Primary colors Gov. Baker’s attitude toward Trump

The primary elections in Massachusetts are just 16 days away, and suddenly, Gov. Charlie “Tall Deval” Baker is not nearly as… disappointed in President Trump as he usually is.

Imagine my surprise this week to find in my mailbox a political flier from the RINO governor and his running mate the lieutenant governor.

“Charlie Baker. Karyn Polito. Making Massachusetts a Great Place….”

Hmmm. Making Massachusetts Great? Why do those words ring a bell?

Oh that’s right. These shameless hacks, who never miss an opportunity to put the blast on the president, have now lifted his slogan, “Make America Great Again.”

How many times has Tall Deval said he was “disappointed” in the president? Actually, he hasn’t said it as much since I called him out on it last year. But when it comes to Trump, he can’t seem to let go of words that start with the letter “d.” He’s always distancing himself from Trump, as the AP put it.

For example, last month, in Helsinki, the president said, well, I can’t even remember his comments now, but they were the outrage du jour on CNN and MSNBC, or at least the outrage du 15 minutes. So Tall Deval felt it necessary to denounce Trump, saying his statements “were a disgrace and I found the entire line of commentary deeply disturbing.”

In case the cameras weren’t rolling the first time, he repeated himself: “It’s disgraceful.”

Yet here he is, a month later, Making Massachusetts Great Again.

I don’t know if this duplicity quite rises to the level of disgrace, but it’s certainly disingenuous, maybe even dastardly, and because it’s so transparent, dumb.

National polls supposedly indicate that Tall Deval is the most popular governor in the country, and we all know that such polls are never wrong. Just ask President Hillary Clinton.

But even if the polls are accurate, the problem for Tall Deval is that the only people who will be voting on the day after Labor Day are Republicans and independents who grab a GOP ballot. None of the people who adore him most – Democrats – will be voting for the closeted Democrat.

Thus, Baker is suddenly Making Massachusetts Great.

His calculations are pretty obvious, if you compare the president’s popularity among Bay State Republicans to Baker’s. These numbers aren’t exactly comparable, but in the 2014 GOP primary for governor, for example, Tall Deval got 116,004 votes. In the 2016 state presidential primary, Trump took 311,313 votes.

In that primary, by the way, Gov. Chris Christie had the ringing endorsement of Gov. Baker. It was worth a whopping 1832 votes to the NJ governor.

So there appears to be a bit of a disconnect between Tall Deval and the actual Republicans who will be voting Sept. 4. Which is why he couldn’t keep Scott Lively off the ballot at the GOP convention earlier this year. In fact, with zero money and no endorsements, Lively got 28 percent of the vote among party activists.

Lively’s only asset in the campaign: he’s not Tall Deval.

The new Baker flier, by the way, goes on to lift some tired slogans that date all the way back to Bill Weld’s first campaign for governor in 1990, about “Making Massachusetts a Great Place to.. Live. Work. Raise a Family.”

Yeah, nothing says a Great Place like transgender bathrooms, pay raises every six months for corrupt judges, a totally crooked legislature, a dysfunctional MBTA, daily indictments of State Police, illegal heroin dealers getting carte blanche at the RMV, the lieutenant governor posing for multiple selfies with a drug dealer who perjured herself in front of a federal grand jury, and now, a $35 million handout for a new baseball park in Worcester for a team partially owned by the proprietor of the failing Boston Globe.

A taxpayer-funded kiss for the Globe, two weeks before the primary. As a taxpayer, I’m very… disappointed.

I’m not saying Lively is going to pull off an upset, but my prediction is, he gets a lot more than 28 percent in the Republican primary, no matter how much backtracking backstabbing Charlie does over the next two weeks.

Just for the record, when Trump pulled out of the Paris “climate accords,” Tall Deval was “very disappointed.” When the GOP House voted to repeal Obamacare, he was “disappointed.” He couldn’t vote for anyone for president in November 2016 – “hugely disappointing.”

And then, on Election Day, after voting in Swampscott, he was asked how it felt to blank the presidential race.

“Obviously disappointed.”

When Vice President Mike Pence came to town earlier this year for a fundraiser, Tall Deval snubbed him.

“My calendar was full,” he said.

On Sept. 4, don’t be surprised if a lot of the people Tall Deval is counting on to vote for him also find that their calendars are too full… to vote of him. Charlie may again be disappointed – not everybody thinks he’s making Massachusetts great again.