WEEKLY ROUNDUP: WHEN THE FALL AIN’T ALL THAT’S LEFT
Recap and analysis of the week in state government

By Jim O’Sullivan
STATE HOUSE NEWS SERVICE

STATE HOUSE, BOSTON, NOV. 20, 2009…… How’d you like to be the poor guy who drew the straw this year to take phone calls from the whack jobs and the media, and the whack jobs in the media, at the Cambridge Police Department?

First it was the cop and the professor jumping ugly with each other over the summer, then your guys are driving home a state senator who later in the afternoon rear-ends a minivan, and sitting on that bit of information for three weeks.

On the upside, the Legislature has your back on the Quinn Bill, which means you still get a raise if you go back to school.

CPD’s media department woes notwithstanding, the various distractions flitting on the periphery of the Hill were sidelined Wednesday and elbowed out completely on Thursday, when Gov. Deval Patrick strode into the tumbleweed-riddled pressroom and laid rhetorical waste to the Great and General Court, and told them to get back to work on education, criminal record and fiscal bills. “It's my hope,” the governor said, “that the members will realize that their rules are of their own making, that they have it within their power to work a couple more days or, frankly, as long as it takes, to get this work done.”

Little rankles like a work ethic charge, or being told as a legislator you’ve neglected your “moral obligation,” as Patrick put it Thursday. And it came on the heels of the governor getting in Bob DeLeo’s grill on Wednesday, visiting a charter school hard up against the speaker’s district as he urged the House to pass the education bill, a choice of venue that DeLeo unsolicited later in the day said sounded “fascinating.”

[. . .]

The charge of leaving work with work still to be done also stung since it was lobbed at the tail end of an autumn that was promised by the speaker to be “busy,” but which culminated Wednesday night with lawmakers sending Patrick only one significant piece of legislation: an act turning a pair of dog tracks into off-track betting parlors. A day later, the big guy got a budget remedy that he said came nowhere close to bringing the fiscal year into balance. Then the haymakers commenced. “The vulnerable populations we’re trying to protect they don’t get to look the other way … It’s their services at stake,” Patrick said, knowing right where to plant it.

It’s a contact sport.

“How does it make me feel inside? Sad,” said one senior legislative Democrat, tongue in cheek. “It just makes me feel sad.”

For DeLeo, it was a bit of a regime-shaping week. The governor gave him the opportunity to change his game, and the speaker responded. The speaker’s uncharacteristically sour response, via a spokesman: "Governor Patrick's comments seem to be more about political necessity than ‘moral obligation.’ Speaker DeLeo's obligation is to the Commonwealth's schoolchildren - not Governor Patrick's political calendar."

Among the rank and file, the Thursday press conference was final permission for how you can wage your re-election campaign. Not only will the governor run against them, they now have license to run against him, making for a general lack of coziness at all those Democratic holiday parties, not to mention 2010.

If you’re a freshman rep, you have absolutely no idea what’s going on here. Your bound to a work schedule and agenda set by your higher-ups. There’s a governor from your own party kicking your teeth in, you’re being forced to go on record in favor of and then again defending taxes, and you’re busting tail to rejoin an institution whose recent-past leader is defending himself in court in a trial playing out during election season. Nevermind the Senate, which this week was unusually compliant with gubernatorial desires, giving him the ed bill and a crime package.

So on the ballot next year will be a Republican, an independent, a governor, and the Legislature. Inasmuch as the Republican Party here is largely a punchline, the Democratic Party has essentially dissolved. There is, in terms of cohesion, no party. There are only incumbents.

Which actually works out quite nicely for both sides, if you’re an incumbent without legit competition, of which there currently appears little. The governor gets to run against the perennially low-polling Legislature, and lawmakers get to run against the chronically low-polling governor. Mutually assured reelection.

Sen. Anthony Galluccio has a larger problem. The Cambridge Democrat was bagged for a hit-and-run in October, and the Associated Press broke the news Monday that he got a ride home from cops 13 hours beforehand under suspicion of being inebriated. While the struggle between the House and Senate over whose excessive misbehavior yields more headlines remains unresolved, smart bettors are not discounting the Upper Chamber’s chances. Galluccio said Friday he was going to use the recess to confront personal issues.

[. . .]

Unless there’s something deeper here, the relationship between the governor and the speaker, probably the most crucial one in the building and in state government, appears at least altered. These are two guys who, at Patrick’s fancy, were palling around two weeks ago in the Oval Office, and now they’re working each other over, like Joe DeNucci and Emile Griffith back in the old days.

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