Massachusetts miracle or mirage?

0 Comments | Insight on the News, May 13, 1996 | by Stephen Goode

A GOP governor has made a name for himself in a traditionally Democratic state and is preparing to take on liberal Democratic Sen. John Forbes Kerry.

It's time to knock the old fleabag down," Massachusetts Republican Gov. William Weld announced last November when he began his race to unseat Democratic Sen. John Forbes Kerry. The "old fleabag" that Weld wants knocked down is the Massachusetts state government, which he says is too big by far, too wasteful and deeply corrupt.

Weld became governor in 1991. Yet here he was, five years later; calling for a radical program to downsize bureaucracy and slash state expenses. The present 11 Cabinet posts would be reduced to six, according to his plan. During a period of three years, 7,500 state jobs would be eliminated through attrition or layoffs.

A Republican in a commonwealth in which only 13 percent of the population are registered in his party, Weld contrasted himself with his liberal Senate opponent by promising as governor to eliminate 74 agencies and more than 100 boards and commissions in a state that often has been dubbed "the People's Republic of Massachusetts." The name resulted from the state's propensity over four decades to expand government by finding the solution to every problem through increased spending for some new commission or agency.

Has the nation's most liberal and left-leaning state become a place where the conservative revolution is working? Has Weld succeeded where conservative leaders in Congress have not, thus making himself an irresistible candidate for Senate against old-style liberal Kerry? It depends upon whom you ask. "Governor Weld has changed the perception of Massachusetts from a place that's not good for business to a place that is good for business, and that's no mean achievement," says businessman and former state Sen. Arthur Chase, a Republican from West Boylston.

But for Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby, Weld's recent promises of change and downsizing are something the people of Massachusetts have heard before, when the governor first ran for office in 1990 and denounced the state bureaucracy as "50 years out of date, sluggish and centralized" -- and then didn't deliver on reform. Not one government agency has been shut down during Weld's five years in office, and the state's budget -- which the governor promised to slash -- has increased by almost 25 percent under his administration, from $13.4 billion to nearly $17 billion, hardly an indication of conservative intent, according to Jacoby. What happened, he says, is that Weld came to office advocating change but then "got absorbed into the political culture of Massachusetts," a fact that makes the Weld administration practically indistinguishable from previous Democratic administrations, including that of Michael Dukakis.

Other Weld watchers, including Barbara Anderson, are willing to give Weld the benefit of the doubt. He has performed "amazingly well. You've got to understand the context: He's working in Massachusetts and, given that fact, he's done as much as anyone could," says Anderson, executive director of the Boston-based Citizens for Limited Taxation, a powerful group founded in 1975 to fight waste and mismanagement in the state. For Anderson, who calls herself a "realist," Weld is "extraordinary." But Jacoby is not so willing to let him off the hook. He could have done more to carry out his promises but didn't, argues Jacoby, in large part because of his personality, which Jacoby describes as "affable [but] whimsical and even puckish. He doesn't take himself very seriously."

This past winter, while Weld was lambasting government and calling for downsizing, he publicly offered to go to Washington as a character witness for first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, whom Weld described as a person of "rock-hard integrity." That's strange stuff coming from the conservative revolutionary he styles himself to be, according to Jacoby. And last fall Weld wore a black ribbon after the death of Grateful Dead leader Jerry Garcia. (Jacoby says Weld even considered ordering flags on state buildings to be flown at half mast.)

Weld, Jacoby believes, is a man far more at ease with the liberal folk of Cambridge, Mass., where his home (and Harvard, his alma mater) is located, than he is with the business and conservative Republicans who would seem to be his natural constituency given the governor's political rhetoric. Weld's wife, Susan Roosevelt of the Oyster Bay Roosevelts, supported Dukakis in the 1988 presidential campaign.

According to Jacoby, author of "Bill Weld's Revolution That Wasn't," in the winter 1996 issue of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal, a key to understanding Weld's political style is his patrician desire to "avoid unpleasant fights," which would go a long way toward explaining why Weld appears to talk tought at election time but backs down when it comes to getting his program in action. Nonetheless, most Weld detractors, including Jacoby, agree that the governor started out well. His budget for fiscal 1992, for example, was lower than the state budget for the previous year, a fact that won him praise in the pages of the Wall Street Journal.