a political start-up in a district that perennially is a permutable start-over. The 9^th is a creation (in 2012) of the redistricting of the 10^th, which was a creation of the redistricting of the 12^th, which had roots from the former 4^th and 14^th districts… as population fled the state.

In Massachusetts, the political hip bone is tightly connected to the thigh bone in the Democrat skeleton. Registered Democrats still outnumber Republicans 3-1; the entire Congressional delegation is of a single party. The last Republican to occupy a seat in this district, and its legacy districts, was Margaret Heckler, who left office in January 1983. Chapman seems unfazed by any perceived structural disadvantage. As do voters.

An unknown and novice to electoral politics, his campaign—which began principally in direct reaction to the Affordable Care Act—received attention, and ultimately national recognition, earlier this month when an Emerson College/WGBH New Poll showed Chapman with a five-point (45 percent to 40 percent) lead over Keating. A seat once considered nearly uncontestable, suddenly seems in jeopardy.

Emerging from the poll’s results are indicators that should alarm Keating. President Obama has only a 37 percent favorable rating and 58 percent unfavorable rating in the 9^th District. Chapman is tied with Keating (39 percent) among females. He is less well known but more well liked than Keating. And of supreme consequence, Chapman holds a solid lead (54 percent to Keating’s 28 percent) among unaffiliated voters.

He may also be the beneficiary of a rare phenomenon in Massachusetts politics: A strong top-of-the-ballot Republican (Charlie Baker) may draw votes for down-ballot Republicans. With no Deval Patrick, Elizabeth Warren or Barack Obama on the ticket, disgruntled Democrats are left with Martha Coakley, proving to be uninspiring to unenthusiastic supporters.

This election is also notable for what is conspicuously absent: the potency of progressivism (and, for that matter, the Tea Party). Everywhere in Massachusetts progressives believe in—expect, even--diversity of everything, except political thought and political party. But this election seems more about issues than identity. And issues appear to be propelling Chapman and retarding Keating as Election Day approaches.

The Emerson/WBGH poll showed that those who believe that taxes and jobs are the critical issues prefer Baker while those who prioritize education and healthcare prefer Coakley. Chapman lists jobs and spending (related to taxes) as those issues most in need of addressing but also senses that the Ebola and ISIS concerns tie into immigration. The latter, immigration, is a new third-rail for Democrats in the Commonwealth; it speaks directly to competency of government in general and the unpopularity of Obama (and Patrick) in particular. Which, in turn, feed into national moodiness and uneasiness.

According to the poll, Chapman shows his greatest support to be, unsurprisingly, in Barnstable County. The region’s largest paper, The Cape Cod Times—which recently endorsed two moderate Republicans for the state legislature—actually endorsed Keating, citing the role of small businesses and healthcare. Those issues, however, favor the Republican.

Chapman retold a story that will undoubtedly resonate with the 1,200 National Federation of Independent Business members in the district: Owners of a bakery on the Cape could not hire an additional employee precisely because their healthcare costs rose threefold.

For Chapman, judicious journeyman, that very clear revelation may be looking into the crystal ball of victory.

James P. Freeman is a former Cape Cod Times columnist

James P. Freeman: Baker, Beacon Hill and Banacek

During the introductory credits of “The Three Million Dollar Piracy,” from a 1973 episode of television’s Boston-based series Banacek, there is a forgotten moment of morbid foreshadowing: Under a blue sky, as the camera pans across the golden dome of the Federalist-style statehouse, at 24 Beacon St., there looms a dark, steel skeletal structure, One Ashburton Place. More than metaphorically, it marked the time when state government as a bastion of ideas would start to be overshadowed by a bureaucracy of idols.

The 2014 Massachusetts gubernatorial election is about the very role of Beacon Hill.

Sitting down with Charlie Baker, the Republican gubernatorial candidate, at the Pilot House, after remarks he gave to the Sandwich Chamber of Commerce recently, you suddenly realize his candidacy is about balancing and restoring the role of limited government from today’s oppressive one. It is a change of approach, rethinking what government does and how it does it. Or, as one political scientist describes it, “affirming certain values and discouraging certain vices.”

One is struck with what Baker is not: a purveyor of identity politics--so carefully crafted by Democrats — where feeling is substituted for function. Instead, Baker is properly defined by action: “This is what I will do” as opposed to “This is who I am.” It is a marked contrast after eight years of Deval Patrick’s form of leadership; governor as emoticon not manager.

A theme of restoration and repair seems to be supported by residents. In polling results released earlier this month by wbur.org, primary voters overwhelmingly (89 percent of Republicans and 81 percent Democrats) indicated that managing state government effectively is a top priority. Perhaps tellingly, this “ranked higher than likability or progressive/conservative attitudes.”

Democrats display unintentional humor, therefore, when speaking of “change.” Surely, upon hearing this, sensible residents echo the sentiments of Guildenstern: “I have lost all capacity for disbelief.” Beyond, as he said, a “gentle scepticism.”

Martha Coakley, Baker’s principal challenger, has been state attorney general for nearly eight years and running for the fourth time for state-wide office. She would spend $500 million for economic recovery -- a plan modeled after Patrick’s 10-year, $1 billion life-sciences initiative, reports the AP. That's ironic, if anything, as she and fellow party members have run on a platform of change from eight years of Patrick’s grisly governance. Baker is relying upon public skepticism about Coakley’s ability to inspire and effect change.

He rightly believes his election would create a “constructive friction” between him and a de facto Democrat legislature (82 percent in the House and 90 percent in Senate) that would revive public accountability. He says that the one-party government is “more pronounced” now and hears even dissatisfied Democrats whispering about the definitive lack of leadership. Is that when the ghost of John Adams would reappear to haunt the hallowed ground on The Hill with “checks and balances” and instill discipline?

For most voters, such issues as runaway taxes, uncontrolled spending, unfunded pension obligations, massive debt burdens and assorted scandals — exacerbated by single-party politics--are accumulated barnacles below the surface of the ship of state; a seaworthy vessel, nevertheless, but slowly submerging. Baker would bring an immediacy to those issues.

Some will immediately greet the new governor.

Just 11 days after the election, on Nov. 4, 400,000 residents will begin —a gain!--enrolling for healthcare on the new Connector Web site. Its predecessor, unable to conform to myriad rules and regulations of Obamacare, was, Baker says, “an astonishing breakdown.” When, and if, fully implemented, costs may exceed $500 million. A Pioneer Institute healthcare expert called it “irresponsible to taxpayers” and described it a “‘Big Dig’ IT project.” Like its national step-cousin, it will likely not be free from trouble and require comprehensive executive engagement of the next governor.

Is this Patrick’s idea of “innovation” and “infrastructure?” It is a supreme example, certainly one of many, of the legacy migraines left over from his administration.

A considerable amount of Baker’s time was spent on the economy. Because of the saturation of codes, rules and regulations, “this is a complicated place to do business,” he asserts. Adding, the state “needs to think differently about economic development.”

Baker may be a beneficiary of a development not yet largely discernible. With Patrick and his party so aggressively progressive, the Democratic base may actually be more moderate, as evident from a Boston Globe poll conducted last July on immigration. Only 36 percent of respondents supported state spending on unaccompanied immigrant children compared to 57 percent who opposed it. The poll’s numbers overall were consistent with national poll results.

Conceivably, then, those children are not on commonwealth soil because residents questioned the veracity and competency of government supervision, not its compassion. If voters look at such factors surrounding other issues — immediate and intermediate -- it would further affirm the results of the wbur.org poll and would ensure a Baker victory.

Forty one years after George Peppard’s leisurely Beacon Hill drive inBanacek, Charlie Baker would reimagine the scenery.

James P. Freeman is a former Cape Cod Times columnist.