Salon.com > Edward Mason

Another Massachusetts meltdown?

Mon, 07 May 2012 19:36:00 +0000

The story about Elizabeth Warren's Native American heritage refuses to die. Today, state Republicans are calling on Harvard to investigate whether Warren used her Native American status to land her teaching post. Some Democrats, haunted by the infamous meltdown of Martha Coakley against Scott Brown two years ago, are wondering if it’s déjà vu all over again.

"The people in Washington are saying, 'The people in Massachusetts are a bunch of fuck-ups who couldn't run a race for dog catcher,'" said one veteran Massachusetts Democratic insider. "This is someone they handpicked, filled the coffers with millions and millions of dollars, made it their number one race, and the people who are up here running it with every resource you would ever want are getting killed."

The Boston Herald broke the story April 27 that Harvard touted Warren’s Indian ancestry, and it’s been downhill since for the Senate hopeful. A genealogist has suggested Warren is 1/32 Native American, although the campaign has not provided documents backing her claim. Warren spoke in one interview of grandparents with “high-cheekbones.”

The stimulus plan that Romney forgot

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 19:43:00 +0000

With polls showing a tightening race, Rick Santorum leveled a broadside at rival Mitt Romney in this morning's Wall Street Journal, suggesting the Massachusetts Republican had a "last-minute conversion" to conservative principles and was trying to distract voters from a liberal record of taxes and fee hikes as governor.

Barnstorming through Michigan, Romney returned fire by telling the Boston Globe, “It's time he focuses on the economy … if the economy’s going to be the issue we focus on, who has the experience to actually get this economy going again?”

But Romney’s track record in Massachusetts for getting the economy moving may not be reassuring to conservatives.

As governor, Romney proposed more than $700 million in economic stimulus in a pair of packages over three years to right a sickly state economy that shed thousands of jobs before he took office, including offering to hand employers $30,000 for each worker they hired, even though he now bashes his Republican and Democratic foes over wasteful government spending.

35 Romney endorsers received contributions first

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Money may not be buying Mitt Romney much Republican love, but it’s going a long way toward helping him buy the next best thing: endorsements in the GOP primaries.

Romney’s Free and Strong America PAC and its affiliates states have lavished close to $1.3 million in campaign donations to federal, state and local GOP politicians, almost all since 2010. His recipients include officials in the major upcoming primary states of New Hampshire and South Carolina, and in three southern Super Tuesday states where he was trounced four years ago.

In New Hampshire, a U.S. senator, a congressman, 10 state senators and three executive councilors shared $26,000 in donations from Romney’s Free and Strong America PAC in 2010 and 2011 combined. All 15 have showered Romney with endorsements leading up to Tuesday’s primary

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley came out for Romney last month – a year after his Free and Strong America PACs funneled $36,000 to the Tea Party darling’s 2010 election bid. And 19 state and Washington, D.C., lawmakers in three Super Tuesday states – Georgia, Tennessee and Virginia -- are backing Romney after his PAC poured a total of $125,500 into their coffers for elections held in 2009 and 2010.

Beware of Mitt, say Bay State conservatives

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 15:47:08 +0000

Mitt Romney’s Iowa surge coincides with a new Iowa TV spot in which he touts himself as a genuinely conservative businessman who will shrink and streamline the federal government.

But some Massachusetts tax watchdogs and small government advocates who remember Romney’s days in the governor's chair say: Iowa buyer beware. They note that Romney promised leaner government when he sat atop Beacon Hill from 2003 to 2007, only to leave the state largely unchanged. Rather, they say his legacy is thick with tax and fee hikes that should make conservatives do a double-take, a big-government proposal for what amounted to a “revenue czar,” and, of course, Romney-care, which bears no small resemblance to President Obama's Afford Healthcare Act.

"Did he make government smaller and simpler – no, it looked very much like what it did four years earlier," said Michael Widmer, president of the nonpartisan Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation. "There was very little reform to show for his four years."

Gubernatorial candidate Romney vowed sweeping changes to the Bay State in 2002 – just as he is doing in 2012 while running against Washington. He inherited a $3 billion budget deficit, a recession and a declining jobs base.

Mitt has always plummeted in the polls

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 18:09:00 +0000

When it comes to deep erosion of support, Mitt Romney is no political newbie. His collapsing poll numbers as governor of Massachusetts (from 2003 to 2007) are an ominous preview of the steady disenchantment he is experiencing now.

“His favorability was basically a straight line down from his honeymoon,” said David Paleologos, director of Suffolk University’s Political Research Center and a longtime Massachusetts pollster. “Sometimes familiarity breeds contempt.”

Now a University of Massachusetts-Lowell/Boston Herald poll conducted last week shows that 48 percent of registered voters in Massachusetts have an unfavorable opinion of the former Republican governor, compared with just 40 percent favorable. In September, 45 percent of voters thought favorably of Romney, while 43 percent looked unfavorably on him. This 10-point swing in his favorability rating is mirrored nationally and in polls in early-voting states. For Romney, rapid descent is a familiar feeling.

Let’s go to the videotape.

Romney entered the Massachusetts State House in January 2003 with a flashy favorability rating of 61 percent. After demanding cuts to fix a $650 million budget hole, voters rewarded him in March 2003 with a 61 percent job approval rating as well, according to a University of Massachusetts-Lowell poll.