In 2001, in recognition of CommonWealth’s fifth anniversary, we rolled out an issue of the magazine that featured lists of 5’s. Heading up our “5 People Who Made A Difference” was then-health care executive Charlie Baker, who made a big impact on state government during the Weld and Cellucci administrations. Baker is making big waves again, this time with the announcement that he’ll be a Republican candidate for governor in next year’s election. Our 2001 look at Baker is reprinted below. His comments on state government and taxes may not be what you’d expect, and they make for interesting reading as we start to take stock of an election that is more than a year away but already stirring excitement among politicos and pundits.

Urbane mechanic

By Michael Jonas

Handing Charles D. Baker the reins of the state’s sprawling human services bureaucracy in the early 1990s was likened by some to putting the fox in charge of the chicken coop. So when you ask the one-time whiz kid of the competition-solves-everything Pioneer Institute what was one of the biggest lessons he learned during eight years in state government, his answer is surprising. “There’s a lot about government that works, and it doesn’t necessarily get the credit or attention it deserves,” he says.

Which is not to say Charlie Baker was at all shy about trying to fix those things he thought were broken. Indeed, if parts of state government work better today than a decade ago, the hyperkinetic former top gun of the Weld administration is likely to have had a hand in it. It turns out that the guy some people worried was out to dismantle state government liked nothing better than diving into its often eye-glazing details—with a plan to address some long-festering problem often the result.

As undersecretary and then secretary of health and human services, Baker found a way to slow the runaway pace of Medicaid spending—one of the notorious “budget busters” of the state’s last fiscal crisis—which was rising an astronomical 20 percent a year. He engineered a sweeping transformation of the state-run health insurance system for the poor, shifting it from a fee-for-service operation to a managed care system that squeezed savings from providers. 

Later, as secretary of administration and finance, a post he held from 1994 to 1998, Baker devised a plan to ensure full funding of the state’s precarious pension system. Acting as Weld’s chief spending cop, he aggressively enforced the governor’s unpopular $1 billion cap on borrowing for capital projects, helping to keep down the state’s debt load and annual interest payments. He even managed to relegate to the scrap heap some elements of the state’s archaic and long-derided county government.

“Some of the stuff I look on most fondly isn’t going to make anybody’s newspaper headline, but that doesn’t make it any less relevant,” Baker says now.

The preppy government fix-it man could be brash and combative. At a 1993 forum on privatization—in front of an audience dominated by unionized government workers—he responded to the interjection of Gov. William Weld’s upper-crust pedigree into the debate by indelicately urging participants to “stay out of the bullshit.”

But reflecting today from his private-sector perch as chief executive of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Baker evinces far less of the in-your-face attitude he brought, with relish, to many battles in government. He acknowledges that some of the Medicaid strictures he championed were “pretty tough stuff,” but adds that “we were at the end of our rope.” And the controversial shutdown he oversaw of eight aging state hospitals and schools for the mentally disabled? “Facility consolidation was important and necessary and the right thing to do,” he says, “but I sure wouldn’t want to do it again.”

Though he won the grudging respect of some human service advocates, others who opposed him in such battles as welfare reform still bristle at the frequent characterization of Baker as the smartest man in state government during the 1990s.

“I don’t know what that means,” says Phil Johnston, who served as human services secretary under Gov. Michael Dukakis. “It doesn’t take a lot of intelligence to demonize women on welfare.”

Despite the ire he inspires in some liberals, Baker is hardly the rigid ideologue he has sometimes been painted. Indeed, his politics may be as tough to pigeonhole as his musical tastes, which range from Springsteen to AC/DC.

In his current role at Harvard Pilgrim, Baker recently joined a health care alliance pushing for a 50-cent increase in the cigarette tax in the New England states to drive down smoking rates and fund expanded health coverage. “There’s a lot of reasons that people can support raising tobacco taxes,” Baker says. Hardly a radical pronouncement, except that it comes from the former chief budget officer of a governor who vetoed exactly such a measure in 1996. “When I was in the administration, I supported administration policy,” he says flatly, leaving the rest to the imagination.

The unfiltered Baker view of the world could come into public focus if he were to run for office himself, something the 43-year-old MBA doesn’t rule out. “He’s bright, he’s straightforward, there’s no b.s. with Charlie,” says House Speaker Thomas Finneran. It’s a description that captures Baker’s strengths as well as his weaknesses as a potential candidate.

But these qualities earned him near universal respect as the behind-the-scenes brains of the Weld years. Weld himself once dubbed Baker “the man behind the curtain.” With the governor-turned-New York-playboy on an odd mission of late to enlarge his reputation for grudgingly squeezing in a bit of governing between squash matches and Adirondack adventures, we may owe more than we know to the wizardry Baker worked behind the State House blinds. 

(Baker photo by Mark Morelli.)