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Tarnished, not finished (continued)

BY DAN KENNEDY


On those occasions when all three groups are in alignment, their votes add up to 55. They break down as follows.

The progressives. These are the 17 Democrats who voted for Bryon Rushing for Speaker last January, a group that also includes Jim Marzilli. Despite protests by Rushing and others that their aim is not to be anti-Finneran, they are perceived that way by many of their colleagues. It gives them a cohesiveness they might otherwise lack ("We’ve stayed together, and we meet and talk regularly," Rushing says), but it also means that their appeal is limited, given that not many members want to get on the Speaker’s bad side.

The moderates. These are the 15 or so Democrats who formed the House Democratic Council earlier this year. State Representative Mike Festa, of Melrose, a founder of the bloc, says "moderate" has more to do with their style than with their politics; for instance, he describes himself as "more progressive than moderate" on most issues. The goal, he adds, is to push for a House in which all members’ voices can be heard. "None of us takes the view that the enemy is Tom Finneran," Festa says. "If there’s something that needs to change, and there is, it’s ourselves. We think the way to do that is to build consensus."

The Republicans. Numbering just 23 members, the opposition party has barely been a force in recent decades, but it may be finding its voice under Mitt Romney. His three Republican predecessors in the governor’s office — Bill Weld, Paul Cellucci, and Jane Swift — were moderates who viewed cutting deals with Finneran and the Democratic Senate leadership as a crucial part of doing business. Romney, who’s both more conservative and more partisan, does things differently. The House Republicans were initially split on the pay raise, for instance — after all, some of those goodies would have gone to them. But after Romney vetoed the measure, all 23 Republicans signaled their willingness to uphold that veto.

Despite Romney’s occasional disingenuousness — for instance, his demagoguery over relatively minor tinkering the legislature performed on the state’s voter-approved anti-bilingual-education law — the presence of a telegenic governor who’s willing take on the Democrats in public could have a salutary effect. A Democratic House member might think twice the next time Finneran orders him to cast a vote that might be difficult to explain to folks back in the district, especially since Romney has vowed to recruit a slate of Republican candidates to run for legislative seats next year.

"It means that the members are always going to be looking over their shoulders. It means it’s going to be tougher for them to make these bad votes," says a Republican analyst.

It also means that for the first time since becoming Speaker, Finneran must now deal with a Republican governor who can make his life difficult in ways that Weld, Cellucci, and Swift couldn’t, or wouldn’t.

Moreover, Romney’s standing with the public is better than Finneran’s, giving the governor an advantage when it comes to the battle of public perception. According to a survey taken in June by the McCormack Institute of Public Affairs, at UMass Boston, 48 percent of Massachusetts residents had a "very favorable" or "somewhat favorable" view of Romney, as opposed to 39 percent "very unfavorable" or "somewhat unfavorable." For Finneran, the numbers were reversed, and then some: 29 percent favorable and 45 percent unfavorable.

From Finneran’s point of view, it seems clear that the difference is based on Romney’s rhetoric rather than on any genuine record of accomplishment. In his interview with Channel 56’s Keller, Finneran fairly dripped with contempt when — following a diatribe about Romney’s alleged lack of budgeting prowess — he was asked if the governor were "incompetent."

"He [Romney] has somewhat sheepishly acknowledged that his original budget had many, many holes in it and flaws in it," said Finneran. "And so I give the governor credit. He’s coming along. There’s a learning curve for all of us. And I have a learning curve each and every day. It’s not an incompetence on the part of the administration. But I think during the campaign, at least, there were these glib, casual assertions of how easy it was going to be to balance the budget, to get it done on time, no taxes, and no reduction in services."

Two observations about Finneran’s outburst: 1) his assessment of Romney is largely correct; and 2) it is nevertheless clear that Romney has gotten under Finneran’s skin in a way that the governor’s predecessors did not.

For Tom Finneran, things just aren’t as easy as they used to be.

NOT THAT THINGS have ever been particularly easy for Finneran. One of seven children, Finneran spent part of his youth living in a housing project in South Boston, and he helped put himself through Northeastern University by working at his father’s rug-cleaning-and-furniture-upholstery business. By the time he graduated from Boston College Law School, he was already married, and the father of the first of his two daughters. Elected to the House at 27, he has spent almost half his life (he is 53) in the legislature.

Finneran got his first taste of real power in 1991, when he was named chair of the powerful Ways and Means Committee by the then–new Speaker, Charlie Flaherty. A fiscal conservative with a penchant for number-crunching, Finneran won praise for helping steer the state through a fiscal crisis even as some criticized him for his centralized, top-down management style.

The Speaker’s job became his in the spring of 1996, under unusual circumstances. Flaherty was forced to resign after pleading guilty to federal tax-fraud charges. The Democrats were lined up behind the majority leader, Richie Voke, a liberal from Chelsea. But unbeknownst to many, Finneran had cut a deal with the Republicans: rather than voting for their own leader, a customary — if futile — exercise, they voted for Finneran, which made him Speaker even though he lost a majority of his own party.

It was, in fact, a brilliant and audacious parliamentary maneuver, the sort of play that wouldn’t even have occurred to anyone else. For Finneran, it gave him an opportunity he never would have had among his own party members. For the Republicans, it gave them a moment of unaccustomed relevance — and the chance to install a Speaker who was far more in tune with their conservatism than Voke was. And though any dreams the Republicans might have had of forming a European-style coalition government did not materialize, they continue to defend their decision. The current House Republican leader, Brad Jones, of North Reading, who was among those voting for Finneran, puts it this way: "There are still a lot of issues that we agree on with the Speaker. He’s a lot more of a Republican than he is a Democrat."

Finneran’s actions and rhetoric immediately after becoming Speaker were emblematic of a say-one-thing-but-do-another style he has maintained to this day. He spoke of inclusiveness, and in fact his first leadership team comprised a combination of Flaherty holdovers, who had voted for Voke, and Finneran loyalists. But the following January, with the glare of the spotlight somewhat reduced, Finneran dumped the remainder of Flaherty’s team and named a new set of committee chairs beholden only to him.

"There is no punishment whatsoever," he told the Boston Globe at the time. "It’s a statement of what I think is the best talent that is available, spread across the entire landscape." It’s a theme that Finneran has stuck with over the years, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. As recently as July 15, for instance, during an interview on Greater Boston, on WGBH-TV (Channels 2 and 44), Finneran sought to disabuse host Emily Rooney of the notion that his leadership team was composed of sycophants. "I want engagement," he said. "I want them to challenge me and the members so our thinking improves on everything. They’re picked on talent, ability, and independence — not dependence."

It sounds good, but the record suggests otherwise. Take, for instance, the Committee on Health Care, where two talented and independent chairs have been forced out for insufficient loyalty to the Speaker. The first was John McDonough, a respected policy wonk who voted for Voke, was retained by Finneran in 1996, and then given the boot the following January. Following several years of teaching health-care policy at Brandeis University, McDonough recently was named executive director of Health Care for All, an advocacy organization. McDonough declined to be quoted on Finneran’s decision to replace him. But even if one concedes that Finneran, as a relatively new Speaker, had the right to choose his own team, he gave up a lot of expertise when he chose to cast McDonough aside.

McDonough was replaced by Harriett Stanley, a conservative Democrat from West Newbury with a Harvard MBA. Stanley started out as a Finneran favorite. But after opposing Finneran on a range of issues such as Clean Elections and the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act (Finneran was for it, she was against it) — and, most significantly, a $1.2 billion tax hike that was aimed at bailing the state out of last year’s fiscal crisis — she was removed as committee chair this past January. Never mind that she comes from a Republican-leaning district that might well have turned her out of office had she voted to increase taxes — the sort of contingency most legislative leaders are prepared to accommodate.

Ironically, just a few months after losing her gavel, Stanley received an award from the Pioneer Institute for a Medicaid-reform proposal. That, in turn, led to a favorable June 10 column by the Globe’s Joan Vennochi, who wrote of Finneran that it was "sad for those of us who remember a different man from a different time. His mind was just as quick but it was so much more open."

When I contacted Stanley, she was circumspect about her relationship with the Speaker, saying only, "The Tom Finneran that I voted for in 1996 with great hopes of changing the way the legislature did business is not the person leading the House today."

Granted, the circumstances surrounding Stanley’s removal are somewhat complicated. Sources say that she can be prickly, and her award-winning reform idea — which would require Medicaid recipients to pay some of the cost of their care — was not designed to win the hearts and minds of progressives. But she is obviously a smart, capable woman, and yet Finneran decided he would rather do without her expertise than allow any independence on his leadership team.

And here’s a delicious irony. Sometime this fall, the House Democratic Council plans to stage a debate on health-care policy. All House members will be invited to hear from two experts. Their names: John McDonough and Harriett Stanley.

McDonough and Stanley are hardly alone in the punishment they received. In January 2001, the House overwhelmingly voted to abolish an eight-year limit on the Speaker’s post, a limit that had been imposed in 1985, when George Keverian vanquished another powerful Speaker, Tom McGee, by promising reform. Among those who voted against Finneran was State Representative Tom McGee Jr., of Lynn — who was promptly removed from the Taxation Committee and stripped of his post as vice-chair of the Public Service Committee, according to a column by the Globe’s Eileen McNamara.

Another former Finneran supporter is State Representative Doug Petersen, of Marblehead, a moderate liberal who voted for Finneran over Voke in 1996.

"I never got along terribly well with Charlie Flaherty," says Petersen, who recalls sessions with Finneran in his pre-Speaker days when "he would genuinely have tears in his eyes" while talking about his desire to restore the reputation and effectiveness of the House. "I trusted Tommy more," Petersen recalls. "I thought he would be more of a fiscal disciplinarian, which I felt that we needed."

But Petersen soon saw his friend’s need for control supersede his better instincts. To increase the number of members who would be personally loyal to the Speaker, Finneran created four new positions with extra pay known as division chairs — "hall monitors," as they have been derisively dubbed by critics.

Petersen was named to chair the Natural Resources Committee, but he says he chafed as Finneran worked behind the scenes to weaken a voter-approved law to regulate animal traps, and to make a "brownfields" bill, regulating the reuse of polluted land, more industry-friendly.

The final rupture, though, came over Clean Elections. When Petersen made it clear that he wasn’t going to back down from his support for the voter-approved measure to provide public-funding for candidates who agreed to spending limits, he was demoted to vice-chair of the Taxation Committee and, finally, removed from leadership entirely.

"I think this, in some ways, is a real tragedy," says Petersen, who voted for Byron Rushing last January. "I think [Finneran] could have been a terrific Speaker. There’s a part of him that wanted this place to be the penultimate in respect and efficiency, but his emotions got in the way. He was never comfortable enough with his position, so he had to keep tightening and ratcheting the process until he had control of the whole thing. He wasn’t confident enough that his own ideas would prevail."

Bob Keough, the editor of CommonWealth magazine and a long-time State House observer, says Finneran’s need for total control is beginning to harm his record of genuine accomplishment. "Whether you agree with him or disagree with him, I think he’s been a masterful legislative leader," Keough says. "But over time, he now seems to be making enemies out of members for no good reason."

Indeed, so thoroughly established is Finneran’s record for settling every score that even members of the Massachusetts Senate — traditionally considered a more prestigious and powerful chamber than the House — dare not cross him.

"He’s a very vindictive guy, and I’ve got a lot of legislation in the pipeline and a lot of things I’d like to do for my constituents," says a senator who requests anonymity. "I do think senators watch what he does and try to stay out of his line of fire."

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Issue Date: August 15 - August 21, 2003
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