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Howie’s Friday Herald column. HC column ping.

Doing Nothing Still Paying Off For Jane
by Howie Carr / Boston Herald 9/28/07

What if ex-acting Gov. Jane Swift gave a speech at Brown University on “public leadership” and nobody came?

That’s what happened Wednesday night - Salomon Hall was, as the Brown Daily Herald put it yesterday, “sparsely filled.” That phrase, along with the equally popular “sparsely attended,” is a reporter’s traditional rebuke of the city desk for sending him/her to a worthless event.

Translated into plain English, it is the ink-stained wretch’s plaintive cry: “You made me miss ‘Dancing With the Stars’ for this?”

Swifty showed up for one of these endowed lectures. Earlier speakers in this series have included ex-Gov. Christy Todd Whitman and cable-TV crackpots Ted Turner and Chris Matthews. They were at least semi-big names, unlike Mrs. Chuck Hunt. You could call Jane a has-been, but never-was is more like it.

According to the Brown press release, the Bride of Chuckie spoke on “Rising to the Occasion: Public Leadership in Challenging Times.”

No wonder the turnout was so . . . sparse. A discourse on public leadership - yaaaaawn.

She could have delivered a how-to lecture to the snot-nosed Ivy brats on what you do after you lose a race for Congress and are faced with the daunting prospect of getting a real job for the first time at age 31. The answer: you get yourself a hack Massport job with an office at Hanscom Field that has no phone.

cw-2But the most educational topic would have been if she’d explained how she’s still allowed to spend down campaign funds left over from the 2002 race for governor that she never made. She backed out of that fight after early polling indicated that, among Republican voters, Mitt Romney had opened up a 71-10 lead, which is somewhat outside the margin of error.

Yet here she is, more than five years later, still living high on the hog on political contributions. The Office of Campaign and Political Finance Web site shows that at the end of last year she still had a balance on hand of $287,858.28. As long as she doesn’t officially renounce running for some other public office someday, she can keep charging expenses to the campaign. This is known as the “Living Well Is the Best Revenge” clause.

Last week, Swift ran up a $473.15 tab for a night at the very chichi Onyx Hotel, which in not-so-chic days used to be Boston police headquarters. On June 19, her 2001 campaign contributors paid a total bill of $1,119.18 at the Taj, which used to be the Ritz-Carlton.

Last month, she stopped in at a Legal Seafoods and charged $60.77 on her campaign committee AmEx card. It wasn’t for a meal, you understand. It was for a “political meeting,” as she put it.

I’d love to hear her - or any other pol - address this abuse of living off campaign contributions long after the voters put a merciful end to your career. But instead, she promotes herself as a “first” governor - first woman in Massachusetts, first in any state to give birth in office.

And now, she speaks to sparsely filled halls, not about hiring Fat Matt Amorello, but on the “integration” of work and family.

“I use the term ‘integration,’ ” she is quoted as saying in the Brown newspaper, “because ‘balance’ connotes that you’re always sacrificing one to give the other.”

Which was not Jane’s style - sacrifice, I mean. What’s the sacrifice when you use state workers as your babysitters? When you have the state police helicopter to take you back to the Berkshires?

“Surrounding yourself with people . . . who knew what the right response was . . . not with people who knew what I ate for breakfast every morning.”

I guess that puts me out of the running for a staff job in the extremely unlikely event Swifty is ever elected to any office again, because I’m pretty sure I know what she ate for breakfast.