Boston
It’s common for Bostonians to give their politicians a 59 percent approval rating—just not Republican ones. Charlie Baker, the third-year Massachusetts governor, is the exception. More than two thirds of the state’s voters give him high marks in surveys, which is itself a polling phenomenon. But Beantown skews much further left than the commonwealth’s general electorate: There are eight registered Democrats for every Republican here, while statewide it’s three-to-one. Yet “Bakah,” as the locals pronounce the name, is among the city’s most popular politicians.
It’d be easy to credit bipartisanship for his good standing. Working across the aisle is a necessity as much as a virtue for Republicans in the Bay State, and Baker, 60, is naturally suited to it. He worked as a cabinet secretary under Governor William Weld (1991-97), another beloved, deal-cutting Massachusetts Republican. In 1998 Baker left state government for the health care sector and the next year became CEO of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, where he showed a data-driven, customer-oriented leadership style that has translated well to nonpartisan governing.
But there’s no underestimating the benefits of his personal style, which is punctilious in private and affable in public. “It’s not uncommon for him to sit with a PowerPoint presentation and ask about a footnote,” one Massachusetts official recalls of working with Baker. People who work for him describe him as a willing listener. He meets weekly with a group of Democratic leaders in the statehouse, including senate president Stan Rosenberg and house speaker Robert DeLeo. Baker isn’t shy about touting such relationships—he, Rosenberg, and DeLeo led a panel at the National Conference of State Legislatures summit in August entitled “From Politics to Statesmanship: Solving Problems in a Partisan World.” It was moderated by Weld.
“It’s a lot harder to take a cheap shot at someone in the press if you know you’re going to be sitting across the table from them sometime in the next seven days,” the former governor says.
The cordiality has its perks. A priority when Baker took office in 2015 was reform of Boston’s public transit system after a record-breaking winter with nine feet of snow exposed its poor management and operations. One of his most controversial ideas was to exempt the T, as it is known, from a state law protecting public workers from competing with private contractors for jobs. Organized labor protested, and the senate left the provision out of its budget draft. But Baker pressed the case on state lawmakers and union workers, insisting that his goal was to “fix the T,” not “privatize the T.” DeLeo bought in, telling the Boston Herald that the urgency of T reform required taking “some steps that are a little bit stronger than you normally would.”
A three-year exemption from the law was negotiated—a compromise for which Baker complimented Democrats. “I think to some extent, the legislature, to their credit, made a decision that they wanted to test this,” he said. Just 6 of the state’s 160 Democratic legislators voted against the budget containing this and other T reforms Baker requested.
Baker’s diplomatic approach to governing has earned him plaudits from across the aisle. In April, Boston mayor Marty Walsh, Baker’s partner in luring GE’s headquarters to Boston, said he wouldn’t rule out supporting the Republican when he runs for reelection next year. Former lieutenant governor Tom O’Neill, the son of Tip and a Massachusetts Democratic heavyweight himself, is equally complimentary.
“Has Charlie Baker as governor of the state done a good job to this point in time? Yes, he has,” O’Neill tells me. “Does that mean that he is untouchable going forward? You know, it’s a strange business, politics. Anything can happen.” O’Neill mentions the “uncertainty” Baker will face from the Trump administration’s actions on health care, which claims 40 percent of the state’s budget, and tax reform, which could hurt Republicans in blue states.
For all of Baker’s crossover appeal, he retains conservative credibility on fiscal policy. Massachusetts lawmakers have approved budgets based on rosy revenue projections that have fallen short each year of Baker’s governorship. In turn, he’s revised tax expectations downward and vetoed almost $750 million of spending—90 percent of which Democrats have overridden. This year he struck $222 million in health spending and more than $40 million in earmarks from the state budget. “Being the Republican governor of Massachusetts is sort of like being a hockey goalie,” says Ryan Williams, who was a spokesman for Mitt Romney when he was governor.
Baker tacks right on top-line education issues, too. He supported a failed ballot initiative to lift the state’s cap on charter schools last November. He testified before Massachusetts’s education board against the adoption of Common Core standards in 2010, and he remains opposed to adhering to them now. He did not, however, take a position last year on a conservative proposal to repeal them. Baker, fearing disruption in the commonwealth’s schools, sought the middle ground, arguing for state-specific standards that incorporate appropriate Common Core elements. His goal was to regain the state’s autonomy without upending its teachers. “We’re not going to be the caboose to the train of a federal program,” Baker told Commonwealth magazine.
At a time when President Trump has suffused every crevasse of American society, it’s inevitable that reporters will seek comment from prominent Republicans, even the ones who don’t work in Washington. But Baker steers clear of the third rails of national politics. He has denounced federal policies that could affect Massachusetts, notably Washington’s wild piñata swings at reforming Obamacare, and he has expressed disappointment with the withdrawal from the Paris climate accord and the proposed travel ban. But while Baker is a Trump skeptic—he was an early opponent of his candidacy and has said he didn’t cast a ballot for him or Hillary Clinton—he is not on the front lines of any “resistance” or intraparty rebellion.
What’s perhaps most symbolic is that Baker works in a plain workspace down the hall from the traditional ornate governor’s office, which he said he forwent in favor of somewhere he “can spill a cup of coffee and not worry about it.” There’s no room for sugar or cream in Charlie Baker’s no-frills governorship.
Chris Deaton is a deputy online editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
