For a newly elected governor, the transition to office is a heady time, but it’s also politically perilous. Buoyed by victory at the polls and stocked up with advice from the worthies on the transition team, any new chief executive comes into the corner office assuming a popular mandate to implement his vision of government. Whether he gets to do so, however, depends on rallying the public and wooing (or bulldozing) the Legislature during his first few months in office. As he begins his tenure, Gov. Mitt Romney should take note of the triumphs and snafus of the last nine Massachusetts governors in their first few months, as they struggled to get their sea legs, both politically and administratively.
Our inquiry starts with Foster Furcolo, who was elected to a two-year term as governor in 1956. He had previously served in Congress and as state treasurer. In the 1956 campaign, he promised to improve public services and introduce new programs in health, education, and welfare. But a few days after his victory, the liberal Democrat realized that he would face serious problems advancing his ambitious program. He discovered that the state budget would have to rise from $363 million in fiscal year 1957 to $387 million the following year just to maintain existing services. His plans for expansion would depend on additional tax revenue.
The battle that ensued was not so much over the need for additional taxes as over which ones. Furcolo pushed for a new sales tax, the first in the state’s history, but it was a tough sell in the Legislature. On the left, organized labor and Americans for Democratic Action criticized the sales tax as regressive and preferred a graduated income tax as more equitable. At the other end of the spectrum, the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation and the business community favored the sales tax, but they wanted to divert most of it for local aid in order to provide relief from increasingly burdensome property taxes.
Much of the debate in the Legislature focused on how the sales tax would adversely impact the poor. So Furcolo gave up on liberal support and staked his hopes on GOP legislators. After all, his predecessor, Republican Gov. Christian Herter, had endorsed the idea of a sales tax. In an effort to win Republican support, Furcolo agreed to allow three-fourths of the new revenue to go for local aid, but that concession undercut his argument that the sales tax was needed to balance the state budget. This proved to be a crippling blow, all the more so since the deal won him few supporters in the GOP. The measure was soundly defeated in the House by a vote of 130-105.
John Volpe, left, put Democrats on the defensive, but Frank Sargent made friends among legislative leaders. Michael Dukakis came across as arrogant, and “can do” Gov. Edward
King bungled things from the start.
The governor did recover from the sales-tax fight. Furcolo was re-elected in 1958, and his administration was a success on a number of fronts, including creation of a state scholarship program, a network of two-year community colleges, new state psychiatric clinics, and a housing program for the elderly. But the early sales-tax defeat hurt his image as a problem-solver. As one Democratic critic put it, “Who does Furcolo think he is–that he can solve all the state’s problems?”
Before leaving office in January 1961, Furcolo was asked if his tax proposal had been a mistake. He replied, “I was fully aware of the political consequences. Before I sent it in, I had a meeting of 26 people at the University Club, members of my staff and others. Twenty-five were against it. They were thinking politically, because 20 of the 26 agreed that the state should have a sales tax. Was it a politically wise thing to do? All 26, including me, agreed that it was not.”
“Vote the man”
Furcolo was succeeded as governor by Republican John Volpe, who started out in life as a hod carrier during the Great Depression and eventually built his own construction business. In the 1960 campaign, the Republican appealed to an increasingly Democratic electorate with the slogan “Vote the Man.” Promising to end scandal in government, he told The Boston Globe, “The one issue in this campaign is corruption, corruption, and corruption, which I am not only fighting against but will eliminate.” Volpe also had to contend with a Legislature that was by now majority Democratic in both houses. Like Furcolo, Volpe struggled without success to enact an unpopular sales tax in his first term. But Volpe had other successes that helped him to rise above the sales-tax quagmire.
Volpe gained a reputation as a businessman’s governor for the simple reason that the most important source of his political power was the business community. He had the support of the powerful Boston Coordinating Committee (otherwise known as “the Vault”), which consisted of 20 members from the big banks and the big insurance companies. With this backing, Volpe put the scandal-weakened Democrats on the defensive. He used his clout in 1962 to curb the power of the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority. This legislation required an annual audit of the authority’s books by the state auditor.
But such victories did not protect Volpe from upset in 1962, when he was defeated in his bid for re-election by Democrat Endicott Peabody. A Yankee Brahmin, an All-America football player at Harvard, and a decorated navy war hero, Peabody was endorsed by President John F. Kennedy and Congressman Tip O’Neill served as his campaign manager. In the primary, Peabody solicited the support of the recently chastened chairman of the turnpike authority, William “Big Bill” Callahan, whose political clout made him “the Maharajah of the Macadam.” Not only did Callahan put the word out that he was with Peabody, but he also raised $50,000 for Peabody’s campaign.
That was a boost in the primary, but it landed him in trouble as soon as he took office, when Peabody found himself embroiled in a bitter fight for the House speakership. Michael Paul Feeney, a state representative from Boston, challenged Speaker John Thompson, who was known as the “Iron Duke”–a well-deserved nickname derived from his tight-fisted rule over the House. Seeing the power struggle as a litmus test distinguishing reformers from insiders, Peabody came out against Thompson, who was an ally of Callahan’s. Feeney failed in his bid to unseat Thompson despite the support of the new governor. As a result of this bruising battle, Thompson became an aroused enemy of Peabody. Both Thompson and Callahan held personal grudges, and Peabody soon found himself frozen out of the Democratic establishment. Peabody also naively pushed a bill calling for the abolishment of capital punishment despite public sentiment heightened by the Boston Strangler case.
Peabody’s position within his own party was so weakened that Lt. Gov. Frank Bellotti defeated him in the 1964 Democratic primary. But the indomitable John Volpe made a stunning comeback, beating Bellotti by 23,000 votes in the general election. Volpe got off to a better start the second time around, even getting a sales tax passed over the objection of Democratic Senate President Maurice Donahue. The Legislature had voted down the measure six times by then, but the seventh time, apparently, was the charm. In 1966, Volpe also secured passage of a landmark Comprehensive Mental Health and Retardation Act.
Volpe was re-elected that same year, when gubernatorial terms were extended from two to four years. Longer terms made things easier for incoming governors by giving them more time to work up to difficult decisions or to recover from early missteps. But as an incumbent, Volpe did not need the extra time, nor did he even complete his four-year term. At the end of 1968, he resigned in order to become secretary of transportation under President Richard Nixon.
Ascending from the lieutenant governor’s office in 1969, Republican Frank Sargent made a relatively smooth transition. Interested in social reform and environmental protection, he was not a businessman’s governor like his predecessor. From the start, the liberal Sargent got along well with Democratic legislative leaders, making friends among them even as he infuriated the conservative wing of his own party. Endowed with an engaging personality and a great sense of humor, Sargent had a unique ability to connect with people across ethnic, racial, class, and party lines. His intention from the outset was to make himself a highly visible governor, a symbol of energy and motion, and to take risks on a broad range of public issues.
Nowhere was that more true than in the issue that dominated his first year in office: highways. Sargent, who had previously served as commissioner of public works, found himself bombarded by protests from neighborhoods and environmentalists over the five interstate expressway projects, including the Inner Belt and Southwest Expressway, that were tearing up much of greater Boston. Though he acted cautiously at first, appointing a task force to review the road-building agenda, in early 1970 Sargent went on television to declare a moratorium on the expressway projects, reversing not only his predecessors but also himself.
“Nearly everyone was sure highways were the only answer to transportation problems for years to come,” Sargent told the viewing public. “But we were wrong.” With this one stroke, Sargent reset the transportation agenda for years to come, and also defined himself as a bold leader with liberal appeal, which served him well in the election that year that put him in office for a full four-year term.
No “leadpipe” guarantees
In contrast, the Democrat who dislodged Sargent in 1974, Michael Dukakis, quickly established himself in style and temperament in ways that did not work to his political benefit. A policy wonk and “good government” reformer who had represented the town of Brookline in the Legislature, Dukakis shunned the trappings of office, riding to work every day on the MBTA Green Line and disdaining the politics of patronage and plunder. But to Democratic Party regulars, Dukakis came across as arrogant, aloof, and self-righteous. This cost him valuable allies when it turned out that Sargent had left him a large budget deficit, compounded by inflation that was fueled by a national energy crisis. Stubbornly clinging to his campaign “leadpipe guarantee” of no new taxes, Dukakis made deep cuts in welfare and social services, for which liberal Democrats did not forgive him when he ran for re-election in 1978.
This desertion left Dukakis vulnerable within his own party. Former Massport director Edward King, a conservative who wooed Democrats alienated by Dukakis’s suburban reformism, defeated him in the 1978 primary and went on to general election victory as a pro-business, pro-growth, and anti-tax candidate. His self-proclaimed image as a “can do” governor, however, was not enough to keep King from bungling things right from the start. The Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination accused the new governor of “purging” women and minorities from state government. Later, the House Post Audit and Oversight Committee called him to task for buying takeout lunches for his staff at a cost of $1,200 per day. Several high-level appointees admitted they had padded their resumes with falsified college degrees, while many lower-level appointments had gone to cousins, nephews, in-laws and the children of friends. Barry Locke, his secretary of transportation, was convicted of conspiracy to commit bribery and larceny and sent to prison.
Catering primarily to banking and industrial interests, King antagonized fellow Democrats and wrote off any possible support from environmentalists, consumer advocates, women’s groups, planned parenthood proponents, public service employee unions, welfare advocates, and a host of other constituencies that he tended to see as adversaries. As a New York Times reporter wrote, “In the year since his overwhelming election victory, Gov. Edward J. King of Massachusetts has managed to incur the enmity of every important local political figure, arouse the anger of most constituent groups and achieve an approval rating in the polls of just around 30 percent.” No modern chief executive has gotten off to a worse start, and things barely improved over the course of his one term in office.
After a hiatus of four years, which he spent teaching at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Dukakis took the Democratic nomination back from King in the 1982 primary and recaptured the governorship. He got off to a better start the second time around, making peace with liberal Democrats who were sadder and wiser after the King experience. (Rep. Philip Johnston, who had railed against the Dukakis budget cuts from the floor of the House, joined the second Dukakis administration as secretary of human services.) Also, in contrast to his first term, when he seemed to serve as his own chief policy maker, Dukakis recruited “idea people” like Charles Atkins, Manuel Carballo, Thomas Glynn, Frank Keefe, Evelyn Murphy, Fred Salvucci, and John Sasso into his administration. Finally, Dukakis adopted a new modus operandi, reaching out to people for their advice and trying to build consensus proposals through an endless series of commissions and task forces. It was a leadership style that served him well through most of two terms, until a disappointing presidential bid in 1988, followed by the collapse of his cherished “Massachusetts Miracle”–and state revenues with it–turned him into an object of scorn.
Dukakis was succeeded by Republican William Weld, a transplanted New Yorker who breezed in and breezed out of Bay State politics. In 1990, he campaigned as an outsider, extolling the virtues of free enterprise and the workings of the marketplace. Despite an economic recession and declining state revenues, Weld pledged not to raise taxes and insisted on trimming spending to match available revenues. But he also preached a social-libertarian mantra that increased the GOP vote among women, pro-choice advocates, gays, minorities, and independents.
The “throw-the-bums-out” climate that prevailed after back-to-back tax hikes swept Weld to victory, along with enough GOP lawmakers to capture a veto-sustaining bloc of 16 seats in the state Senate. This was enough to give Weld surprising political leverage as he entered office. In addition, Weld recruited talented people to serve in or advise his administration, including Charles Baker, Eric Kriss, Gloria Larson, Peter Nessen, Kathy O’Toole, and Michael Porter. Weld got his first budget through the Legislature, inflicting cuts that bleeding-heart Democrats were loathe to accept but unable to stop. He won repeal of a recently enacted sales tax on services within a few weeks of taking office.
Running out of steam
Weld had his greatest success in those first few years in office. After that, he seemed to lose steam–and definitely lost leverage over the Legislature after the 1992 election, when the ranks of GOP state senators fell below the one-third necessary to thwart veto overrides. Weld had little trouble getting re-elected in 1994, but he resigned in 1996 to pursue nomination as ambassador to Mexico (a nomination that was killed in the US Senate).
Weld was succeeded by Lt. Gov. Paul Cellucci, who was as rightful an heir to the gubernatorial throne as anyone who has obtained it in that fashion. Weld and Cellucci had run as a slate as early as the 1990 Republican primary campaign–a novelty that has become a tradition in the GOP, and last fall spread to the Democrats as well–and Weld often referred to Cellucci as his “co-governor.” But Cellucci proved to be as much heir to the administration’s dissipating energies as to its political legacy. After winning the office in his own right in 1998, Cellucci made a show of assembling a “transition team” and making a fresh start. But the agenda he came up with was nothing beyond the one he had shared with Weld. All that seemed left to pursue was further tax cuts, and the only way to pursue them was by going around the veto-proof Legislature. The result was 2000’s Question 4, a ballot initiative that ordered a rollback of the state income tax to 5 percent.
Cellucci himself gave up the office before seeing that tax cut stopped in its tracks last summer, halted mid-phase-in because of the current budget crisis. Named US ambassador to Canada by President Bush in 2001, Cellucci turned the keys to the corner office over to his own hand-picked 1998 running mate, Lt. Gov. Jane Swift. This transition was awkward, to say the least. Swift was still recovering from several political missteps, such as asking state employees to baby-sit her children and using a state helicopter for private use, and she was pregnant with twins. In hopes of putting her own mark on the office, Swift launched a work force development initiative to boost adult education and job training, filed sentencing-reform legislation that included post-release supervision of criminal offenders, and announced tough new environmental standards. But she also quickly found herself embroiled in an ugly power struggle with board members of the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority over toll hikes scheduled to cover the cost of the Big Dig. By the time deteriorating economic conditions threw the state’s budget out of balance, putting Swift in even hotter water, Republican activists had begun their move to draft a white knight–Winter Olympics savior Mitt Romney–to hold onto the executive branch. Now Romney himself will try his hand at getting an administration off on the right foot.
It won’t be easy. Like Furcolo in 1957, Dukakis in 1975, and Weld in 1991, Romney faces a daunting budget deficit. Romney doesn’t seem inclined to shoot himself in the foot the way Furcolo did, by going to bat for additional tax revenue. But whether his vow of no new taxes will allow him to impose his will on a back-on-its-heels Legislature, like Weld, or infuriate everybody, like the first-term Dukakis, remains to be seen. Much will depend on his ability to attract talented people to work in his administration–as did Dukakis in his second term, and Weld in his first–and to set forth a compelling and courageous agenda that rides on the force of his own personality (Sargent, Weld), establish a framework for political consensus-building and accommodation (Dukakis II), or take his case to the people (Cellucci with his tax question). Failure to take at least one of these tacks will leave Romney isolated from the political class and the public both, like Peabody or King–and likely to suffer their one-term political fate.
Still, perhaps the best advice for Gov. Romney can be found in a realization Frank Sargent came to after a visit from Foster Furcolo just before Sargent became governor in 1969. Furcolo regaled Sargent with tales of his missteps and miscues as governor. “He was hilariously funny telling some of these stories on himself,” Sargent later recalled. “He and I both believe that you should take your job seriously, but not yourself.”
Contributing writer Richard A. Hogarty is emeritus professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts-Boston and the author of Massachusetts Politics and Public Policy.