Posted on 09/09/2007 5:36:58 AM PDT by raccoonradio
(1989) Bang! The gavel sounds and three of Massachusetts' fastest political mouths are off and running. It's the self-styled "governors of the commonwealth" -- starring Barbara Anderson, executive director of Citizens for Limited Taxation; Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr and talk-radio host Jerry Williams -- live on WRKO every Tuesday for two hours of hacks, hokum and hyperbole.
In one recent episode, WRKO's $200,000-plus-a-year talkmaster and the Herald's six-figure multimedia man were decrying the temerity of the state Division of Capital Planning and Operations for wanting to pay a civil engineer between $36,072 and $47,000. The point, Williams said later, is that the state is supposed to have a hiring freeze. Or, as he put it on the show, "Isn't this supposed to be a no- hire, no-fire administration?"
Not exactly. Although hiring was frozen earlier this year until agencies submitted budget-cutting plans, once those plans were approved, agencies were free to hire again. Capital Planning, which laid off 10 employees as a budget- cutting measure, is down another 30 from attrition. Nevertheless, four days before the show, it decided not to fill the 16 jobs it had listed and pulled the postings Carr and Williams were reading.
But to the "governors," the facts of the case were largely eye-glazing minutiae standing in the way of a good story. None of them got mentioned. And that's typical of the talk-radio troika's pseudo-populist, antigovernment screeds.
As Massachusetts heads into an election year, the political climate is more rancorous than it has been in years. Many think Williams, Anderson and Carr have been instrumental in either creating or aggravating the poisonous climate.
The trio started doing the show last April, after a Middlesex News columnist claimed they wielded more power than Gov. Dukakis. Dukakis himself has worried publicly about their effect. Announcing his budget vetoes last July, he alluded to Williams and Carr, saying, "I am disappointed in all of us who have let the talkmasters and columnists define our values."
The principal value that defines the broadcast of the radio "governors" is cynicism. It's a show where bombast is the order of the day, where state Environmental Affairs Secretary John DeVillars -- generally considered a bad driver but an energetic administrator -- is denounced as a "greedy, shameless hack," where state government in general is reviled as a faceless "they" continuously scheming to squander tax dollars, and where the less rabid media are scornfully dismissed as "bum-kissers."
Williams, Anderson and Carr each play a different role. Carr updates the audience on the latest batch of hacks he has uncovered on the public payroll (often scooping himself by using material from his column that will run in the following day's Herald) and thumbs his Bartlett's for vintage derision. Anderson -- who seems reluctant to engage in the nicknaming and name-calling that so delight Carr and Williams -- pumps her organization's latest tax- cutting petition and updates listeners on whether the next attack by the revenue redcoats is coming by land or sea. Williams adds his own specialty: a dulcet dollop of indignation. He has the state's most finely honed -- and easily activated -- sense of outrage, which makes him sound every bit as sincere voicing his empathy for the $20,000 working stiff as he does pitching the products he hawks during the show.
Political pros are split on the effect of the program. Williams claims it's harmless "tongue in cheek" fun, and some agree. "It is satire," said Republican political consultant Charles Manning. "I think the only people who take it seriously are pointy headed intellectuals who don't know how to park a bicycle." But others say the show is taken seriously, and not necessarily by the intellectuals.
"I think individually and collectively they do have a strong influence," said communications consultant Bob Schaeffer. "They appeal to a segment of the public who they can whip into a froth and generate phone calls to the Legislature."
No doubt about it, Williams can generate phone calls. In fact, if there weren't a Jerry Williams, Nynex might have to invent one. State Sen. Lois Pines (D-Newton) said that on several occasions during the budget debate last June, Williams generated enough calls to overload the State House switchboard for hours.
"No one could get a phone line out because all the lines were overwhelmed with calls coming in," she recalled. That ability to reach out and touch legislators makes the trio powerful, Pines thinks.
Beyond that, some think WIlliams, Anderson and Carr have made politics less civil. "If you are in this building, you hear more and more people talking about getting out of the building," said Rep. Mark Roosevelt (D-Boston). "The long-term effect is a nastiness and vindictiveness that poisons the body politic."
But the real question is probably this: Did Carr, Williams and Anderson create the state's foul mood or do they simply mirror the scowl on the face of the body politic? After all, with a failed presidential candidate-cum-lame- duck governor, a burgeoning budget deficit and an economy slipping into recession, the political climate was bound to get stormy.
"I think they are basically lightning rods for the sentiment," said Mark Jurkowitz, media critic for the Boston Phoenix. "I think they have been able to anticipate public sentiment . . . but if they move the public mood five points, I would be shocked."
Rep. Jack Flood (D-Canton), a conservative Democratic gubernatorial candidate, agreed. "I think the average citizen already had the feeling of frustration," Flood said. "Reading the columns of a Howie Carr, or talking with Jerry Williams, or signing a petition of Barbara Anderson's gives them the ability to vent that frustration. They focus the frustration. But the anger and the energy is already out there."
Survey research tends to support that view. WRKO's 50,000 watts notwithstanding, Williams' Massachusetts audience is simply not that large. Although 35 percent of those surveyed in the latest Boston Globe/WBZ poll said they have listened to Jerry Williams at least once, his regular audience appears to be much smaller.
John Becker, president of the Sudbury-based Becker Institute, says that two of his polls, one in January 1988 and one last May, found that only 11 percent of the population are fairly regular Williams listeners.
According to KRC/Communications Research president Gerry Chervinsky, who polls for the Globe, the main cause of the anger and cynicism in the state is "Dukakis' presidential campaign and the way the state financial situation has gone." Which, in a way, is bad news for the radio rowdies.
"As soon as Michael Dukakis leaves the public stage, they will lose their favorite target," said Ralph Whitehead, a University of Massachusetts journalism professor. "Then I think their influence will begin to dry up. It is definitely perishable."
Indeed, the three may have planted the seeds of their own undoing by becoming so closely affiliated with Citizens for Limited Taxation's proposed referendum that would cut up to $800 million from the tax base, said Democratic consultant Larry Rasky. That measure has been repudiated by almost all the gubernatorial candidates, the bond market and both Boston newspapers.
"As we move into the next political year, we will see a major debate over the CLT position that will focus people on the proper role of government," Rasky said. That debate has the potential to shift the public mood from anger at Dukakis to concern over what is happening to state services. If that has happened by the time the debate ends and the voting begins, Rasky predicts that the Anderson-Carr-Williams tag team will see its credibility die with the tax- cutting referendum.
WILLIAMS
"Stubborn, smug, spiteful, repetitious." That's the way Jerry Williams describes Gov. Dukakis. It's a description that, some suggest, is equally apt when applied to Williams himself.
He sees nothing ironic about that. But then, it's fulmination, not irony, that is Williams' strong suit: four hours a day of it, almost all directed against Dukakis and the Democrats. In the view of liberals who came to admire Williams in the 1960s and '70s for his on-air crusades for civil rights and against the Vietnam War, the dean of local talk-radio has succumbed to the seductive pull of ego and Arbitron.
"I think Jerry's whole budget spiel is self-aggrandizing and much more ego and personal-power oriented than anything to do with substantive policy or a belief system on his part," said Jurkowitz, of the Phoenix.
Certainly self-aggrandizement bordering on solipsism was on display when Williams accepted an award from the Republican State Committee at a party conference in Falmouth last month. There, a straight-faced Williams told the crowd that one of the primary reasons Dukakis persists in trying to site a prison in New Braintree is that the governor is angry at him.
Those who have followed Williams' career say the erstwhile liberal hero has traveled an enormous distance to arrive at a GOP podium as the commonwealth's premier Democrat-basher. One theory is that Williams completed a 180-degree turnaround in two 90-degree turns, first going from liberal to populist and then from populist to conservative.
The other theory is less charitable. "I think he went from liberal to cynic," said Paul Davis, a former staffer for Rep. Joseph Kennedy and a longtime Williams observer. "He found an obvious formula that works and took his talents, if not his principles, and applied it to that formula."
But like many a liberal turned neoconservative, Williams thinks it is liberalism that has changed, not him.
"I think I am the true liberal," Williams said. "I don't think we have any more liberals. From the governor on down, these liberals are really statists." In fact, Williams said, he may be "the last liberal left" in Massachusetts.
If so, it's a brand of liberalism that conservatives are most comfortable with. Certainly Williams is one of the only liberals who pushes Citizens for Limited Taxation's latest tax and fee rollback, or who regularly sounds the "waste, fraud and abuse" budget-cutting mantra.
"I'm not even sure Jerry is in command of the facts on the budget, but he doesn't care," Jurkowitz said. "It is a totally negative, destructive argument he is mouthing. He is one of the three horsemen of the apocalypse, and he loves it."
Williams clearly wasn't in command of the facts when Gov. Dukakis came on his show last winter. On fiscal matters, Dukakis backed him so far into a corner that Williams finally wound up admitting that a major tax increase would likely be necessary just to finance the Boston harbor cleanup.
Williams does have some budget-balancing suggestions -- the elimination of the Metropolitan District Commission and the establishment of off-track betting, to name two. Still, he admits his basic budgetary philosophy is cut now, worry later.
"This may appear to be drastic, but I say cut them off at the pass," he said about the Democratic leadership's attempts to raise taxes to balance the budget. "Let the next governor deal with it."
Although he considers himself a journalist, Williams admits his presentation of information isn't fair. "No, I don't think we're fair," he said. "Whoever said politics is fair, or life is fair? I try to call them like I see them."
ANDERSON
Of the three radio "governors," Anderson is the true believer. She admits she sees the world in terms of heroes and villians. To Anderson, the Dukakis administration and the state Senate are villians. The heroes have a tenuous toehold in the House, mostly because of House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Voke (D-Chelsea), whose now discredited "no new taxes" budget so impressed Anderson that she nominated him for "emperor of the universe."
It turned out that the emperor -- or at least his revenue estimates -- had no clothes. That didn't matter to Anderson: Voke was wrong in the service of the right cause. It is only when one is wrong in the service of the wrong cause -- like, say, former Secretary of Administration and Finance Frank Keefe, who overestimated revenues last year -- that he becomes suspect.
Strangely enough, for someone who has pushed tax cuts and caps so relentlessly, Anderson says what's at issue is not money but principle. "It's not that people care about the money. They don't," she said. "They don't want to give it to someone they perceive is using them and laughing at them."
That's why Anderson got into politics in the first place: She felt government was laughing at her. The year was 1975, property taxes had just gone up, and the town manager of Danvers, where she was living, had just said, "Get used to it folks. It's going up every year."
"The tone was exactly that: Get used to it folks, there is nothing you can do about it," she recalled. "I remember the sense of helplessness, that I had no control over it. . . . All this means to me, this whole thing, is that I am a player. They can't just raise my taxes, they can't walk all over me, they can't do anything to me without having to deal with me as a person."
For almost a decade, Anderson has been a major player in Massachusetts fiscal affairs. Friends and foes agree that she is bright, articulate and dedicated.
But she is not a particularly responsible player, say those who have to struggle to make government work in the wake of Anderson's various revenue- razing referendums. Their criticism is simple: Anderson pursues slash-and- burn tactics without taking responsibility for the effect the referendums have on government.
Anderson pleads guilty. Cheerfully. "This is Citizens for Limited Taxation," she said, "not Citizens for Suggested Budget Cuts. . . . I can't conceive of any way that it is my responsibility to tell them where to cut."
Nor does it worry her that banks say that if her latest referendum passes, it may cost the state an additional $2 billion in borrowing costs over the next 10 years.
"If I did nothing except what pleased or makes big business . . . feel secure, we wouldn't do anything, because their interests are not my members' interests," she said. Anderson does not mention that her principal backer, the Massachusetts High Technology Council, has its own bottom-line interests.
As Anderson sees it, her job is to give people a tax-cutting option. That way, if government can't convince voters that their tax dollars are being well-spent, voters can take the taxes back.
If Citizens for Limited Taxation has no responsibility to evaluate what the state should do, how can it decide what level of taxes should be paid?
"You decide what you can afford," Anderson said. What you can afford, as she explains it, is less an issue of personal economy than a matter of trust.
And in Anderson's mind, trust is impossible under the current administration. "I don't see any solution until Michael Dukakis has resigned or left office," she said. Indeed, as far as she is concerned, the Dukakis administration is the enemy, which is one of the reasons she doesn't feel any compulsion to give a balanced assessment of the government's performance.
"Why is it our responsibility to tell their side when they never tell our side?" she asks.
CARR
In late October, state Rep. Nick Paleologos (D-Woburn) encountered Howie Carr sharpening his wit on his favorite whetstone: the State House. Paleologos, a frequent target of Carr's, laced into the tabloid columnist.
"I said, 'I'd like to have your job, filing a 500-word news hole by listing the state payroll and calling people names. That is not what I call journalism.' "
Two days later, Paleologos made a cameo in Carr's column. Stressing the need for an "up-to-date hack list," Carr wrote, "my survey began Monday with Rep. Nick Paleologos. Let's see Nick, there's your father the court clerk, your aunt the court clerk's assistant, your brother John who's the flack at the Mass. College of Art. . . ." Carr went on to mention Paleologos' brother Dave, who formerly worked for the House speaker, and the representative's wife, Patty, formerly a legislative employee.
It was, as the State House idiom goes, "classic Howie." Which means two things: funny and unfair.
"Classic Howie" also means condemnation by intimation. In this particular column, Carr's intimation was unmistakable: The entire Paleologos clan are worthless layabouts, hacks who got their jobs solely because of Nick's clout.
To be sure, there was no proof of any of that. But then, Carr doesn't think that's necessary. As far as he is concerned, anyone on the public payroll is a legitimate object of ridicule.
"My feeling is I am like a sports fan at a game," Carr said. "I pay my money to get in here, I pay my money every week in taxes, I think I have a right to boo who I want to boo since I bought the ticket."
What's striking about Carr is that, for someone so willing to emblazen people with the scarlet "H," he can't define what a hack is.
"It is like art," he said. "I can't define it, but when I see it, I know it."
He sees it whenever he spots someone in a government job who has held a previous government post, or who comes from a campaign into government, or is friends with or -- especially -- related to, someone else on the public payroll.
Despite his considerable income, Carr seems to have a Texas-sized chip on his shoulder. A lower-middle-class kid who mingled with preppies at Deerfield Academy, where his father managed the student store, Carr shows a particular disdain for anything he thinks smacks of privilege. Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, for example, though that didn't keep him from serving as a paid study group leader there for a semester in 1987. Nor has it kept him from signing on to do once-a-week commentary for the "Ten O'Clock News," on WGBH-TV, though he has made fun of the station's viewership in the past. In addition, Carr writes monthly for Boston magazine, and regularly preaches his antihack gospel on the lecture circuit.
If Carr can't exactly define what a hack is, he can't really define his philosophy, either, but his bent appears to be nihilistic.
"To a large degree I do think state government is a meaningless exercise," he said. "I do know that there are vital services performed, and a lot of people aren't hacks, but in large part I see it as a game: They are trying to lift my wallet, and I am trying to stop them from lifting my wallet. . . . I basically believe that everything it does, it screws up, therefore I want to give them as few resources as possible with which to screw up."
The verdict on Carr among many of his public sector victims is basically Paleologos': Carr is more vaudevillian than journalist, someone who can be shrugged off, even when he can't be laughed off. But one of the things that most outrages people is the way Carr makes sport of people's appearance. For example, Massport board member John Vitagliano, who has a poor complexion, is invariably "John 'Scarface' Vitagliano." House Speaker George Keverian, who has a serious weight problem, is the object of frequent fat jokes, "George Keverian (D-Papa Gino's)" being one of the more recent.
Even Anderson admits those kinds of Carr-isms make her wince. And the normally glib Carr seems lost as he searches for a justification.
"I know that people criticize me for that," he said. "I think that one thing I try to do is sometimes say in print the things that people are thinking as they read the paper or watch the news."
Why? "I guess," Carr said, "because nobody else does it."
yes I think he was given a Sat 12-3 pm shift to wrap it up...
if you mean his last show of all time. If you mean
his last regular shift, yes, I think he was given Saturdays and Sundays (or just Sat only). The original move was daily
10-noon (”the fastest two hours in radio”) then he went to
weekends.
Ah, Bill Weld, the man who had a fondness for that amber liquid! ;)
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