Massachusetts Politics

You and I will never have a credible pathway to the presidency of the United States, but if we did, we would take it. That's why former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick (2007-15) will be a candidate for president in 2020.   He probably won't win, but he could win; therefore, he'd be crazy not to give it a shot.. Here's how a successful candidacy could unroll for the man I call, admiringly, the Buddha of America politics: A naturally gifted, superb one-on-one campaigner, Patrick goes to Iowa early and often.  He connects exceptionally well with small audiences everywhere he goes, and, after weeks of  quietly going about the business of retail campaigning in small towns and at rural farm crossroads, his candidacy catches fire.  One day the sun comes up in Iowa and everyone's talking about this guy from Massachusetts by way of Chicago. In the state caucuses on Feb. 3, 2020, he manages a strong second-place ...

The economy of metropolitan Boston is booming, employment is near historic highs, and more young people than ever want to live and work in Boston, so one would think that ridership on the MBTA would be increasing.  One would think wrong. According to a report delivered during a meeting of the MBTA Fiscal and Management Control Board today in Boston, overall subway ridership is down 1.6 percent for the first quarter of Fiscal Year 2019 (July 1-September 30, 2018). Things are worse on the subway line I frequent. The board was informed that, over the past five years, ridership has declined 2.5 percent on the Orange Line, which runs from Oak Grove Station in Malden, at the Melrose line, to Forest Hills Station in the Jamaica Plain section of Boston. I hope they won't spend on a marketing study to determine why riders are shunning the T. The reasons are obvious to anyone who has to use the T: on the Orange and Red subway lines, for example, servic...

Whenever I think of Freddie Berry, the late Majority Leader of the Massachusetts Senate who will be buried this weekend, God rest his magnificent soul, I can't help but smile because he was such a naturally funny and attractive human being, the kind of person who constantly surprised and delighted you with his slyly camouflaged wit and high intellectual voltage, and because every day that he ventured forth into this brutish world he was a walking, talking Exhibit A of how much a righteous person possessed of an unswerving, ferocious determination could achieve in the face of obstacles the nature of which normally crush 9,999 out of a 10,000 souls.  I doubt that Freddie's soul was ever seriously dented, so formidable was his inner strength.  Berry died this past Tuesday at age 68 following a long period of declining health.  He was born with cerebral palsy, and though he bore the effects of tha...

Now that Mike Capuano has lost, I’m hearing some grumbling to the effect he could have run a better campaign.   Some say he wasted too much time talking about Trump when he should have been taking the fight hard, much harder than he did, to Ayanna Pressley. “In terms of experience and ability to get things done, she doesn’t belong in the same ring with him,” said one lifelong resident of the district who was sorry to see the curtain come down on Capuano's career.   “For whatever reason, or reasons, he decided it was too risky to attack her.   Well, look where that got him.” At first, this line of reasoning made sense to me. But, the longer I thought about it, the less convincing it became.   I’d try to conjure a mental picture of Capuano ripping into Pressley on the stage at some candidates’ forum or on the set of some TV program, and every time I did, Capuano came across as a bully and the audience looked pained. It now seems to me that Capuano's candidacy was ...

In the case of Steven “Stat” Smith, the people of Everett were not willing to let bygones be bygones.   Thank God. On Tuesday voters there decisively rejected Smith’s bid to regain his old seat in the Massachusetts House, a position he was forced from in 2012 by the U.S. Attorney because he’d abused the absentee ballot process. Smith paid a $20,000 fine, was sentenced to four months in federal prison, and banned from running for public office again for a period of five years.   That ban was up in April. Within days Smith was asking his townspeople to sign nomination papers to put him on the September 4 ballot in the Democratic primary for representative in the 28 th Middlesex District.   He amassed more than 500 signatures in one weekend -- many multiples of the required number. Smith ran an energetic, high-visibility campaign throughout the spring and summer.   He persuaded untold hundreds of Everett homeowners to put signs up promoting his candidacy.   You co...

Deval Patrick, a former two-term governor of Massachusetts, must be smiling at the news out of the University of Massachusetts School of Law at Dartmouth, formerly Southern New England School of Law. On Thursday of last week, the school announced that its incoming class of first-year students, numbering 94, is 17.5 percent larger than last year’s, which had 80.   In a press release marking the start of the academic year, the school also said: - Its incoming class is 42% larger than the class that entered in 2016, the year the school first earned full accreditation by the American Bar Association; - First-year students come from 25 different states; - Average age of first-year students is 27; - Applications for admission increased this past year by more than 20 percent, from 782 to 940; - 57 percent of applicants were admitted this year, whereas 64 percent were the previous year; It's getting harder to get in. - Members of the Class of 2017 passed the bar exam on thei...