Charlie Baker spends big
Many years ago, in West Virginia, Arch Moore was running for governor against a carpet bagging Democrat named Jay Rockefeller, and of course Rockefeller had more money than God. But somehow he couldn’t put away the underfunded Republican Moore.
So Moore’s supporters printed up a bumper sticker:
“Make him spend it all, Arch!”
That’s the way I felt about Scott Lively at the end of the Republican primary yesterday. Especially after my wife got the last mailing from Tall Deval, the fifth or sixth in the last two weeks, on top of the saturation TV ads. This final mailing was personalized with our very own street, as in “Making (X) Street Great Again.”
Make him spend it all, Scott!
The fact that a guy like Scott Lively, with zero money and even less media money, living above his storefront church in downtown Springfield, could throw a scare into the biggest Trump hater in the country (at least in the RINO bracket) speaks volumes about Baker’s feeble record.
Seldom has so much dough been squandered in a political race for such little result.
He’d never be governor today if he hadn’t drawn Marsha Coakley in the final in 2014. Ditto Scott Brown and Marty Walsh – every successful white guy in Massachusetts politics over the last 20 years made his bones by thumping the hapless Marsha.
And still, he could only beat Coakley – the Hillary Clinton of Massachusetts – by 40,000 votes, and it was a nail-biter.
And now he draws… another Bum of the Month. Gonzalez? Massie? Does it make a difference? Between the two of them, if they pooled their money, Gonzalez and Massive could maybe buy one grande latte at Starbucks.
Yet there was Tall Deval last night, on Herald radio less than an hour before the polls closed, scrounging for votes, against a guy who held his election party in downtown Worcester last night in the old Bancroft Hotel, now an apartment building.
“BYOB?” I asked him, and he laughed.
“Not at my party,” the reverend said. “It’s non-alcoholic.”
Tall Deval has a glass jaw. He makes the rounds of the Beautiful People on the NPR stations, he consorts with the jock sniffers, he regularly appears on the Beavis & Butthead station, and then he does a turn with Karyn Polito’s cousin.
In other words, he goes to all the places where seldom are heard the words “Leigha Genduso.” Or, for that matter, the words “A.J. ‘Gropey’ Baker.”
The governor hates Trump, Trump “disappoints” him except when he “disgusts” him, but the state economy is doing great, and Tall Deval is not… disappointed.
Four years, I asked an old pol at the State House about Charlie Baker’s perennial campaign for governor.
“I don’t see Charlie Baker as governor,” he said. “I see Charlie Baker as the governor’s chief of staff.”
And the real governor, of course, is the unindicted co-conspirator. Or until recently, Pee Wee Herman’s husband.
But Tall Deval is getting the job done. Just ask him. He is, to quote from one of the many mailers on my desk, “Challenging Government to Work More Efficiently with Less Taxpayer Money.”
He may be challenging, but they’re not responding. Less taxpayer money? Didn’t the hacks add $400 million in the conference committee? And Charlie brags that he’s making state government “More Fiscally Responsible.”
That’s why the judges have only gotten four pay raises of $6,250 in the last 18 months!
Abraham Lincoln, who was not a RINO, once famously said that, “You can fool all of the people some of the time, you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”
Tall Deval has just got to hope there are enough of those some people you can fool all of the time.
