Up here in the Commonwealth (God save it!), it appears that we might be on our way to electing yet another Republican governor. A recent Boston Globe poll had Charlie Baker nine points up, and then the newspaper endorsed him, and quite a few of the usual Democratic big-money boys, including Mike Barnicle-enabling ad man Jack Connors, have announced they're perfectly fine with installing their fellow CEO in the Corner Office. (More on this in a moment.) This has caused some pre-emptive bashing of Martha Coakley, mainly by people who never got over the fact that she lost to Scott Brown in 2010. (And, yes,I'm looking at you, Mr. Lemieux.) To be sure, Coakley's 2010 Senate effort was a towering debacle, although anybody who is truly surprised that Massachusetts might take a flyer on someone who appears to be a reasonable Republican statewide doesn't understand the last 50 years very well.

Hell, the last two Democratic governors were Michael Dukakis, a neoliberal technocrat, and Deval Patrick, who, at least in his first campaign, ran as the same kind of post-partisan uniter that his good friend from Illinois pronounced himself to be in 2008. For our governors especially, but statewide generally, we elect Republicans. We elect Democrats. We do not elect wingnuts, nor do we elect radical southpaws. We're a helluva lot more conventional than our image would have you believe. (Senator Professor Warren was both sui generis, and the exception that proves the rule.) And, frankly, Martha Coakley has run a decent campaign for governor, a campaign clearly superior to the one she ran against McDreamy. She won a tough Democratic primary, with opponents who covered the entire spectrum of Democratic politics. She has more than held her own against Baker in their debates. She has done everything that people said she failed to do in 2010, including humanizing herself through her ads. (There's a very good one in which she describes her brother's struggle with mental illness, a story that I, for one, had never heard before.) In addition, since losing to Brown, she's been a damned good attorney general. And Charlie Baker has run a campaign of pablum. Which brings me to the basic conundrum of this race -- why is Martha Coakley paying forever for the bad campaign she ran in 2010 while Charlie Baker doesn't pay at all for the equally terrible campaign he ran for governor later that same year? They're both retreads. Neither one of them is in the least charismatic. At least Coakley's been elected, several times, to a statewide office.

In 2010, Baker ran a nasty, futile, flailing campaign against Deval Patrick, who was perceived as being vulnerable by a lot of the same wiseguys who now see Baker as practically inevitable. Patrick kicked Baker's ass from hell until breakfast. And this came after almost 20 years of Baker's playing Hamlet during every state election cycle. In 2006, when there was no incumbent governor because Willard Romney finally gave up the job he'd quit doing back in 2004, Baker got scared out of a Republican primary by the mighty political demigod that was Kerry Murphy Healey, who went on to lose to Patrick, whom nobody expected to win at the beginning of the campaign, by 10 points.

What's different now? Go back to the aging Hibernian power elite that I mentioned earlier in the piece. Unlike Healey, Baker is wired into that elite as one CEO among others. (Many of those people are the same people who can be, ah, inconvenienced by an attorney general who's committed to doing her job well.) Which brings us tothe Globe's endorsement of Baker, which is calm and reasoned, but which seems to be more than a little curious, since it doesn't make a very compelling case for Baker over Coakley on any grounds save for the fact that he's not her.

[pullquote align='C']Baker splits from the national Republican Party on social issues such as

abortion rights and same-sex marriage. The commitment he expresses to

avoid raising taxes shouldn't be mistaken for an allergy to the public

sector; Baker spent the formative years of his career deep in the weeds

of government - first as secretary of health and human services under

Governor William Weld and then secretary of administration and finance

under Weld and Governor Paul Cellucci. In those years, he learned how

agencies work (or don't) and how budgets are balanced (or not).[/pullquote]

(Just a note -- the Massachusetts Constitution requires the state budget to be balanced. So, any time you hear any governor of either party up here brag about having balanced x-number of budgets in a row, remember that he essentially is arguing that, during his time in office, he hasn't robbed any banks.)

I don't know what that paragraph means. No, Baker is not an anti-choice whackadoo, and he couldn't do anything about marriage equality even if he wanted to. But let us not make those issues the sole determining factors of Baker's moderation. If Baker is committed to not raising taxes, at all, ever, then it doesn't matter how he feels about "the public sector." The public sector is going to get whacked regardless. And then there's this bit of tap-dancing.

[pullquote align='C']One needn't agree with every last one of Baker's views

to conclude that, at this time, the Republican nominee would provide the

best counterpoint to the instincts of an overwhelmingly Democratic

Legislature. His candidacy opens up the possibility of creative tension.

Facing veto-proof Democratic majorities in both houses, Baker would

have no choice but to work constructively with the Legislature.

Likewise, the Legislature would have to engage with Baker's initiatives. Perhaps

ironically, in light of their differing partisan affiliations, Baker's

candidacy offers an opportunity to consolidate some of the advances made

during the administration of Deval Patrick. Baker could be counted on

to preserve and extend educational reforms, to ensure the rigorous

administration of new funds for transportation, to knowledgeably oversee

the cost-containment law now reshaping the state's signature health

care industry. At a difficult inflection point in state government,

Massachusetts needs a governor who's focused on steady management and

demonstrable results.[/pullquote]

This is the purest moonshine. Vote for Charlie Baker because...creative tension? The only real policy position of Baker's that the Globe endorses is his enthusiasm for charter schools, over which the Globe and its columnists have been slavering for two decades. Otherwise, the whole endorsement can be fairly summed up as, "It's time for a Republican governor again."

(David at Blue Mass Group does a nice job summing up the curious twistsand turns that the Globe's longtime crush on Baker has taken.)

There are better candidates than Martha Coakley. History has proven that. There are better candidates than Charlie Baker, and history has proven that, too. But, this time around, he gets credit for soft-pedaling the executive dickitude that sank him in 2010 while she has to fight the last battle, over and over again. T'ain't fair.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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