Gov. No-stick
Why the public doesn't care about Bill Weld's bad press
by Dan Kennedy
by Dan Kennedy
Yet of all the obstacles standing in Kerry's way, none looms larger than Weld's near-mystical immunity to bad press.
During the past five years, the media have pounded away with story after story of malfeasance, misfeasance, and nonfeasance on the part of the governor and his administration. Cost overruns at the Big Dig. Children's deaths that the Department of Social Services should have prevented. Safety problems at Logan Airport. High-level state employees running private businesses out of their offices. Troubles at the Registry of Motor Vehicles, ranging from shenanigans over handicapped license plates to a brand-new building with air so toxic it had to be shut down. Ethically challenged underlings. Campaign-finance violations. Conflicts of interest.
Sure, a lot of this was not Weld's direct responsibility. But it was the responsibility of his people. And they screwed up on his watch.
Yet it's clear to political observers of all stripes that these stories simply don't stick. Early polls show Weld and Kerry are in a dead heat, and you're more likely to hear political junkies clucking about the imperious parking habits of Kerry's wife, Teresa Heinz, than about Weld's inability or unwillingness to take charge.
As Kerry and Weld prepare for their first debate this Monday in Faneuil Hall, the biggest challenge for Kerry is to tie his Republican opponent to the deeds of his own administration. If Kerry succeeds, he'll put Weld on the defensive, an unfamiliar position that the senator can exploit throughout the campaign. If he fails, the danger is that he'll come off as humorless and whiny, a poor sport in contrast to the affable, endearingly goofy governor.
Weld's public persona is so coated with Teflon that some of his critics blame the media for going too easy on him.
"The press likes Bill Weld personally," says Dan Payne, Kerry's media consultant. "They think he's cute." Though Payne concedes that the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald often weigh in with stories on the failings of the Weld Administration, he charges that a lack of follow-up, and a failure to tie these stories directly to Weld, dissipates their impact.
Adds Jim Braude, executive director of the Tax Equity Alliance for Massachusetts and one of Weld's most outspoken critics: "Relentlessness is a very important ingredient, and I think it's in short supply."
Payne and Braude are on to something. More than any Massachusetts politician in memory, Weld knows how to play the media game. The follow-up stories sometimes don't get done because of the disarming manner with which he handles criticism. And his detached, Ronald Reagan-like management style enables him to play the perpetual outsider, the critic-in-chief of the very government he heads.
The Reagan mystique
Reporters do like Weld. He's loose and funny, he can banter with reporters about rock and roll, and he's been known to enjoy a drink or two with the press. It's a cultural thing; it's easy for Baby Boomer journalists to think of him as one of them, even if he is a multimillionaire Brattle Street blueblood. "Weld is very seductive with the media," says Herald columnist Wayne Woodlief. "He loves to share gossip with reporters at parties."
And much of Weld's agenda resonates with members of the State House press corps. His embrace of full equality for lesbians and gay men, and his staunch support of abortion rights, gives Weld a baseline credibility with well-educated, youngish reporters. Never mind that he once appointed homophobic ex-state senator Ned Kirby to a judgeship, or that he made a few underpublicized overtures to the religious right when he was testing the presidential waters.
Even so, the press has hardly been shy in going after Weld. The governor's been hit with one tough piece after another since his inauguration in 1991.
There was the Globe's 1992 reporting on the Commonwealth Business Council, an attempt by high-level Republican operatives to sell access to the Weld Administration. The Globe's State House-bureau chief, Frank Phillips, who worked on those stories, says he thought he'd unearthed a "major scandal," and was stunned at how easily Weld shrugged it off.
There was the Globe's Spotlight series in December 1993, on the eve of the 1994 gubernatorial campaign, which revealed a shocking indifference to sleazy campaign-finance practices on the part of a governor who, as a candidate, once said that the State House ethical climate failed to pass his "smell test."
There were the Herald's Impact Team stories in 1995 on Weld's questionable draft deferment, his sweetheart home-mortgage deal, and his failure to ride herd on the state's numerous regulatory boards, which were beset by long-unfilled vacancies, out-of-control caseloads, and political backscratching.
And there has been story after story of less-than-monumental importance, creating a steady drip-drip-drip that would have seriously damaged a typical politician, but that leave Weld untarnished (see Fresh scandals, forgotten).
"It's counterintuitive to what everybody says about the media's power to shape and control public debate," says Michael Goldman, a Democratic political consultant who's not working for Kerry. "They've thrown everything they can at this guy. I think that he is the political phenomenon of our time."
More than anything else, Weld's strength stems from his reputation as the conquering hero who saved the state from the liberal Democrats who'd brought it to the brink of ruin. When Weld took office, the so-called Massachusetts Miracle hailed by his predecessor, Michael Dukakis, had long since collapsed. The budget was running hundreds of millions of dollars in the red. The unemployment rate was 9.3 percent, highest of the industrial states. But within months, Weld and the Democratic leadership in the legislature had agreed on a plan to cut spending and balance the budget without raising taxes. As the economy improved, Weld was even able to offer some modest tax cuts. Unemployment today is 5.1 percent.
As a number of Weld's critics point out, though, the crisis was averted largely because of $1.2 billion in new taxes that Dukakis pushed through the legislature shortly before leaving office -- and that wouldn't have been available to Weld if a ballot initiative aimed at rolling back those taxes, sponsored by Citizens for Limited Taxation and enthusiastically supported by candidate Weld, hadn't been defeated. The recovery of the state's economy has merely followed national trends.
This alternative view, which challenges the very foundation of the governor's mystique, should be much better known than it is. Indeed, the Globe's Peter Howe wrote a lengthy, page-one Sunday piece in July 1992, and produced a follow-up in October 1994, on the eve of Weld's re-election triumph over Mark Roosevelt. But Weld seems above it all.
Largely that's because even though Weld may not be "one of us," he's even more emphatically not "one of them." Massachusetts has a long history of granting its old-money, blueblood politicians (a near-dead breed that Weld singlehandedly revived) the benefit of the doubt on ethical matters, on the theory that since they don't need the money, there's no need to worry about them stealing. This gives Weld a freedom to maneuver that a politician with an Irish or Italian surname would envy. Just ask Massachusetts House Speaker Charlie Flaherty. Or State Auditor Joe DeNucci, who was seriously damaged by a recent Herald series on his slovenly work habits, which resemble those of Weld.
"I think the public believes that Bill Weld is an honest man," says John Moffitt, a business consultant who ran Weld's 1990 gubernatorial campaign, and who remains as an informal adviser. "And I don't mean honest in terms of not stuffing cash into his pockets, but that he's honest in terms of what they see is what they get."
People like Bill Weld. They like his boar-hunting Yankee antics, his weird remarks about rooting out "walruses" (that's Brahmin for "hacks") from the bureaucracy. Just as Ronald Reagan's naps and jelly beans made him seem more genuine, Weld's eccentricities, presented with just the right light touch (unlike George Bush's pork rinds and Lamar!'s plaid shirts, for instance), allow him to define himself as someone other than just another politician. And people like his easy-going demeanor, especially when compared to that of the intense, often-churlish Dukakis.
"There are a lot of people who see sociability and being good-natured and able to take a joke as being good at what you do," says Globe columnist Patricia Smith, a frequent Weld critic.
Like a Bloody Mary
The Reagan analogy extends to Weld's management style as well. For eight years Reagan was able to avoid taking responsibility for his own administration simply by not being there. Two-hundred-billion-dollar deficits? The president was clearing brush at his ranch. Iran/contra? The president was sleeping through a Cabinet meeting. Another top aide indicted? The president's hearing aid was turned off. Far from holding Reagan accountable for such dereliction of his oversight duties, the public instead allowed him to play the role of spectator to his own presidency.
It's a style Weld has successfully emulated. Barbara Anderson, executive director of Citizens for Limited Taxation, once told the Globe's Scot Lehigh that members of the public don't hold stories of governmental wrongdoing against Weld because they know he's oblivious: "Anyone who knows Bill Weld knows he has been living on another planet. I think that not knowing and not wanting to know is a sin too, but it's not as bad as lying."
Thus Weld's squash games, frequent out-of-state trips, and attendance at Grateful Dead concerts have the effect of removing him from the scene of the crime, giving him the same sort of outsider status that Reagan enjoyed. It's anti-politics as politics, and it's enabled Weld perpetually to campaign against the very government he heads. And his relaxed detachment matches up well with the public's basic lack of interest in politics, especially when compared with Dukakis's hands-on micromanagement. "People get tired of that earnest look of concern," says David Brudnoy, a talk-show host for WBZ Radio (AM 1030). "Maybe insouciance is in."
Weld's political genius is never more evident than when he's reacting to criticism. In an environment in which, as one observer puts it, "most politicians expect a blow job every time a reporter writes about them," Weld is smart enough not to pursue vendettas against his critics. By fessing up immediately, he makes it nearly impossible for reporters to pursue the matter any further.
"For a story really to have impact, it at least has to be a three-day story, and the Weld people are very good at making it a one-day story," says a Republican activist who asked not to be named. "They take their hit and move on."
Jon Keller, political reporter for WLVI-TV (Channel 56), says Weld's determination to maintain generally friendly relations with reporters is an ongoing lesson in damage control that more-sensitive politicians could learn from. For instance, last July Keller wrote a brutal op-ed-page piece for the Wall Street Journal headlined A GOP STAR BECOMES `ONE OF THEM.' "Weldocrats" -- conservative Democrats -- felt "betrayed" by Weld, Keller wrote, because of such issues as his support for the legislative pay raise and his refusal to go along with efforts to reform paid police details. He quoted the ever-quotable Barbara Anderson as saying, "He's now become one of them, sort of like the pod people."
Did Weld go looking for a piece of Keller's hide the next day, as many other politicians would do? Not a chance.
"He blushed the color of a Bloody Mary after one too many Jack Danielses," Keller says, offering a mixed-drink metaphor that's perhaps appropriate for a governor well-known for his love of amber-colored liquids. "He said, `So, a published author.' And then we moved on. I think I notice a degree of frostiness from him toward me, but nothing that's affected access."
Perhaps the most devastating piece of reporting Weld's had to deal with was a three-part Globe Spotlight Team series in December 1993. Among other things, the series found that expensive political favors had been performed for major campaign contributors; that Weld's fundraiser, Peter Berlandi, was touting his access to Weld in trolling for clients for his private consulting business; and that political operatives who'd worked for Weld and Lieutenant Governor Paul Cellucci had "teamed up as consultants in the flourishing new cottage industry of Republican influence-peddling."
So what did the governor do? He told reporters it was "a good series," repeated his support for campaign-finance reform, and added: "I didn't see anything there that was a violation of laws or regulations."
"I remember standing there with my mouth open," says the Globe's Frank Phillips. "It just completely takes the wind out of your sails. He's very clever in deflecting reporters' aggressiveness."
Joe Sciacca, a veteran political reporter for the Herald, recalls chasing after Weld in an airport last year when he was working on the story on Weld's military deferment, which was granted because of his allegedly bad back.
"He just dropped his bags in the middle of the hallway and went into a 20-minute explanation of his draft record," Sciacca says. The result: a nasty one-day story. And no follow-up, other than a few mocking columns by the likes of the Herald's Howie Carr, who trashes everyone. (No hard feelings, mind you. Weld was on Carr's show on WRKO Radio, AM 680, last week, playing the liberal as Carr's lunatic-fringe callers blasted him for opposing the death penalty for 12-year-old murderers and for refusing to cut off welfare benefits to legal immigrants.)
Weld's Teflon is not scratch-proof, though. On the few occasions when Weld has acted like a typically defensive pol, he's been hit with the same sort of daily media barrage that is regularly visited upon lesser beings.
Witness the criticism that greeted his support of the legislative pay raise, unveiled right after the 1994 election, and that is likely to be repealed by voters this fall.
Witness, too, the reaction to his arrogant departure for a Pete Wilson political event last June immediately following a tornado that devastated Great Barrington. The populist Herald was especially offended, running an acidic WHERE'S WELDO? headline and an editorial calling his absence "shameful."
No more mea culpas?
Now Bill Weld is about to learn that the rules have changed. Even a gubernatorial race is a parochial affair compared to a campaign for the US Senate. This one's going to be among the most closely watched in the country, not only because it's likely to be a squeaker that could help determine the balance of power on Capitol Hill, but because it's a contest that features a clash of trends: Weld's new-style libertarian Republicanism versus Kerry's New Democrat pragmatic liberalism.
This race is just the kind of high-pressure environment that could change the way the public views negative information about Weld. For one thing, says the Herald's Joe Sciacca, it's going to be a lot tougher for Weld to mea culpa his way out of follow-up stories with Kerry and his handlers on the case. "He may see a new level of scrutiny," Sciacca says.
Two years ago, for instance, Mark Roosevelt enjoyed his only real bump in the gubernatorial campaign when he flung charges of incompetence and corruption at Weld during their first televised debate. Roosevelt lambasted Weld's management of the Big Dig and laid-back work habits, leaving the governor flustered and sputtering. The moment passed because Roosevelt had virtually no money to follow up with paid advertising, which in turn led reporters to treat his campaign less seriously than they might have.
"It was a matter of just not being able to get the message out," recalls Dave Wood, who was Roosevelt's press secretary, and is now corporate communications manager for Continental Cablevision.
That won't be a problem for Kerry.
In addition, the affability gap Kerry suffers from may not mean that much in the long run. "If it were a congeniality contest, Mitt Romney would be a US senator," Keller says, referring to Ted Kennedy's Republican opponent in 1994. "A Senate race is serious business." Though Kerry may not be able to match Weld in wit or charm, Keller thinks it won't matter if Kerry can show some passion and can differentiate himself on issues such as a higher minimum wage, which Kerry favors and Weld opposes.
Lou DiNatale, a senior fellow at UMass/Boston's McCormack Institute of Public Affairs, believes Weld's peculiar relationship with the public is the product of coming along at a time when voters were fed up after 16 years of Democratic governors and several eons' worth of Democratic legislatures.
"There were too many Democrats, there were too many liberals," he says. "He was a Republican, and he wasn't an idiot."
In other words, give people some credit for sophistication. Voters often like balance in politics, countering a Democratic Congress with a Republican president, and then countering a Democratic president with a Republican Congress. For five years Weld has been perceived as a useful counterweight to the legislature's Democratic leadership. But the balancing argument doesn't work for Weld in the Senate race, since his election would be seen as strengthening the Republican stranglehold on Congress.
DiNatale also thinks Weld is about to learn an unpleasant lesson: that cultivating reporters counts for little when the stakes are as high as they are now.
"There is no question that Weld has wooed the press in a way that allows him to run for higher office," DiNatale adds. "But it's like the mongoose and the snake. They can love you all day long, but in the end they'll fuck you. Because it's their business to fuck you."