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After about 100 residents turned out last month for West Brookfield's annual town meeting, Selectman Thomas Long voiced a sentiment heard regularly throughout New England. "I think the towns around here have outgrown the old New England town meeting," he told the Worcester Telegram & Gazette.

Since West Brookfield has fewer than 6,000 residents it is required by state law to keep a Board of Selectmen and to hold open town meetings. Larger towns, though, are not. On May 14, the annual town meeting in Braintree was held for the last time, after a run of more than three centuries. Next spring Braintree voters will elect a new nine-member town council and a mayor. A dozen other Massachusetts towns have made the same decision over the past four decades. (1).

New Englanders have long complained that the traditional town meeting is unsuited to the demands of modern-day work and family life. Just as common is the charge that an unrepresentative group of insiders ends up manipulating the process. As far back as 1897, A.G. Sedgwick wrote in The Nation that insider control by "the Village Tweeds" had led to a general "decay of town government" in New England.

The usual remedy, much favored by Progressive-era reformers of 100 years ago, has been for towns to "professionalize" by turning to a city-government structure. Another approach, put in place by dozens of towns in New Hampshire and Maine in recent years, is to dispense with the town meeting and put major questions on the townwide ballot.
(2).

Only in the past decade, though, has a third option become imaginable. Could modern networking technologies reconnect larger groups of people to their local governments? What if there were a way to preserve the deliberative aspects of the town meeting -- still stoutly defended by conservatives and progressives alike -- without requiring busy, work-stressed residents to assemble at the same time and place?

In fact, promising experiments are underway to encourage citizen input in regional planning, drafting of regulations, and even to use "wiki" technology to collectively draft laws, says Peter Shane, a law professor at Ohio State University. Beyond that, special software exists for an electronic town meeting -- an online deliberation, guided by a moderator, in which participants don't leave the comforts of home. By the same token, large meetings in an auditorium can use wireless communications to more efficiently distribute information, collect opinion, and record a collective decision.

To the traditionalist, such scenarios may sound like bad science fiction -- or bad political science. Can electronic gadgetry really solve problems of democracy that have been around since Athenians set up the original agora? Nobody is going quite that far. Yet significant efforts are afoot to build on the model that Massachusetts towns created in the mid-17th century. Recent work suggests that the town meeting as practiced today in more than 1,000 New England towns could benefit by being brought into the 21st century. But just as important is the idea that technology enthusiasts have a lot to learn from the old-fashioned town meeting.

. . .

Anyone who has been to a well-run town meeting knows that something important can happen: People come into a room willing to listen to other points of view. Sometimes they change their minds. So the challenge of using new technology is to extend those possibilities, not to short-circuit them.

Shane was the lead investigator for the Virtual Agora Project, a four-year study at Carnegie Mellon University funded in 2001 with a $2.1 million grant from the National Science Foundation. The goal was to investigate whether new information technologies might have, as one of the project's researchers put it, "a potentially revolutionary application -- permitting large numbers of citizens to easily learn about, deliberate, and act on political and social issues."

"We found that under carefully designed circumstances we could provide an online meeting that seemed to have the same positive impacts of a face-to-face meeting," Shane says. (3).

Group-meeting software has been in use in large businesses for years, but what makes recent efforts to adapt that technology to civic and governmental purposes noteworthy is that the people involved are proponents of deliberative democracy.

Beth Noveck, a professor at New York Law School, has assembled a range of tools as part of a Democracy Design Workshop. Working with Benjamin Barber, a noted theorist and the author of Strong Democracy, Noveck helped design a product called Unchat, software that is meant to facilitate not chat but deliberation. It gives a three-dimensional view of a virtual conference room, with visual representations of each participant, and allows for varying styles of moderated discussion.

"Ten years ago, people said, 'Oh, we can put the town meeting online,'" says Noveck. "And then we realized very quickly that a chat room does not replace the hundreds of years of etiquette and social conventions and procedures and know-how and culture that go into running a really effective town meeting." (4).

For the Virtual Agora Project, Shane and his associates developed software they called "Delibera." It allows a networked group to communicate with audio and text. As with Unchat, participants see themselves depicted around a conference table. Those who wish to speak press a button and are put in the queue. Meanwhile, they are able to ask questions and register responses with text messaging.

For some who have studied the traditional town meeting, though, face-to-face conversation is precisely the aspect that makes it work. Jane Mansbridge, a professor of government at Harvard University, studied the Vermont town meeting for her 1980 book Beyond Adversary Democracy. Mansbridge says she finds it hard to imagine the face-to-face experience could be duplicated online.

"If one of the things you want to develop in the deliberative process is empathy for people whose perspectives are not your own, actually having them there is very, very helpful," Mansbridge says.

Mansbridge sees a promising blend of new technology with traditional deliberation in a project developed by the Washington DC-based nonpartisan organization AmericaSpeaks.(She is a member of the group's board of directors.) Since the late 1990s, AmericaSpeaks has been holding large-group deliberations it calls 21st Century Town Meetings, a term it has registered as a trademark.

In such meetings, hundreds or even thousands of people are recruited (selected for demographic balance) to attend a meeting in a large hall. The meeting is "electronic" in that all participants are equipped with wireless communications, linked to a central computer system. Yet it is more intensely face-to-face than a traditional town meeting because people are arranged at round tables to facilitate small-group discussion.

They are given briefing materials and randomly assigned to tables of 10, where they discuss the issue at hand. Working with laptop computers and handheld keypads, each subgroup reports its opinions to a "theme team" that distills the collective judgment of the meeting.

AmericaSpeaks has convened more than forty 21st Century Town Meetings in more than thirty states, including in two towns in Maine, where it was used as part of a 2005 effort to refine the state's plan for universal health care coverage. (5).

Carolyn Lukensmeyer, the founder and president of AmericaSpeaks, says she studied the town meeting process in Vermont before beginning work in 1995 on a way to make deliberation work better in large groups. She says moving discussion entirely into cyberspace isn't the right goal. "There is something about the essence of democratic process that at some stage is built upon and requires human relationships," Lukensmeyer says. "And you can't replicate that on the Web."

Both Shane and Noveck are quick to say that cyberspace meetings will not soon replace the old-fashioned kind. But Noveck, for her part, can imagine a future in which networking technologies become so ubiquitous that the distinction ceases to matter.

"I think it's perfectly reasonable to believe that we can have a virtual town meeting," Noveck says, "but I think that the day will come that we don't distinguish between a virtual and a face-to-face town meeting." Either way, she says, it's the quality of the deliberation that counts. (6).

Dave Denison is a contributing writer for CommonWealth magazine.

Annotations, amendments, and digressions:

(1) The other 12 towns are: Agawam, Methuen, Franklin, Southbridge, Watertown, Greenfield, Barnstable, Easthampton, Amesbury, Weymouth, West Springfield, and Palmer. Braintree becomes the 13th town to convert to a city-style of government since 1966, when Massachusetts towns were given the ability through home rule to rewrite their charters without legislative approval.

(2) Boston ended its town meeting in 1822 and incorporated as a city. But early in the next century, despite the Progressive-era preference for professional city management, not all Massachusetts towns were willing to "outgrow" the town meeting. In 1915 Brookline invented something new: The representative town meeting, in which delegates were elected from all neighborhoods to form a local legislature. Brookline continues to hold representative town meeting, as do 36 other mid-sized and large Massachusetts towns, including Arlington, Framingham, and Plymouth.

(3) To test Delibera, the project brought 568 residents of Pittsburgh to the campus of Carnegie Mellon University in July of 2004. The Pittsburghers were given packets with detailed information about the city’s overcapacity in school buildings. What kind of plan for school closure and consolidation might make sense?

Information in hand, the participants were divided into three groups. One group was asked to review the packets, each person alone in a room, and fill out a detailed questionnaire about the school issues. Another group was asked to study and then meet for face-to-face discussions. The third group represented “the virtual agora” – they participated in a moderated online meeting, using Delibera. (The 170 online participants were divided into sub-groups of 12 to make discussions manageable.)

Not surprisingly, researchers found that those who worked in solitude were the least enthused about the day’s work. But those who deliberated “began to feel it might be more valuable than they thought to engage with their fellow citizens in this kind of deliberation,” Shane says. “The great thing is, there was a positive story to tell, and the online group and the face-to-face groups were nearly indistinguishable in this regard.”

For more on the project, see the VirtualAgora site.

(4) For descriptions of the many tools of the Democracy Design Workshop, see the
DoTank site.

(5) AmericaSpeaks held two 21st Century Town Meetings on the rebuilding of New Orleans, in December of 2006 and in January of 2007, in which more than 4,000 people in five cities participated. The meetings in New Orleans, Dallas, Houston, and Atlanta were connected by satellite television, while residents of Baton Rouge were bused to New Orleans.

(6) A few more considerations: Cost is a major factor when it comes to upgrading the town meeting. When AmericaSpeaks held health care meetings in Biddeford and Orono, Maine, in May of 2005, the tab came to "a couple hundred thousand" dollars, according to Lukensmeyer. Nor does "deliberative software" promise to be an inexpensive solution, unless civic-minded software developers make an open-source product available. Nevertheless, several countries are ahead of the U.S. in building the infrastructure to allow citizens to connect with government, according to Shane and Noveck. There is strong interest in the UK and in Europe, as well as in Canada, in the public use of networking technology.

Not so many weeks ago, it seemed likely that Deval Patrick was going to bring a jolt of new power to the Massachusetts governor's office. He was carried into office by an active, enthusiastic organization; he won by a large margin; and unlike Republican governors of recent years, he didn't start off immediately hobbled by the Democratic Legislature.

Governor Patrick made it clear on his first day in office that he was thinking like a muscular governor: He told reporters that he would seek direct control over independent quasi-public authorities such as the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority -- a goal no governor has achieved, though many have tried. (1).

But after a string of missteps and misfortune, Patrick suddenly seems to be at the helm of a diminished governorship. Headlines about lavish spending for office furnishings and a state car -- and about an ill-advised phone call on behalf of his former business associates -- have hurt his image. News that his wife is suffering from exhaustion and depression means that Patrick will have important family priorities to attend to in coming months.

Clearly, if there were a power-meter for Massachusetts politicians, Patrick's reading would be down several notches from where it was when he took office in January. And yet a governor's power takes many forms. There is the personal influence often referred to as clout, which can be augmented or squandered, and there is the fixed, constitutional power of the office. And it's worth noting that when it comes to the latter -- the inherent powers of the governorship -- the Massachusetts governor is among the strongest in the nation.

Sometime this summer we can expect to see the power of the office on display. In final negotiations over the budget, Patrick, unlike many other states' governors, has both the power of a line-item veto and the partisan political support in the Legislature to back it up. The recent Republican governors had veto power, too, but the Democratic Legislature consistently overrode them. That won't be so easy now. All Patrick needs is a third of the Democrats in one chamber to stand with him and he carries the day.

"Patrick both initiates the budget process and he concludes the budget process," says former Senate president Tom Birmingham. "He should be by far the most powerful player."

But that is only to say that Patrick will be, as an embattled President Bill Clinton once asserted himself to be, "still relevant."(2). The more important question is, can Patrick effectively wield those powers he's given -- along with those derived from force of will and personality -- to make improvements in state government? As his wobbly start makes clear, it's not an easy job for a rookie. But it's one of the paradoxes of Massachusetts politics that the governor is given great power and yet sometimes can barely make a ripple in what has been called, as Patrick recently noted, "the capital of the status quo."

* * *

Measuring political power is an inexact science. The way power ebbs and flows between different power-centers in government often depends on where the most forceful personalities in state politics are operating at any given time.

But state constitutions and statutes have a lot to say about the balance of power. Most states, suspicious of executive power, started out with weak governorships by design. Many have evolved in recent decades toward strong-governor systems.

Thad Beyle, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who has studied the nation's governorships since the 1960s, says Massachusetts is a classic example of a strong-governor state. But that is a fairly recent historical development.

Massachusetts Governor John Volpe led a successful push for a constitutional amendment in 1964 to lengthen the governor's term from two years to four. That same decade saw a strengthening of the governor's powers over judicial appointments and a new requirement that the governor and lieutenant governor run as a team, which removed the lieutenant governor as a potential rival.

In the early 1970s, Governor Francis Sargent created today's cabinet system, giving the governor more direct control over state agencies. A beneficiary of the Beacon Hill power-shift was Michael Dukakis, who became a hands-on activist governor over three terms spanning 12 years in the 1970s and 1980s.

Beyle, in a ranking of the power of the governorship in all 50 states, makes the distinction between "personal powers" of governors -- factors that vary from person to person, season to season -- and the "institutional powers" that are set in place by law. Examples of measurable personal factors are how large a governor's margin of victory was on election day, and where he stands in public opinion polls. Whether a governor has strong budget controls, appointment authority, and veto powers are examples of institutional powers. (He recently updated the rankings for a new edition of "Politics in the American States: A Comparative Analysis," due out later this year from CQ Press.) (3).

"In terms of institutional powers, Massachusetts is at the top," Beyle says. In a combined ranking of Patrick's personal powers (as of February) with institutional power, Massachusetts comes out in the top ten.

Among the institutional factors Beyle considers are "tenure potential" (some states limit governors to one term; Massachusetts doesn't have term limits), how many other executive branch officials are elected (separately elected officials -- such as the treasurer, secretary of state, and auditor in Massachusetts -- mean the governor has to deal with competing power-bases), and whether the governor has untrammeled powers to appoint heads of executive agencies (in some states the legislature has advise and consent powers over cabinet appointments).

In Massachusetts, the governor's appointment power is not as strong as many governors have wished, given the nearly two dozen quasi-public agencies and authorities that operate, some say, as a "fourth branch of government" in the Commonwealth. Because board members don't serve terms concurrent with the governor's, it can take years for a new governor to replace holdovers from the previous administration on the boards of such power centers as the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority and the Massachusetts Port Authority.

Patrick gets a low rating in one of Beyle's "personal powers" categories. Because Patrick has not had previous experience as an elected official in the state, he may lack the kind of network of powerful allies of someone who has been climbing "the ambition ladder" for years. The underlying assumption is that as Patrick learns on the job and develops his own network he stands to consolidate his strength.

* * *

Of course, the "personal power" that is impossible to quantify has to do with how well Patrick gets along with other Beacon Hill power brokers. Birmingham notes that ranking the formal powers of governors tells only half the story. Massachusetts may well have a strong-governor system -- but it also has a full-time, year-round Legislature that has grown accustomed to a central role in state government. And part of the perennial drama on Beacon Hill is the contest between the executive branch and the Legislature for the upper hand -- a contest that some say has tilted too far away from executive power in recent years.

"We have had a power grab by the Legislature" through the 1990s, says Eric Kriss, who served as secretary of administration and finance in the Mitt Romney administration. Kriss says the budget battles this spring will be the first test of whether Patrick can change the balance. He contends the Legislature has made "unwarranted assumptions of executive power" by "micromanaging" the budget process.

"It used to be there was an allocation of money for a broad purpose," Kriss says, such as "build highways." It would be the administration's job to decide how and where to spend the highway money. But in a trend that started in the 1960s and intensified in recent years, he says, lawmakers have become more insistent on rewriting the governor's spending plan line by line. Patrick has already set off alarm bells in the Legislature by eliminating in his proposed budget many of the specific categories (known as earmarks) that lawmakers prefer to bargain over.

Birmingham and others don't rule out the idea that strong executive power can meet strong legislative power and produce good results. Peter Nessen, who served in the Weld and Romney administrations, points to the early 1990s as a model. William Weld started out as an engaged and formidable governor. The Senate was ruled by the strong hand of Boston Democrat William Bulger. Cambridge Democrat Charles Flaherty was speaker of the House. By 1993, Weld and several strong Democrats, including Birmingham, had enacted a complete overhaul of the education finance system.

"The last time you can look back at the executive being strong, the Legislature was also strong," Nessen says of that period. And because of the cooperation that briefly prevailed, "you got some very interesting advancement."

Former New Hampshire governor Jeanne Shaheen, now director of the Institute for Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, says institutional powers don't have much to do with what really matters. "All those powers don't mean much" if the governor doesn't have the political skills to make changes in government programs.

"I suppose most people feel the most powerful on election night when they win," says Shaheen. "But the way I would define powerful, it's in the context of 'what do you accomplish?' I would say I felt best about the job I was doing at those points when we were able to get things done -- when we got the health insurance program for children working, when we passed an expansion of public kindergarten, when we got a budget passed."

In the end, the institutional powers can take a governor only so far. Success for Patrick may mean becoming more a part of the culture of Beacon Hill that he assailed as a candidate.

"The governor has loads of ways to influence people," explains Birmingham. Every year, for example, the Legislature authorizes an upper limit of money that can be spent for large capital improvement projects -- schools, roads, bridges. "The governor has the absolute final say on what capital projects go forward," Birmingham notes. "Those projects mean an awful lot to individual legislators." That doesn't mean the process should turn into a "bazaar," he says, "but there are, you know, accommodations that can be made."

Dave Denison is a contributing writer for CommonWealth magazine.

Annotations, amendments, and digressions:

(1) Governors who stay around long enough can gain influence over these boards -- by having a majority of their own appointees. But state law makes it difficult for the governor to have direct control. In 2001, Gov. Jane Swift tried to fire two members of the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority board, but the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court later ruled she did not have proper legal cause to do so.

(2) It should be noted that Patrick's power in the budget battles is more likely to be a negative power -- if he uses the veto. It's a higher challenge for the governor to keep things in the budget than to strike things out. To exert positive power he needs a majority bloc of legislators or a few key allies on the conference committee that will make the final budget decisions.

(3) Beyle's four personal powers are: 1) how large the governor's margin of victory was, 2) how much previous state government experience the governor has, 3) how early or late in a term the governor is and whether another term is possible (or ruled out by term limits or a declaration to not run for re-election), and 4) a governor's approval ratings in public opinion polls.

Beyle's six institutional powers are: 1) how many separately elected executive branch officials there are, 2) how long the term is (two years or four) and whether there are term limits on the governor, 3) the governor's appointment power over six major functions of state government (corrections, health, highways and transportation, K-12 schools, public utilities, and welfare), 4) budget powers, 5) veto power, and 6) whether the governor's party controls one chamber of the legislature, or both, or none.

"Shit the Dog finally croaked on December 9 after fourteen-and-a-half years of marplotting through life," the article began. I suspect she offered it first to her editors in Dallas – just for the fun of it, knowing that the Observer would be there to print what a family newspaper would not. We were proud to do so.

I wasn't as soft-hearted about dogs then as I am now, so I don't remember judging Molly harshly about giving the poor thing that moniker. Only when I re-read the essay the other day (it can be found in her first collection, Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She?) did I recall the explanation for it: She and her Observer Co-Editor Kaye Northcott noticed that the young pup would practically trip over the pattern in the linoleum, "so we called her Shitface for a while, and then it got to be Shit for short and then it was too late." Anyway, as Molly explains, the dog turned out to have "a genius for fouling things up."

Two things strike me today about this work of reporting. 1) I cannot vouch for the strict factuality of the account. Did Shit the Dog really once cause gridlock "on the entire Upper West Side" of Manhattan by the misadventures Molly ascribed to her? I concede that in my tenure at the Observer (as in hers) there was no fact-checking department, as such. 2) But what other journalist in America would have found a way to use "marplotting" so beautifully in her lead? Most of us are not only poorly read but mentally lazy. So it took me 20 years to bother to discover that Marplot was a character in a play called "The Busy Body," by Susannah Centlivre (1669-1723). Did Molly read "The Busy Body" in her bookwormish girlhood in Houston? Or was it an artifact of her education at Smith College or at the Institute of Political Science in Paris? I wish I knew. But the point is the word means a dim-witted meddler with a genius for fouling things up. Mot juste, as Molly would say they say in Lubbock.

You can read a lot into Molly's short memorial for Shit. The political world Molly chronicled was full of marplotters. Her method was to regard them the way people regard their poorly behaved dogs. They might be exasperating, embarrassing, even infuriating – but they are part of the family. And, in the end, they do provide us with funny stories. Molly always remembered to thank Texas politicians, especially those in the Legislature, for being such entertaining curs. "God love you, guys," she wrote on the acknowledgments page of her first book, "I couldn't have done it without you."

Power and Idiocy
That's the Molly that the world came to know. She became famous because of her determination to study the marplotters, expose their misdeeds, and then laugh. For the most part, the technique was successful – and sane. Politics is full of actors who attempt to build themselves up. At her best, Molly could reduce such people, almost literally diminish them into flyspecks, in the course of two or three extremely polite reportorial sentences. Tom DeLay: "He's normally genial, with the air of a small-town car dealer experienced at being professionally affable. ... When DeLay is not angry, he comes across not as a nut but as a man given to ill-advised enthusiasms – such as bringing back DDT. Nothing, however, in his manner or conversation would lead you to think he is a natural leader." She went on, in a 1999 profile, to describe his success in the pest-control industry, the Legislature, and then Congress. "His real constituency is the lobbying corps, and the sleazy smell that rises from their vigorous cooperation is another reason for DeLay's vulnerability." (Ahead of the curve on that one.)

That profile is included in her 2004 volume Who Let the Dogs In? Among the many striking portraits of politicians included therein is one of my favorites: a thorough dismemberment of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. She recounts Gingrich saying in 1992 that Woody Allen's affair with Mia Farrow's daughter "fits the Democratic Party platform perfectly." To which Molly responds, "The Democratic Party has never recommended screwing your lover's adopted daughter." In such moments, one realizes that Molly went beyond "speaking truth to power." She came to specialize in speaking truth to idiocy.

As I delved back into Molly's body of work in the days after her death last week, I found myself calculating how old she was when she began to learn to do this so effectively. She started at the Observer in 1970. She would have been 26 then. I remember spending considerable time with the Observer bound volumes when I arrived at the office in 1984, at just that age, and I found Molly's dispatches from the early 1970s to be thrilling, like discovering a weird new literary form. The earliest example of Molly's writing to be reprinted in her books is an explanation of Texas politics she wrote for a magazine called Place in 1972. You can see that she has already found her voice at age 27 or 28. Within two paragraphs she's quoting a Johnny Winter lyric: "They's so much shit in Texas/you bound to step in some." (Sorry for the recurring fecal theme.) Immediately following, she clarifies: "I love the state of Texas, but I regard that as a harmless perversion on my part."

She held that stance through the rest of her writing life. For some, it began to read like shtick, and sometimes it was. Molly liked to say she had never made a smart career move in her life. Not quite right. She made a career out of those two themes above: Texas is repulsive, and I embrace it. That became the Molly Ivins signature. It was her ticket to success. It was also a political statement: I will not respond to adversity by shrinking in fear, hatred, or bitterness.

As she got older, though, Molly found her way to another kind of political statement. Sprinkled through her books are appreciations of people she considered to be journalistic and political heroes. This is the work I like best. This is where you find the answer to the question "What are you for?" If the world as it exists is so full of bumpkins, knaves, racists, and tyrants, then how do you imagine a better world? What is there to do?

Courage and Gallantry
Turn directly to the profile she wrote in 1985 for the Washington Journalism Review of the independent journalist Bob Sherrill (reprinted in Molly Ivins Can't Say That). She notes that Sherrill credited his old editor in West Virginia, Ned Chilton, for going with the motto "Sustained Outrage." Then Molly checked with Chilton, and he said, "Yeah, I have adopted 'Sustained Outrage' as my motto, but guess who gave it to me, who suggested it? Sherrill." And where did Sherrill get it? From my own passing acquaintance with Bob, I would say (understatement ahead) he has a naturally cantankerous temperament. But he found his way to Ronnie Dugger's Texas Observer in the early days, in 1960, and recognized it as a place to learn what to do journalistically with outrage.

Another of Molly's heroes was John Henry Faulk. Molly wrote about him for the (short-lived) magazine called Wigwag in 1988. (Molly was a self-proclaimed recycler: This one was reprinted in Molly Ivins Can't Say That and again in Who Let the Dogs In?) Faulk, the humorist who grew up in South Austin and was blacklisted in the 1950s, devoted himself to free speech and civil-liberties activism until his dying days in 1990. And before he died, Molly later recounted, she promised him she would take every chance she could to speak out for the Bill of Rights.

But it's all there in Molly's 1995 profile of Jessica Mitford, the well-born British investigative journalist whom Molly ranked with the best of the muckrakers, but with an additional weapon: She was always funny. It wasn't that Mitford was fearless, Molly writes, she was brave. "Much as she ridiculed those English public-school virtues, like spunk and pluck, she was herself guilty of one of them: She was gallant. Her gallantry was beyond simple courage. It sometimes takes courage to see injustice and then stand up and denounce it. Gallantry requires doing so without ever becoming bitter; gallantry requires humor and honor."

In her short 1995 piece remembering Erwin Knoll, the late editor of The Progressive, Molly recalls sitting in the magazine's Madison, Wisc., office with Knoll and younger members of the staff. She mentions the way jazz musicians pass their music hand to hand, learning by improvising together. She writes, "Independent journalism in this country is likewise a rather endangered craft, or even art form, if you want to be pretentious. And it, too, has to be passed down from hand to hand. And so we sat there, the two of us, regaling the youngsters with tales of Izzy Stone and Andrew Kopkind, Bob Sherrill and Ronnie Dugger, Frosty Troy and William Brann."

Molly worked in the tradition of Dugger, Sherrill, Mitford, and the others, and she enlarged it. She combined sustained outrage with sustained humor, which was a way to sustain good will. The Bush years only stoked the outrage while putting the humor and refusal to hate to the test. In her two books about the current president, co-written with Lou Dubose (Shrub in 2000 and Bushwhacked in 2003), she tried to warn the country about what was coming. Belatedly, the country is coming to see she had it right.

Molly was up to a lot of things in her journalism: She wanted to encourage people to have fun, to remind those who felt isolated in their liberal views that they were not alone, to use humor against the powerful and not the weak. But to be bold, to get it right, and to have the goods – as she and Lou did about the Bush administration from the start – isn't that the highest accomplishment in journalism?

Plus, she was gallant.

Boston writer-at-large Dave Denison was an editor at The Texas Observer from 1984 to 1989.

If the humor depended on the notion that the new governor was about to step into a booby trap, the suggestion was defensible. It’s not often that someone succeeds—really succeeds—in the job of governor of Massachusetts. Consider the recent record. Since 1974, six individuals have served in the governor’s office over eight terms. Only two of those terms can be seen as notably successful: Michael Dukakis’s second stint (1983-1987) and William Weld’s first (1991-1995). Two out of eight suggests that the mathematical odds of success for a new governor in the modern era are 25 percent.

But what do we mean by success? It is a testament to Patrick’s uplifting campaign that the question seems to have suddenly come alive. Keller’s jest aside, the state’s political mood as Patrick takes office is anything but fatalistic.

“He’s coming in with expectations that are sky-high,” says Charles Baker, an official in two Republican administrations in the 1990s and now chief executive of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care. “A lot of people have sort of cognitively mapped their vision of the world and the future onto his administration, and onto him.”

And why not? One of Patrick’s campaign slogans was “Hope for the best—and work for it.”

The high expectations derive, as well, from a sense that Patrick may be able to make the governorship powerful again. His campaign organized a large, highly motivated network of supporters; he won by a large margin; and unlike the Republican governors of recent years, he doesn’t start off immediately hobbled by the Democratic Legislature.

In his election-night speech, Patrick said the state has gone through a period of “government by gimmick and photo op and sound bite.” He added, “Do not expect more of that from me.”

But what should we expect? What will he need to do to succeed? In the weeks before and after the election, I spoke with several astute observers of Massachusetts politics and asked their opinions about who has succeeded, and why, as governor. (The assessment above about Dukakis and Weld is the consensus view.) What are the most important habits of highly effective governors?

It’s a simple question, and it is answered simply enough. The baseline for good performance is to hire talented people; set a few clear, achievable priorities; work with the Legislature to produce a balanced and productive budget; insist on high ethical standards throughout government; and stay focused on the job for a full term.

But in the spirit of “hope for the best,” I pressed the question a bit further. How might a governor—in this place, in these times—lead an administration that is better than good? To borrow the title of the bestselling management book by Jim Collins, what would it mean to go “from good to great”? Is it even possible to imagine greatness in government?

When thinking it over, some of my experts talked about the skills necessary to be an excellent manager in the public sector. Others spoke of leadership skills, which overlap with management ability but are not the same. As Marty Linsky, an early Weld aide who teaches leadership in Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, puts it, “There is a huge difference between governing well and leadership.” He notes that a governor can sometimes “succeed” by avoiding contentious issues that a true leader will take on. In his book Leadership on the Line (co-authored with Ronald Heifetz), Linsky makes a distinction between the way leaders confront technical problems, for which solutions already exist if the right people are tapped, and the way they respond to “adaptive challenges,” which are problems that involve sweeping change and uncertain outcomes. In Linsky’s view, looking for new solutions and coping with people’s resistance to change is a higher-order challenge for leaders.

Governing well, of course, is the starting point for greatness. From my interviews, I have distilled eight commonly agreed-upon elements that have defined “good” in past administrations. Making the leap from good to great depends on combining competent management with visionary leadership on the tough calls. And succeeding as a visionary leader depends on judgment — not on whether a governor’s decisions are immediately popular but whether they are the right ones. In other words, whether they lead to lasting improvements in the living and working conditions of the Commonwealth.

Here, then, are eight elements of success for a governor in Massachusetts:

1. Hire good managers

Practically the first words out of Michael Dukakis’s mouth when I sat down with him at his office at Northeastern University were, “It starts with people.” Running an administration requires the ability to choose good managers who will, in turn, choose other good managers.

Charles Baker, who worked for Republican governors Bill Weld and Paul Cellucci, explains it this way: “If you’re the governor, you appoint a whole bunch of people who work directly inside your office, then you appoint a whole bunch of people who become cabinet secretaries, and they appoint a whole bunch of people, with your permission, who become commissioners of big agencies and department heads. And at the end of the day, for better or for worse, a lot of those people you put in those jobs are going to define your administration.”

As anyone who has ever been involved in hiring knows, there is always an element of chance involved in selecting personnel. “You pick someone you think is going to be terrific and they turn out to be less than terrific,” Dukakis says. “Sometimes you pick somebody you’re really kind of concerned about and they turn out to be your star.”

The media glare can be especially hot when a governor first starts to build an administration. Massachusetts has a rich tradition of patronage hiring in the public sector—as well as a reactionary subculture of contempt for government hiring, in which columnists and talk-radio windbags routinely characterize public employees as “hacks.” In the weeks after the election, Patrick showed an awareness of the perils of patronage, notifying legislators that he intended to make hiring decisions based on “merit,” not connections. Of course, that’s easier said than done. Everyone is connected to someone—and the recommendation of an “insider” may be more reliable than a résumé delivered over the transom.

Dukakis started his first term, in 1975, with a reformer’s high-minded disdain for patronage. As he is the first to admit, the Democrat’s first term was not a success, partly because he had strained relationships with legislators, so when he returned to power in 1983 he made a point of interacting with lawmakers. By the time he left office eight years later, a noisy chorus of critics, fired up by anger over tax increases and an economic downturn, christened a generation of government employees as “Dukakoids.”

When Weld took office in 1990, the boil was lanced. The new governor pledged to get rid of “the walruses”—the lounging, long-in-the-tooth state bureaucrats. Whether Weld’s hiring practices were superior to Dukakis’s tends to be a matter of partisan perspective. The “hack” epithet didn’t disappear in Weld’s term, but there was no general abuse of “Weldoids.”

Baker maintains that new talent from unexpected quarters was what made Weld’s first term as governor a singular success: “I would argue that Bill Weld’s first cabinet was as good as any cabinet any time, anywhere, any place.” And there’s a leadership lesson for Patrick in Weld’s approach, Baker says.

“As he starts choosing people to fill some of these jobs, I would argue that boring is better,” says Baker. “If I were him, I’d be looking for talent, competence—I sound like Mike Dukakis here, I guess—and a little less for ideology. At the end of the day, most of the voters of Massachusetts are pretty pragmatic. They just want stuff to work. And his challenge is going to be that he’s going to get tremendous pressure from a lot of places to [consider] philosophy and ideology first and experience and skill-set second.”

For his part, Dukakis faults recent Republican administrations for a lack of energy and activism. Patrick doesn’t necessarily need new programs and new funding to make significant change in state government, Dukakis says. Instead, he needs new blood: “If he picks the kind of people I think he’s going to pick, and they in turn recruit the kind of people they should, you’ll see a transformation in the way this government works that will be dramatic and very impressive—without any [new] money.”

The challenge in getting from good to great, though, goes beyond recruiting. It’s not how many “stars” are hired but whether an ethic of good management works its way from top to bottom. “Managing in the public sector is 50 times more difficult than managing in the private sector,” Dukakis says, “because you don’t control your environment.” Talented public officials find ways to handle the public scrutiny and countervailing power that is inherent to government.

The slow pace of change can frustrate the very type of people government needs: people with good ideas for change. A great governor would find ways to inspire the legions of government workers, at all levels, to believe that public service requires more patience and dedication than ordinary jobs do.

2. Set an ethical tone

Corruption, or the appearance of corruption, can sink an administration. Joanne Ciulla, a leadership scholar who teaches ethics at the University of Richmond, says the most important thing for any leader to realize is that “the first handful of major decisions you make sets your values system for the rest of the term.” That’s especially the case with ethics.

Democrat Edward King’s term (1979-1983) was marred by charges of cronyism and corruption. When his transportation secretary, Barry Locke, was convicted in early 1982 of conspiracy to commit bribery, the headlines helped doom King in his rematch against Dukakis later that year.

In fact, Massachusetts government in the 1960s and 1970s was rife with bribery, extortion, and kickbacks, especially in the awarding of public construction contracts. A special commission led by John William Ward concluded in 1980 that corruption was “a way of life” in the Commonwealth.

One of the accomplishments of Dukakis in the 1980s, and of the Republican governors who followed, is that out-and-out graft was mostly rooted out of state government. Locke remains the only Cabinet official in recent decades to serve time for official corruption.

The governor’s chief legal counsel serves as the top ethics enforcer in the executive branch, but the governor is the one who is responsible for setting the tone. “If there is any impropriety, they have to be fairly draconian about it right up front, because that’s the only way you start nipping it in the bud,” Ciulla says. “Leadership is a lot like parenting. If you let everyone run amok in the beginning, and then try to get strict, it really doesn’t work too well. But if you start very, very strict and you fire people who have done things wrong and you’re really tough, you have way fewer problems later on. And you can even loosen up a little bit. But you can never go from loose to tight.”

3. Set clear priorities

Jeanne Shaheen has something in common with Deval Patrick. When Shaheen was elected governor of New Hampshire in 1996, Democrats had not held the office in 14 years, almost as long as the 16-year Democratic exile that has just ended in Massachusetts. Now director of the Institute of Politics at the Kennedy School, she remembers the exhilarating but daunting moment of taking office.

“Suddenly people feel like you can do everything that’s on everybody’s agenda,” she says. “So it’s important to try and be clear about what you want to do and try and manage those expectations from people.”

David Osborne, who studied six governors for his 1988 book Laboratories of Democracy, sees a challenge on that front for Patrick. “In politics and government you can’t focus your public energies on too many things,” Osborne says. “Bill Clinton taught me this, back when he was governor. He said the public has to be able to articulate what you’re about in one or two sentences. If you’re doing 15 good things, to them it’s nothing. It needs to be one or two big things that they understand about you.”

Choosing those one or two issues involves using what political scientists call the agenda-setting power of the executive. It’s widely accepted that the agenda has to be limited and focused, but there is also a matter of timing. The savvy leader must recognize when windows of opportunity are open. In the early 1990s, the time was right in Massachusetts to concentrate on wholesale changes to public education. But the drive for a universal health coverage law that started at the end of the final Dukakis administration languished in the 1990s. Suddenly, for several reasons, the chance for health care reform came in 2005 and the governor and the Legislature reached agreement on a major initiative.

Governors always hope to drive the agenda, but sometimes events force their hand, and the best they can do is recognize opportunities and react. “If you’re lucky, you set 50 percent of the agenda,” says Shaheen. “The other 50 percent is what you can’t know about in advance.” For Shaheen, an urgent item was dropped on her desk when the state’s Supreme Court invalidated New Hampshire’s system for funding public schools. For Republican Mitt Romney last year it was construction defects on the Big Dig. Other governors—such as in Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi—have faced severe natural disasters. An obvious rule for governors today is that if you do not make emergency preparedness a priority, you may well end up costing people their lives. And ineffectiveness in an emergency can put the rest of a governor’s agenda in jeopardy.

Osborne says one challenge sure to face Patrick is that he does not have the expanding economy that allowed Dukakis in the mid 1980s to focus on revitalizing older cities and “spreading the wealth,” or the technology-fueled prosperity of the 1990s that allowed Weld to simultaneously cut taxes and increase spending on education. The current economic situation, according to Osborne, calls for finding ways to “squeeze more value for less money out of state agencies,” to control costs in health care and public pensions, and to focus on budget reforms.

Osborne’s perspective rests on the idea that “there’s just no way people are going to accept significantly higher taxes.” But that gets at the heart of the priority question. Lower taxes were a top priority for Weld in the 1990s, and he worked with the Legislature to enact more than two dozen tax cuts. Patrick campaigned on the idea that local property taxes should be cut but that state tax levels were about right. Of course, in campaigns most budget numbers are fictional. One cannot govern successfully without making the leap from wishful numbers into the cold waters of budgetary reality. Candidates don’t need to limit their promises, but governors do.

4. Master the budget

Former Senate President Tom Birmingham, now comfortably ensconced in the downtown Boston law offices of Edwards Angell Palmer & Dodge, still shakes his head in wonder at the way Weld mastered budget details, especially given Weld’s reputation for a short attention span. Bir mingham was elected to the state Senate in 1990, the same year Weld was elected governor. As Senate chairman of the joint education committee and then, beginning in 1993, as chairman of the Senate Ways and Means Committee, Birmingham became familiar with every nook and cranny of the state budget. From the start, Birmingham was negotiating with Weld on a vast expansion of state funding for public schools.

“I remember being involved with him about the Education Reform Act,” Birmingham recalls. “This was when he was really engaged, right at the beginning. He was as bright a person as I ever met in state government. And the Education Reform Act was a fairly complex piece of legislation. Weld grasped not only the initial and secondary implications on some of the financing pieces, but even the tertiary implications.”

When it comes to the state budget, knowledge is power, and it’s a power that has to be acquired quickly. After just eight weeks in office, a new governor must submit his first budget proposal to the Legislature, setting out his priorities for state government in cold, hard cash.

“Most people who become governor don’t realize how fast that process sucks you in and how hard it is to get on top of it,” says Robert Pozen, who served as secretary of economic affairs for Mitt Romney at the start of his administration in 2003.

Many new governors come in pledging to squeeze fat out of the state budget. Birmingham is skeptical there is much fat to be squeezed out. In his view, 16 years of Republican administrations, along with careful scrutiny by legislative committees, have kept the budget reasonably lean. “Unfortunately, there’s no line item in the budget that says ‘waste and inefficiency,’” Birmingham says.

The difficulty for Patrick, says Pozen, is that however tight the current budget is, the appetite for expansion may be overwhelming. “There’s this pent-up demand” among Democratic constituencies that may make it harder for Patrick to keep the lid on, says Pozen.

Though Patrick’s primary task will be to get the budget into balance, government reformers say there’s a bigger job ahead: What about transforming the budget-writing process so that spending trends can be more easily analyzed? What about making the budget a tool for streamlining government?

These are perennial questions but not always welcome ones in the Legislature and the state agencies. Weld’s first secretary of administration and finance, Peter Nessen, made a run at “performance-based budgeting,” but the Legislature didn’t go for it. In the most recent administration, Pozen was part of an unsuccessful effort to set up “performance metrics” designed to answer, throughout the state’s agencies, a simple question: Did you get what you want out of the money you spent?

Osborne, who lays out a process he calls “budgeting for outcomes” in his book The Price of Government (see Considered Opinion, CommonWealth magazine, Spring ’04), argues that “people don’t realize how bad the fiscal future is” in state government. With more of the budget eaten up by health care and pension costs, Osborne says, there is little room for growth for anything. Therefore, he argues, the budget process should be turned into a process of focusing on better results with the money available.

As Baker points out, that hasn’t happened in Massachusetts because legislators want to have control over the budget. “The Legislature really wants to be able to own that document every year,” he says. Good governors are part of the annual effort to balance the books. But it would take a great one to guide the Legislature toward a whole new way of using the budget to improve results.

5. Find a way to work with the Legislature

One of the surest ways to earn a national reputation as a good governor is to work well with a legislative branch controlled by the opposite party. Former Virginia governor Mark Warner, for example, was considered to be a future Democratic presidential candidate after he worked with a Republican legislature on a challenging agenda, which even included tax increases. Democrats Janet Napolitano in Arizona and Kathleen Sebelius in Kansas have also won high marks for working with Republican lawmakers.

Weld’s success derived from his ability to work things out with a strongly Democratic Legislature. Though he campaigned as a Republican against Beacon Hill, he struck up a working relationship with then-Senate President William Bulger and House Speaker Charles Flaherty. Birmingham, who succeeded Bulger as Senate President in 1994, says that Weld’s virtues were his pragmatism, his flexibility, and his ability to have fun with Beacon Hill insiders even as he slammed them with partisan rhetoric.

“You could cut a deal with Weld,” Birmingham says. “He was prepared to come to agreements on issues when his staff was kicking and screaming and saying, ‘You shouldn’t do it.’” The fact that Weld held weekly meetings with legislative leaders made a big difference, Birmingham says. “You can’t underestimate that—it counts for a lot.”

Patrick faces a different dynamic. If some expect him to achieve great things because he will be working with fellow Democrats, others will want him to hold the Legislature in check—in lieu of an effective block by Republicans, who have at least temporarily gone out of business in Massachusetts.

Dukakis’s three terms demonstrated the various perils of the legislative relationship among members of the same party. The lesson he says he learned in his first term is that a governor can’t get much done by casting himself as a scold of the Legislature. His second term saw major steps forward in transportation and economic development policy because, he says, he and his staff spent much more time developing a collaborative relationship with lawmakers.

“You don’t begin to go down a policy road without involving key legislators from the beginning. That’s the rule,” Dukakis says. “You bring them in from the beginning.”

Birmingham notes that it helps if a governor has good chemistry with the two top legislative leaders, especially if the Senate President and House Speaker are not as ideological as he and former Speaker Tom Finneran were. There wasn’t much Gov. Paul Cellucci could do, Birmingham admits, during the legislative battles of the late 1990s. “Finneran and I were like a Japanese horror movie,” he says.

Romney made a rule early on that his agency leaders were not allowed to speak with legislators unless authorized by his legislative liaison’s office. The result was perhaps the worst executive-legislative comity since Dukakis’s first term. Romney and legislative leaders managed to produce a significant health care law, but only because of a unique set of external pressures, including a drive to put the issue on the state ballot and the federal government’s threat to withhold Medicaid funds if the state didn’t reform its system for covering the uninsured.

Perhaps Romney saw the Legislature as a lost cause, since he had no power base there. But a governor who doesn’t want to mingle with lawmakers—and cajole and exhort and wheel and deal—might as well look for another job. The great governors are the ones who can walk among a group of backslappers, policy wonks, ideologues, egomaniacs, seat-warmers, and pork-barrel pragmatists, and move them in one direction.

6. Stay on the job

Nobody has been more scathing about Mitt Romney’s job performance as governor than Mike Dukakis. Romney’s efforts to move onto the national stage exposed him to criticism that he became an absentee governor halfway into his term. “That guy was out of there two years later,” Dukakis says. “There was no interest.”

But, I asked Dukakis, didn’t you also take your eye off the local scene in 1988? That was different, he protests, asserting that he made it a rule to be on the job, in the State House, four days a week while he sought the presidential nomination in the middle of his third term.

But still, wouldn’t you agree it’s a hazard to run for higher office while still serving as governor? “It’s a hazard,” he agrees.

It’s impossible to know whether Dukakis could have emerged from his third term in better form had he stuck with his day job. The recession that hit the East and West coasts in 1989 would have created severe pressures in any event. But the fact that Dukakis appeared to be AWOL in 1988 made the public reaction to hard times more severe.

Today, there’s bipartisan agreement that the state needs a governor who will put national ambitions aside, and that greatness is only possible with full immersion in the governor’s office. Says Baker: “There’s no way you can be a great governor if you don’t invest yourself completely, utterly, and totally in that job the entire time you are doing it. No way.”

7. Show some courage

David Osborne recalls the battles Bill Clinton waged in Arkansas for education reform in the 1980s. One of his more controversial proposals was competency tests for teachers, which were strongly resisted by the teachers’ union. Clinton pushed it through by generating public support, and by emphasizing other gains for teachers in his education reform package. He was aware of what New York City mayor Fiorello LaGuardia long ago said is the most important lesson in politics: how to say no to your friends.

In Marty Linsky’s view, saying no is practically the definition of good leadership, and good leaders challenge their constituency rather than pander to it. Linsky cites the decision by Gov. Francis Sargent, a liberal Republican in the 1970s, to oppose a new ring of urban highways in Boston. A former public works commissioner, Sargent was “a highway guy” and was expected to be on board. Instead, he stopped the project, infuriating his core constituencies. That, says Linsky, “was a very gutsy thing to do.” The maxim Linsky offers is: “Leadership is about disappointing your own people at a rate they can absorb.”

Osborne sees several tests of greatness for Deval Patrick when it comes to reforms that public employee unions oppose. “If he has the courage to cross some of these interest groups at times, then he has the potential to become a great governor, I think,” says Osborne.

Joanne Ciulla, though, resists the notion it is inherently admirable to say no. “That assumes the leader is always right, which isn’t the case,” she says. “Americans have a very macho view of leadership—and also men do.” There is a necessary collaboration between leaders and followers, she says, and the learning must go in both directions: “There is a really big difference between leadership in business and in politics. Businesses are not democracies.”

But Osborne says there is a time for give-and-take, and a time to stand firm. “I’ll tell you that the single most important thing I’ve learned about leadership over the last 25 years is, ‘It takes courage,’” says Osborne. “In times like this, where you have to reform institutions—because we’ve got these Industrial Age bureaucracies—you don’t get results without courage.”

8. Invigorate democracy

Nobody’s quite sure what to make of Patrick’s idealistic campaign rhetoric (which was a big part of his appeal) about a “transformed politics and a whole new civic life,” as he put it in one speech. What does he envision? Will there be a new Bureau of Democratic Renewal? How does a campaign plank for “reviving citizenship” translate into gubernatorial policy?

Patrick is justifiably proud of the grassroots organization that propelled his campaign, and he speaks movingly of the need to keep such activism alive. That could mean steering his network of volunteers into Democratic Party politics, and it could mean reactivating the ground troops when the governor wants to put pressure on the Legislature, as Clinton did when he pushed education reform.

Patrick has authorized his lead organizer, John Walsh, to keep a grassroots organization alive and buzzing. But Baker, who sends out a regular Friday e-mail message to the employees of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, says the new governor must find ways not just to stay in touch with his political base, but also to enlarge his sphere to include the slightly more than 100,000 full- and part-time workers for the state.

“If he really wants to succeed, to be great, he’s going to have to figure out some way to communicate with his own employees in state government, and with the larger body politic in Massachusetts, that goes beyond communicating through the press conference and through the news media,” Baker says. “He’s going to have to come up with some way to communicate more directly and more regularly.”

Any excitement Patrick creates that keeps people politically active has to be considered a gain. Much of what he wanted to accomplish in his campaign was to show that politics could be hopeful and idealistic, not bitter and vituperative. It’s part of his strategy of encouraging more people to participate. By maintaining a positive, inclusive style of governing, Patrick may improve the tone and tenor of politics in Massachusetts.

Yet there are a host of problems that can be seen as part of a democratic dysfunction here that only a great leader with a genuine passion for democracy could address. For instance, the Legislature has consistently nullified the process that gives citizens the right to propose, vote on, and enact laws and constitutional amendments. This contributes to the kind of public cynicism about politics that Patrick decries.

There are several other reform issues that could be on a civic agenda: Is one-party rule healthy in civic life? One of the reasons Republicans are given no chance to get a foothold in the legislative and congressional delegations is that Democrats control the drawing of political district lines. What about the lack of people willing and able to run for public office? Is it a problem that mounting a challenge costs so much that most incumbents go unopposed?

Maybe direct democracy and nonpartisan “good government” reforms don’t really lead to results that are in the best long-term interests of the Commonwealth. That has surely been the judgment of the top legislative leaders here for a long while. And Patrick himself showed no interest in the campaign for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage (throughout the campaign, Patrick said the public has “moved on” from the question) and raised no objection when the Legislature failed to give the amendment an up-or-down vote in November.

The Supreme Judicial Court has several times ruled that the Legislature has violated the state’s constitution by blocking citizen-initiated laws and constitutional amendments. An ordinary governor would chastise the Legislature when he disagreed with its ends. An idealistic governor would champion the democratic process even when he’s not sure where it leads. Perhaps it would take a great one to address the mistrust that now exists between citizen activists and elected representatives—and to lead the way to an honest democratic dialogue.

RISING TO GREATNESS

One way of thinking about how a governor can go from good to great is to think in terms of hitting on all eight cylinders. Turning in a good performance on all the elements described above might add up to a great tenure. Another factor is whether a leader is willing to take enough time to succeed. In Jim Collins’s book From Good to Great, he notes that some companies amble along for many years with average performance, then suddenly come upon a turning point that allows them to take off.

As Patrick himself has noted, the job may take eight years rather than four. Nelson Rockefeller was elected to four terms in New York, serving from 1958 to 1973. He had some stormy times, but there’s no question he left his mark on the Empire State. And, like Dukakis, Bill Clinton had a better second term in Arkansas after learning painful lessons in his first one.

In Osborne’s Laboratories of Democracy, Clinton talked about his attempts to create “lasting change” as Arkansas governor: “I think the acid test is, when you’re through, have you made a difference?” It could be argued that policies enacted in Dukakis’s second term made a real difference by dramatically improving conditions in decaying cities such as Lowell. It could be argued that Weld made a difference by putting the brakes on the growth of state government while going along with an ambitious plan to make Massachusetts public schools some of the best in the country.

Robert Pozen argues that to match the successes of Dukakis and Weld, the new governor needs to accomplish only two things: “He’s going to be a great governor by keeping the budget in balance and by making health care work.” If the new health insurance law succeeds by extending health insurance to all residents without breaking the budget, Pozen says, it will be a model for every other state. “If he can do that, then he’s a hero.”

Jeanne Shaheen says “there’ll be a lot of other things he’ll have to deal with” to keep Massachusetts economically competitive, such as new initiatives in education. But, she notes, the governor’s success ultimately depends on taking the long-term view.

“[For] a lot of the decisions that you make, you’re not going to be able to determine what the ramifications are for a number of years down the road,” says Shaheen. “When Jesse Ventura was governor [of Minnesota, from 1999 to 2003], there were a lot of people who thought at the time he was a great governor. But if you look at it 10 years from now, the decisions that he made, will they really have meant that it was great for the state? That’s probably not an assessment you’re going to be able to make right now.”

In the end, greatness is a matter of legacy. Looking back, are there some governors who have left their states different—and better—for having been governor?

Alan Ehrenhalt, executive editor of Governing magazine, has written about a lasting change made by Woodrow Wilson in his one brief term as governor of New Jersey. Wilson was a pioneer in inserting himself into the legislative process and pushing his own agenda. Before his tenure, most Americans had assumed the separation of powers made such executive activism improper. In an interview, Ehrenhalt notes that Robert LaFollette took a similar approach as a Progressive reformer in Wisconsin. But the chief executive who stands out for him is Al Smith, who served as governor of New York from 1919 to 1921 and again from 1923 to 1929.

“He really found ways to take Progressive reform ideas and make them practical,” Ehrenhalt says. “His greatness was that he had the practical political skill of a Tammany Hall politician and the vision of a Progressive, even though he was an uneducated man.” Smith pushed for worker’s compensation and occupational health and safety, among other measures. “He was the person who figured out ways to protect people against some of the worst abuses of the industrial system of that era,” Ehrenhalt says.

It’s no accident that Progressive-era governors come to mind when we think of great leaders, Ehrenhalt suggests. It was after that period that Justice Louis Brandeis referred to states as “laboratories of democracy.”

Could the new governor of Massachusetts make that phrase ring true here? It’s something to wish for. It might even be what Deval Patrick calls “hoping for the best.”

[Originally published in CommonWealth magazine under the title "Recipe for Success: What ingredients would make Patrick a good governor -- or even great?"]

The victory speech Governor-elect Deval Patrick delivered on the night of Nov. 7 was characteristically hopeful and idealistic -- and passionate on the subject of citizen power. "We have a mandate to change the way we do business on Beacon Hill and to keep the grass-roots alive and growing," he told his assembled supporters.

A few weeks earlier, at a rally on the Boston Common, he sounded a similar note. "Grass-roots governing, like grass-roots campaigning, is about listening to people -- going to where they are in their lives and workplaces," he told the crowd. "This [campaign] is not just about strengthening partisan politics, it's about reviving citizenship."

Citizen activism was the dominant theme of the Patrick campaign. And a month after the election, Patrick’s key campaign organizer, John Walsh, confirmed to a Boston Globe reporter that one thing Patrick means by ''grass-roots governing'' is working with a new political organization being set up for his network of volunteers and donors. He has also encouraged his backers to stay involved in community affairs and local Democratic Party politics.

If that's the extent of the new governor's program for transforming politics and civic life, it is neither controversial nor especially ambitious. But suppose Patrick's uplifting rhetoric about the need for more citizen participation is taken seriously -- even by those who have a different vision for state government.

Only days after Patrick's election, a battle erupted on Beacon Hill that featured energized and vocal grass-roots activists -- though not the ones Patrick had in mind. They were pushing for a vote to amend the state constitution to prevent same-sex marriage. Legislators met in joint session on Nov. 9 and spent a long afternoon avoiding action. At the end of the day, they voted to recess until Jan. 2, apparently dooming the amendment by parliamentary maneuver. As protesters kept up a drumbeat of "let the people vote" over the next week, it was outgoing governor Mitt Romney who seized the democratic high ground and blasted legislators for ignoring "the voice of the people."

''Certainly what's happened in the last several weeks is not in line with what Governor-elect Patrick is advocating,'' says Kristin Mineau, president of the Massachusetts Family Institute, which has led the drive for a constitutional amendment. ''November 9th was business as usual.'' Mineau's group joined Governor Romney, former Boston Mayor Raymond Flynn, and others in asking the Supreme Judicial Court to find a remedy for the Legislature's inaction. The court is expected to make a ruling in late December (1).

No one really expected Patrick to side with the ''let the people vote'' crowd. He took a clear stance in his campaign in favor of same-sex marriage, saying the issue is settled and the state needs to ''move on.'' Nor did he attempt to pass himself off as a champion of ''direct democracy.'' He spoke against honoring the 2000 ballot proposition to roll back the state income tax to 5 percent.

And yet efforts by activists -- both liberal and conservative -- to use ballot initiatives to overcome legislative inertia have been a defining feature of grass-roots politics in Massachusetts in recent decades. More often than not, the Legislature is coming out on top in those power struggles -- and sometimes by bending the rules.

The battle over same-sex marriage is just the most recent example. In fact, if Jan. 2 comes and goes without a vote on the proposed amendment -- and on another one asserting a right of universal access to healthcare that is also pending -- the Legislature will have disposed of seven of the last eight citizen-proposed amendments, not by up-or-down votes but by motions to adjourn or recess. (2).

This side of Beacon Hill politics puts Patrick in a difficult spot: If the same-sex marriage debate illustrates the dangers, from his perspective, of direct public involvement in lawmaking, the Legislature's machinations also feed the kind of public cynicism about politics that Patrick has so often decried.

Pamela Wilmot, executive director of Common Cause Massachusetts, sees a challenge for Patrick in making his support for citizen empowerment directly relevant to the how the state legislature works. “That’s a core part of our civic life,” she says. “That’s where our most important decisions are made.”

* * *

Good-government reformers have complained about closed-off legislatures for a long time -- and Massachusetts may not be the worst offender. A couple of years ago, the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU produced a study that called New York state government the "most dysfunctional" in the nation. Seymour Lachman, a disenchanted New York state senator, detailed the problems in a book this fall entitled Three Men in a Room. Lachman argued that all major decisions in Albany are made by the governor, the Senate majority leader, and the Assembly speaker.

Massachusetts has seen a similar pattern over recent years. In fact, during some stretches of the 1990s, Beacon Hill operated more on the "two men in a room" model, as when Senate President Tom Birmingham and House Speaker Tom Finneran famously spent six months in 1999 negotiating details of an overdue state budget while the Republican governor, Paul Cellucci, was frozen out. (3).

Now Patrick has a chance to at least move Massachusetts back to triumvirate rule. He begins with the widespread expectation he will have a better working relationship with House Speaker Sal DiMasi and Senate President Robert Travaglini than Romney had, if only by virtue of being of the same party. Patrick's plan to keep his political organization active signals he wants to negotiate from a position of strength.

Cynics will call that ''machine politics.'' But Patrick's civic agenda is likely to include other worthy ideas. His working group on civic engagement, one of several transition groups charged with developing an agenda for the Patrick administration, has discussed allowing same-day voter registration (and other election reforms), improving public access to government documents through better websites, and redesigning civics education in the schools.

As well, there are some ways Patrick may be able to help open up the Legislature to wider participation among its own members. State Rep. Jim Marzilli, a Democrat from Arlington, says there are some moves Patrick can make immediately that would empower rank-and-file members of the legislature. He cites a movement for “budget transparency” already being pushed by some civic organizations. All the Governor’s office has to do is produce a budget document that gives clear and relevant information and legislators and the public would be a step ahead. “That’s a very concrete example of how he can bring people back in,” Marzilli says. (4).

These modest reforms, however, don’t get at the thornier questions raised by citizen initiatives, and it remains to be seen whether Patrick intends to make reforming that process part of his civic agenda.

Alan Ehrenhalt, executive editor of Governing magazine, wonders why a new governor would make wider citizen activism one of his priorities. ''Most citizen participation is negative,'' says Ehrenhalt. ''The main reason most citizens participate most of the time is to oppose things.'' Realistically, Patrick might stand to get more done simply by working well with top legislative leaders. ''If it's 'three men in a room' and you see eye-to-eye with the other two, it's hard to imagine why you'd want to change that," Ehrenhalt says. (5).

Certainly, the Progressive-era reforms that gave citizens the power to propose laws and constitutional amendments are not in favor with today's lawmakers. The powers derive from Article 48 in the state constitution, which was drafted by the Legislature in 1917 and approved by the voters the following year. The thinking at the time was that voters needed a way to overrule legislatures when they were too much in the control of powerful business interests.

But it turns out that powerful economic interests can use the process, too -- sending out paid signature-gatherers to put questions on the ballot that do not really spring from ''the grass-roots.'' And the question raised by the same-sex marriage amendment is a vexing one for those who idealize populist democracy: is it acceptable to submit a question of minority rights to majority rule?

Of course, few legislators will speak out publicly against the citizens rights created in Article 48. But their actions tell the story. The Legislature came near to a constitutional crisis in 1999, as it steadfastly refused to fund a law approved by voters creating public financing of elections – a clear violation of its constitutional duty, according to a ruling by the Supreme Judicial Court. (6).

Pam Wilmot of Common Cause says that due to legislative intransigence, ''the ballot process for a constitutional amendment is essentially dead.'' (7). David Donnelly, the lead activist in the ''clean elections'' battle of the 1990s, says the ability of voters to create laws (which is meant to be easier than amending the constitution) is in doubt, as well.

Donnelly, an organizer for Washington D.C.-based Public Campaign, says the health of the initiative process ought to be of concern to the new governor. ''That's absolutely part of civic engagement,'' he says.

And if the Legislature -- and perhaps the governor -- have no confidence in Article 48's rules, wouldn't it at least make sense to try to change them?

* * *

The problem, of course, is that it would take a new constitutional amendment to rewrite Article 48 -- and it would have to be approved by the voters. As many activists would point out, Massachusetts already has high hurdles in place for the citizen initiative. Of the 18 states that allow citizens to propose constitutional amendments, Massachusetts is the only one that requires legislative approval before the amendment can go to the ballot. (8).

Still, there may be a good-government argument to be made that majority support in the Legislature should be required for constitutional amendments (as it stands, amendment proponents need support from only a quarter of the Legislature in two consecutive sessions). And yet realistically, there is almost no chance voters would decide to weaken their initiative powers. Does that mean the Commonwealth faces a problem without a solution?

Benjamin Barber, author of Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (1984), admits that empowering citizens is a tough sell to those in power. ''There's no question that involving and engaging citizens in a serious way in self-government is much more complicated and difficult for politicians,'' Barber says, ''and does also risk that a certain amount of their power is actually returned to the people.''

Nevertheless, Barber, the Kekst Professor of Civil Society at the University of Maryland, and director of New York-based CivWorld, an organization that promotes democratic innovation, contends that a governor could only deal with such problems with a bold approach. The answer, Barber says, is in moving beyond ''let the people vote.''

''Part of the point of direct democracy and strong democracy is not just to get citizens to vote on things but to get individuals to turn into citizens," Barber says. "And that's a process that is more than just about voting.''

If initiative and referenda powers are to be meaningful they need to become ''more deliberative'' Barber says, which means requiring more work on the part of the voters. Coming to ''a wise judgment'' requires more than a modern-style political battle waged with manipulative television spots. Barber envisions new uses of Internet networks, distribution of high-quality educational materials provided by all sides, frequent televised debates, and even a series of straw votes before the final binding one.

Updating our Progressive-era reforms for the modern world may sound utopian, but going in the other direction -- asking voters to beef up the powers of the Legislature -- is no more realistic. (9).

Annotations, amendments, and digressions:

(1) The Supreme Judicial Court ruled in 1992 -- after Senate President William Bulger prevented a direct vote on a constitutional amendment for term limits -- that such actions violate the constitution. The problem is, the court has no power to intervene, according to the SJC. After Senate President Tom Birmingham deep-sixed an earlier attempt in 2002 to propose a constitutional amendment on same-sex marriage, the SJC reiterated its view. Will the SJC give a different answer this time? Mineau says the current case argues there is cumulative damage being done. ''The governor's lawsuit is making the case it's not just this amendment," Mineau says, "it's a whole string of amendments, and that the citizens' petition process is broken unless the court fixes it."

(2) Amendments are supposed to move forward unless 75 percent of the body votes against them. But the body can adjourn with a majority vote. So by allowing a majority to block amendments instead of a supermajority, the Legislature in effect has informally amended the constitution. Article 48, Part IV, Section 4, states clearly: “Final legislative action in the joint session upon any amendment shall be taken only by call of the yeas and nays.... At such joint session a legislative amendment receiving the affirmative votes of a majority of all the members elected, or an initiative amendment receiving the affirmative votes of not less than one-fourth of all the members elected, shall be referred to the next general court."

(3) Technically, they weren’t in “a room” for much of those 1999 negotiations, they were on the balcony adjoined to Birmingham’s office – which allowed the Senate President to smoke.

(4) It would take more ambition to challenge certain aspects of one-party rule and the incumbent-protection racket in Massachusetts. Isn’t it a problem for civic engagement that it costs so much to run for statewide office? But the Legislature for the moment has killed the public financing plan. Pam Wilmot cites redistricting power as another example. “We believe that needs to be a citizen process,” says Wilmot, whose group wants an independent non-partisan commission to draw district lines every ten years instead of self-interested legislators. Wilmot says Patrick expressed favor for the idea at a campaign event. The problem: such a change would require a constitutional amendment. Common Cause made a run at proposing the amendment last year, but fell just short of the required number of signatures. Had it moved forward, it’s difficult to imagine the legislature wouldn’t have blocked it in its customary manner.

(5) Ehrenhalt is a veteran observer of government and he takes a more nuanced view than those comments suggest. In discussing the "three men in a room" problem in Governing (November, 2006), he notes that concentrated power in Albany (and the fact that Republicans have controlled the state Senate since 1966 while Democrats have had the Assembly since 1974) hasn't led to great results. "New York, a fountain of new governmental ideas and creative programs for most of the 20th century," Ehrenhalt writes, "has produced very little innovative or reformist public policy since the days of Republican Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller in the 1960s."

(6) Was the legislature required to fund the law? It depends on what the meaning of "shall" is. Article 48, Part II, Section 2, states: “if a law approved by the people is not repealed, the general court shall raise by taxation or otherwise and shall appropriate such money as may be necessary to carry such law into effect.” As it played out, the law was nixed primarily because of stubborn resistance by then- House Speaker Tom Finneran. The SJC even went so far as to require the sale of certain state property to fund “clean elections” candidates in 2000. But after that, the Legislature put “an advisory question” on the ballot in 2002 asking “Do you support taxpayer money being used to fund political campaigns for public office in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts?” Not surprisingly given the wording, 66 percent of the voters said no. Then the Legislature came into compliance with its constitutional obligation to either fund or repeal by repealing the public financing law. (The repeal language, though, was slipped into a budget bill and was passed without a roll call vote.) For more on this saga, see my article “Statehouse Subversion” in The American Prospect, Feb. 11, 2002.

(7) Over the last 24 years, five of the last six citizen-initiated amendments have not received a final vote in the legislature’s joint session (the constitutional convention), according to the brief filed by Romney, et al. The exception was the citizen initiative for a constitutional amendment allowing graduated income tax rates, which was sent by the legislature to the voters and was rejected at the ballot in 1994. (The four other attempts to allow a grad tax since 1960 were amendments proposed by the legislature. The voters rejected these amendments in 1962, 1968, 1972, and 1976.)

(8) Massachusetts uses the “indirect initiative” – in which the legislature considers the proposed statute or amendment before it goes to the ballot. According to Richard J. Ellis in Democratic Delusions: The Initiative Process in America (2002), nine other states use the indirect initiative but only Massachusetts and Mississippi apply it to constitutional amendments. And, “Massachusetts is the only one that gives the legislature the right to prevent an initiative from reaching the ballot.” In the other states, the legislature can only prevent a vote by adopting the measure.

Twenty-four states use some version of the initiative and referendum process. Of course, that means in the majority of states citizens cannot pass direct legislation -- and in 32 states citizens are not entitled to propose constitutional amendments. (But every state except Delaware requires constitutional amendments approved by the legislature to be ratified by the voters.) Activists in Massachusetts, in demanding “let the people vote,” often equate voting on laws and amendments with the essence of democracy. By that logic, the majority of states aren’t democratic.

(9) Further concluding thoughts:

As usual, the most likely outcome is the status quo, i.e., the constitutional language remains unchanged and the Legislature goes along with it when convenient.

Would it be politically smart for Deval Patrick to attempt to use his political capital on reform of the citizen initiative process? Probably not – at least not early in his term, and not when the same-sex marriage controversy is still alive. But when “strong democracy” proponents like Ben Barber talk about getting “individuals to turn into citizens," they are speaking Patrick’s language. As Patrick said at the Boston Common rally in October, his campaign was “about asking all people to help me as governor help you as citizens help yourselves.”

In Barber’s collection of essays, A Passion for Democracy (1998), he writes, “strong leaders have on the whole made Americans weak citizens; [and] representative institutions have conformed to Michels’ iron law of oligarchy and distanced the citizenry from the government to which representation is meant to tie it.” He goes on to discuss styles of leadership that are compatible with strong democracy. This is what Patrick would have to consider. As Barber told me, ''if a governor wants to be a genuine strong democrat he's got to be a stronger and more effective leader than somebody who's going to simply yield to the traditional system of legislative prerogatives.''

It bears repeating that Patrick did not campaign explicitly as a “democratic reformer.” His language about “changing the way we do business on Beacon Hill” was intentionally vague – surely he didn’t want to embrace a reform agenda that would alarm the legislative leaders he would have to work with. In fact, Patrick’s rhetoric was mostly that of a “civic republican.” Perhaps he’s closer to Harvard government professor Michael Sandel than to Ben Barber in his thinking. As Sandel writes in Democracy's Discontent (1996), "the republican tradition emphasizes the need to cultivate citizenship through particular ties and attachments...[which requires] a concern for the whole, an orientation to the common good." That’s Patrick’s language, too.

It may well be that Patrick’s intention is only to exhort people to take part in civic life, and to keep his campaign supporters active in an organization that can influence state politics. Beyond that, one could argue that if there were to be any real chance to reform our Progressive-era mechanisms for voter participation in state government, the leadership will have to come from somewhere else. It probably would take some sort of broad-based citizens’ movement to do it.

This is an expanded and updated version of an article published in the Boston Globe on December 10, 2006.

Such moments have not gone well for Democrats in recent years. In 2002, state treasurer Shannon O’Brien, who had campaigned as a fiscal conservative, met Republican Mitt Romney in a debate at Suffolk University in Boston a week before the election. Romney made it clear from the start that he opposed higher taxes. And he turned to O’Brien and said, “Everybody knows that if you are elected, we’re going to have another massive tax increase.” Moderator Tim Russert put the question directly to O’Brien. Would she veto a tax hike if the Legislature passed one? She equivocated. Russert pressed her. She contended her position was identical to Romney’s: Both had declined to sign a formal no-new-taxes pledge.

Boston Globe reporter Yvonne Abraham watched the debate with a group of undecided voters in the middle-class suburb of Marlborough. She reported reactions of frustration with O’Brien’s evasive responses to the tax question. “She doesn’t want to answer it!” one man shouted at the TV screen. On Election Day, Romney took 58 percent of the vote in Marlborough and emerged with 106,000 more votes statewide than O’Brien out of 2.2 million cast.

Four years earlier, Democrat Scott Harshbarger had insisted in his campaign that “we will not spend one penny more than we can afford.” But when Harshbarger met incumbent governor Paul Cellucci in a late-October debate at Faneuil Hall, the two men ended up in a shouting match over taxes. “The problem with you, Scott, you’re in that old mode,” Cellucci said. “Raising taxes is in your blood, and you believe that every time there’s a new program you have to raise taxes.”

“Tell the truth,” Harshbarger retorted. “Tell the truth! Try that for a change. Instead of running sound bites, we’ll have a real debate.”

“Scott,” Cellucci boomed, “you can’t handle the truth!” Republican partisans in the hall roared, as it seemed Cellucci had momentarily morphed into Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men. Everyone understood that Jack Nicholson would never take a soft line on taxes. (In Five Easy Pieces, he took an especially tough stand relating to a side order of toast.) In the 1998 election, Cellucci edged out Harshbarger by about 65,000 votes out of 1.9 million.

A TAX THEORY OF POLITICS

Political professionals know that elections are decided by multiple factors. Personality and “likeability” are important. A well-organized machine counts for a lot. Clever television ads can make a difference. All well and good. But I will argue here for a simple, one-dimensional theory. The governor’s race in Massachusetts, in these times, is decided by single-issue voters. Not the ones who vote on abortion, the death penalty, or same-sex marriage. I’m talking about those who tune in to the governor’s race in the fall with one question in mind: Who will hold the line against higher taxes? They don’t look to the governor to improve schools, to “create jobs,” to settle moral disputes, or to end traffic jams. They’re not looking for a visionary leader; visions can be costly. They want a governor who envisions lower taxes.

It’s not that the tax debate determines the outcome every time. Take 1986, for example, when Massachusetts last elected a Democratic governor. It helped that he was an incumbent. Then, just as Michael Dukakis’s reelection campaign was getting into gear, the leading Republican candidate was said to have been caught in his office with his pants down (literally). Party elders prevailed on him to step aside. Then he was replaced by a Wellesley legislator who, it turned out, had embellished his military record. Then he was replaced by the little-known and now long-forgotten George Kariotis, who got 29.6 percent of the vote against Dukakis.

So there is always the chance the governor’s race could pivot on matters of character, charisma, or comic ineptitude. But the one constant in Massachusetts politics since (at least) the 1970s is popular vigilance against higher taxes.

When Dukakis was elected to his first term in 1974, state government had grown rapidly under the administration of Frank Sargent, which allowed Dukakis the rare (for a Democrat) opportunity to run against an incumbent Republican on a platform of fiscal responsibility. But that only set Dukakis up to hit the trifecta of political doom: He campaigned pledging his opposition to tax increases as a “lead-pipe cinch”; he took office in an economic downturn and started cutting budgets; and when that wasn’t enough he agreed to tax increases. He lost in the 1978 Democratic primary to conservative Edward King, who promised tax cuts. Two years later came the property-tax revolt and Proposition 2½. Barbara Anderson and Citizens for Limited Taxation emerged on the scene. Dukakis was elected again in 1982 and 1986, but by the end of his final term in 1990 the state was in a recession, which meant more budget cuts and a pair of income tax increases that took the rate to 6.25 percent. As Anderson never let people forget, the initial Dukakis-signed tax hike in July 1989 (from 5 percent to 5.75 percent) was sold as a temporary tax that would expire in 18 months. The anti-taxers’ campaign to bring the rate back down to 5 percent continues to this day—and has already become a prominent issue in this year’s campaigns.

By 1990 the reaction to the Massachusetts downturn—and to Dukakis’s failed run for the presidency in 1988—was so vitriolic that Anderson pushed a draconian tax rollback and spending limit on the ballot that opponents said would have resulted in well over a billion dollars cut from the state’s then-$13 billion budget. Only an all-out effort backed by well-funded labor and progressive groups and led by Jim Braude (who was clever enough to make use of the slogan “It Goes Too Far”) killed off Question 3.

It was a rare victory for Democrats and liberals on a high-profile taxation battle, but it was also the time when the magic started to happen for Republicans. In the governor’s race in 1990, William Weld supported Question 3. (His Democratic opponent, John Silber, said it was reckless and unworkable.) Weld thus hit the trifecta of political glory: He campaigned against taxes; but when he took office he didn’t have to deal with the severe budget cuts Question 3 would have required; then the economy improved and he pushed for tax cuts. Weld was reelected in 1994 with 69 percent of the vote. It’s been happy times for tax-cutters ever since—and doom for Democratic gubernatorial candidates who decline, no matter how coyly, to jump on the bandwagon.

RISE OF THE ANTI-TAX VOTER

That Massachusetts has a vocal group of tax-averse voters is apparent to anyone who has been through an election cycle here. But are they the decisive group of voters in governor’s races? Can they really be seen as single-issue voters, moved primarily by the taxing-and-spending debate?

Democrats certainly don’t see it this way. They tend to see the party’s losing streak as a result of personality problems. John Silber’s loss to Weld in 1990 was attributed to Silber’s volatility—for example, he reacted rudely to questions from the much-admired TV news anchor Natalie Jacobson. When Weld trounced Mark Roosevelt four years later, it was conceded that Roosevelt just couldn’t match Weld in star power. Harshbarger in 1998: a plodding campaign and poor debate performances. O’Brien in 2002: same verdict. In each case, according to the pundits and professionals, Democrats lost due to deficient campaign mechanics and not-quite-ready-for-prime-time candidates. It was a problem of image, not ideology.

And there was another explanation that gained wide currency: Voters want a Republican governor to act as a check on the lopsidedly Democratic Legislature. Republican Lt. Gov. Kerry Healey made this a central theme in her speech accepting her party’s nomination this spring, and she’s sure to repeat it all summer and fall.

But why is this effective? The idea of checks and balances is an abstraction—a good-government ideal. It would be nice to think voters make decisions on the basis of democratic theory, but I don’t think they do. If voters worry about Democratic control of the Legislature, it is primarily because they fear taxing and spending will get out of control. Republican warnings against giving Democrats full ownership of state government pack a punch for one reason: They speak to the fears of anti-tax voters.

Perhaps this will be the year that changes everything. The three Democrats who are contending for the nomination in the September primary are each, in different ways, prepared to blunt the usual Republican arguments. Neither Attorney General Tom Reilly, nor venture capitalist Chris Gabrieli, nor former Clinton administration civil rights official Deval Patrick are easily portrayed as State House “insiders.” Reilly and Gabrieli, as well, decided early on to support a reduction in the state income tax rate from the current 5.3 percent to an even 5 percent, though Gabrieli has been circumspect about exactly when that should happen. Patrick doesn’t believe the income tax rollback is affordable and has been speaking instead of the need to reduce local property taxes, something he says will be impossible to do if state tax revenues are cut.

If independent candidate Christy Mihos emerges as a factor in the fall, some of the typical electoral dynamics may be altered, as well. But the emphasis on taxes may be even greater for his presence in the campaign. He claims that high taxes are part of what is driving people and businesses out of the state, and is proposing a property-tax limitation that, in effect, says Prop. 2½ hasn’t been enough to protect homeowners.

And there is always the possibility that Democrats can “reframe” the tax issue to their advantage. But I have my doubts. Which brings me back to those single-issue voters. This spring I spent some time poring over my multi-volume set of Public Document No. 43, better known as Massachusetts Election Statistics, published every other year by the Elections Division of the Secretary of the Commonwealth. I make no pretense of sophisticated social science; I built no databases and ran no multiple regression analyses. I was interested only in making commonsense correlations between the several high-profile tax-related questions that have appeared on the ballot since 1986 and the partisan elections decided in that time.

The voting patterns over the last two decades in governor’s races are well known. As Robert David Sullivan put it recently (“Shifting Ground,” CW, Spring ’06), “If you were to take a map of the state and plot the 50 or so communities that voted most heavily for Romney in 2002, most of your pushpins would form a large ‘C’ around—and well removed from—the city of Boston.” Democrats over the years have run strongly in Boston and surrounding cities, in liberal outposts such as Amherst and Northampton, and in the western part of the state. Those are also the locales that are least tax-phobic. Elsewhere in the state lurk concentrations of anti-tax voters.

AS GOES LUNENBURG?

To get an idea of the sort of place I mean when I talk about tax-averse single-issue voters, consider the Worcester County town of Lunenburg. There are many suburbs in that “C” around Boston where the voting patterns are similar, but I suggest Lunenburg for its sheer middleness. It’s in the middlemost county, sandwiched between working-class Fitchburg to the west and upper-crust Groton to the east. With a median family income of $63,981 in 1999, it ranked 174th in the state—almost exactly in the middle of the 351 cities and towns in the Commonwealth.

The most numerous voters in Lunenburg, as in the state as a whole, are those who decline to choose a party affiliation. Out of almost 7,000 registered Lunenburg voters in 2004, 59 percent were unenrolled. About 20 percent were registered Democrats and 19 percent Republican. (Statewide, Massachusetts has about 49 percent independent, 37 percent Democrats, and 13 percent GOP.) So, as in many towns and exurbs, it’s the independents who decide elections. In 2004, the town gave majority support to Acton Democrat James Eldridge for state representative. (Rep. Eldridge is an active supporter of Deval Patrick in this year’s governor’s race.) Lunenburg also voted for Democrat Al Gore in 2000 and for John Kerry in 2004. But in governor’s races, the town goes Republican, turning out strongly for Weld and Cellucci in the 1990s, and giving Romney 60 percent of the vote in 2002.

On tax questions, Lunenburg leans toward the GOP positions, too. From a liberal point of view, middle-class towns should have been bastions of support for the proposition put before voters in 1994 to make state income tax rates progressive—allowing higher rates for the rich and potentially lower rates for the rest. Statewide, 65 percent of the voters said no to the graduated income tax. In Lunenburg, 68 percent voted no.

In 2000, Gov. Paul Cellucci pushed a ballot question requiring the state income tax to be returned, by 2003, to 5 percent. That question won statewide with a solid 56 percent of the vote; it carried Lunenburg with an even stronger 64 percent. And then in 2002 came the strangest tax vote of all—a libertarian-backed ballot question proposing the complete elimination of the state income tax. Not many non-libertarians took the proposal seriously. Yet 40 percent of the state’s 2.2 million voters that year said yes to junking the income tax. In Lunenburg, 48 percent voted yes and 44 percent voted no, with 8 percent (perhaps sensibly) leaving the question blank.

As goes Lunenburg, so goes Massachusetts? Not exactly. The town leans more toward Republicans than the state as a whole, and favors tax limitations more strongly. But the state is full of towns like Lunenburg. In fact, on the 2000 income tax rate rollback, 322 cities and towns voted yes and only 29 voted no. The combined vote of the state’s 10 largest cities was negative, with 241,444 against and 226,569 in favor (a 51.6 percent to 48.4 percent margin). But towns and suburbs voted heavily to cut the income tax rate. Even in the vote two years later to eliminate the income tax, there were 102 towns and cities that voted yes. Only 31 of these could be considered full-fledged Republican strongholds (by the standard of voting for the Bush-Cheney ticket in 2004).

One probably shouldn’t make too much of the fact that 40 percent of the voters expressed the desire to blow up the income tax. The vote was surely more a barometer of hostility than an actual public-policy preference. Still, when you look at the places with a majority of yes votes, you find small cities (Attleboro, Haverhill, Peabody), middle-class suburbs (Billerica, Danvers, Plymouth), wealthy Republican enclaves (Dover, Duxbury), and even the urban working-class Democratic city of Revere.

That’s the coalition that has been electing Republican governors. To put it into simple electoral math, the Republican starts with about a third of the electorate that consistently votes GOP. (Take the 27 percent who voted for Bob Dole for president in 1996 as the low baseline.) A Republican can write off the third of the electorate that is down-the-line Democratic (only 27 percent stuck with Mark Roosevelt when he ran against Weld in 1994, but that was an anomaly). That leaves a final third—the group of unaligned voters that is concentrated in middle-class towns and suburbs. These are the people who vote against higher taxes whenever they get the chance. When six out of 10 voters in a town like Lunenburg vote to cut the state income tax and then vote two years later for candidate Mitt Romney (by about the same margin), these voters are making an equivalent statement. They are not single-issue voters in national elections, or in local ones. But in the governor’s race, they vote for the lower-taxes candidate, and they do so reliably.

TO TELL THE TRUTH

The statements on taxes made over the years by Massachusetts voters do not add up to coherent tax policy. Only a third of the voters support graduated income tax rates? Progressivity makes the income tax fair and equitable. Kansas sets its rates at 3.5 percent for those who make up to $15,000 a year, 6.25 percent on $15,000 to $30,000, and 6.45 percent for income above $30,000. More than half the states—including Arkansas and Georgia—have progressive state income tax rates. Yet the question has failed at the ballot five times over the last four decades in Massachusetts, where it would require an amendment to the state constitution to tax income at different rates.

And how can voters think it’s sensible to cut the state income tax, when doing so results in less state revenue-sharing to cities and towns, which inevitably puts more strain on the property tax? I live in the town of Arlington, which comes close to rivaling Cambridge in lopsidedly Democratic voting. Yet Arlington supported the income tax rollback in 2000 by 12,141 votes to 11,240 votes. It’s true that Cellucci and others promoted the rollback in a flush year, before the 2001-02 economic downturn. But when the state cut back on local aid in 2003, Arlington and most other towns faced tighter budgets and had to consider raising property taxes. It took a couple of tries, but Arlington voters eventually trudged to the polls last year and voted to override the limits of Proposition 2½. A few dollars saved in income taxes is then traded away for higher property taxes. Does that make sense?

Maybe not—as a matter of tax policy. But what Republicans seem to understand better than Democrats is that talking about tax policy is not at all the same as talking about taxes. Traditionally in American politics, arguments about taxation have been about taking sides. That’s why politicians are so quick to resort to demagogic appeals. Republicans in recent decades have mastered the simple appeal to voter anger about government taking “your money.” There was a time when the Democrats had a perfectly effective demagogic appeal, as well. It was memorably expressed in novelist Robert Penn Warren’s masterpiece All the King’s Men. When the up-and-coming populist Willie Stark (a fictional version of Louisiana’s Huey Long) complained that his audience didn’t seem to be paying much attention to his tax program, his adviser Jack Burden said, “You tell ’em too much. Just tell ’em you’re gonna soak the fat boys, and forget the rest of the tax stuff.”

For all kinds of reasons, Democrats have abandoned blatant “soak the rich” appeals and have become disinclined to raise taxes on the business sector. So now when the subject of taxation comes up in the heat of a campaign, Republicans are the ones who connect on an emotional level, while Democrats are left droning on about tax policy and demands on the state budget. When Republicans promise they can hold the line against taxes, stimulate the economy, and protect important government programs, Democrats cry foul. “Tell the truth!” demanded Scott Harshbarger in his debate against Cellucci.

But what would it mean for politicians to tell the truth about taxes in Massachusetts? Maybe the truth that matters most to a middle-class voter in a town like Lunenburg has little to do with what politicians end up arguing about every four years. Can the state afford to cut the income tax rate from 5.3 percent to 5 percent? Who knows? That depends on whether you believe there will be a lot of extra revenue next year from the improving economy, and whether that revenue will be needed for this or that. But probably fewer than a hundred people in the entire state have enough mastery of the state budget to contribute intelligently to that discussion. The question that matters to an ordinary taxpayer is whether she will be paying more taxes next year than this year.

An intellectually curious taxpayer might wonder, as well: Am I really paying more now than I was 10 years ago, or does it just seem that way? And am I paying more in taxes than I would pay if I made the same income in New Hampshire or North Carolina? It does seems strange that, with all the attention to taxation in Massachusetts political debates, such basic questions are seldom addressed in a forthright way. Maybe that’s because there is no bell-clanging “truth” about the fundamental question: Are taxes too high in Massachusetts? It’s easy enough to say they are. But how high is too high?

Imagine paying about $10 out of every $100 earned to support state and local government. Is that too much for a middle-class family to pay in order to have decent public schools, police and fire protection, roads and sewers, and state services provided for the health and care of indigent children and elderly persons, the mentally ill, the disabled, and others who need assistance?

HOW HIGH IS TOO HIGH?

As it turns out, $10 out of $100 is what most middle-class people pay in combined state and local taxes in Massachusetts. In a 2003 study by the Washington, DC–based Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy comparing the tax systems of all 50 states, the national average for someone in the middle 20 percent of the income range is 9.9 percent of income for state and local taxes. The middle 20 percent in Massachusetts pays 9.2 percent, according to the study. That figure includes estimates of state income taxes, property taxes, and sales and excise taxes. (A millionaire in Massachusetts is likely to pay only about 6.8 percent of income in state and local taxes.)

I asked Cam Huff, of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, to calculate what a middle-class family of four in Massachusetts is likely to pay today in taxes. Assuming a family income of $67,000, two children under 12, and an average single-family property tax bill, Huff came up with a combined tax rate of 9 percent. He did not estimate sales taxes and excise taxes which, of course, depend on how much such a family spends on items like toys, electronics, cigarettes, beer, and gasoline (clothing and groceries are exempt from sales taxes here). But it’s easy to assume a figure of about 10 percent, reducing that $67,000 income to about $60,000 after state and local taxes.

That hardly seems to prove that taxes are too high in the Commonwealth. And in fact, as other figures produced by the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation show, Massachusetts overall is not a high-tax state, in terms of how much of our income goes to taxes. In fact, when all state and local taxes (including other revenues from fees and assessments) are taken into account and measured against personal income, Massachusetts ranked 46th in the nation in 2000. (Anti-taxers such as Barbara Anderson prefer to use a per capita measure; by this standard, Massachusetts ranked second in the nation in 2000—right after New York—in personal income taxes collected, and eighth in all state and local taxes. But the per capita measure can be deceptive. It tells us how many dollars government collects relative to the size of a state’s population. In expensive states such as Massachusetts, government needs more dollars to pay for the same amount of services as in a cheaper state. The per capita measure doesn’t tell us much about ordinary people’s tax burden. For example, the state that collects the most tax revenue per capita is Alaska—a state that has no personal income tax and has the lowest overall middle-class tax burden in America.)

Every state uses a different combination of taxes and fees to support government services. If you live in Maine, New Hampshire, or Vermont, you’ll pay a lot more in property taxes and less in income taxes. In Massachusetts you’ll pay more in income taxes but much less in sales and excise taxes than in most other states (though not New Hampshire, which also has low sales taxes). But overall, if you make a middle-class income, you’ll pay about $8 to $10 out of $100 in whatever state you choose (unless it’s Alaska, Delaware, Nevada, New Hampshire, or Wyoming, where you’ll pay $5 or less), according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

Here’s the rub: When you add federal taxes to the mix you start to run into real money. As Huff points out, in 2003, federal taxpayers with incomes between $50,000 and $75,000 paid an effective tax rate of about 10 percent. On top of that, the employee’s share of payroll taxes (for Social Security and Medicare) is 7.65 percent. Add that $17.65 to the $10 in state and local taxes and you get close to $28 out of every $100 of income. Added to that, there are federal gasoline taxes and other excise taxes, etc. In fact, ITEP reports that total federal personal taxes on earnings—including both income taxes and payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare—now average about 23 percent. So when local, state, and federal taxes are taken into account, it’s reasonable to estimate that the average person will pay $30 to $33 out of $100 in taxes.

At that rate of taxation, the person in Lunenburg making the median income of $63,981 sees only about $43,500 in after-tax income. In a state where the cost of living is so high, it shouldn’t be hard to understand why lots of voters, when asked, say they’d just as soon not see their own taxes go any higher.

IT’S COMMON IN the state’s liberal and affluent enclaves to chalk up this aversion to higher taxes to people’s selfishness, or to an unwillingness among suburbanites to support services that they imagine benefit people in the cities, or to an unreasonable demand for more government services and lower taxes at the same time. When Democrats cry, “tell the truth!” they usually mean they want Republicans to stop promising better government and more tax cuts.
But when the debate goes in this direction it is almost impossible for Democrats to avoid a condescending note that doesn’t play well with the voters: Don’t be fooled by Republican promises. There’s no free lunch. If you want good schools and better health care and social services you have to pay for them.

Suppose, though, that the most tax-averse voters—the ones who may very well decide the governor’s race this fall—already know that. Suppose they don’t want to see severe cutbacks in state government and don’t want to see taxes creeping up, either. They want stability. They want about as much government as they’ve been getting, and no more.

That makes for a profoundly unprogressive politics. It turns the governor into a glorified town manager. But we are in a state where the middle-class considers itself maxed out. And we are in an era when a candidate who equates progress with taxes (or even hints at that) will need to have more magnetism or charm or passion—and persuasive power—than anyone we’ve seen in Massachusetts politics in a long, long time.

Freelance writer Dave Denison was the founding editor of CommonWealth.

A photograph from that night made the event unforgettable. The image shows two black bodies hanging from a sturdy elm in the town square, as white people mill about, some looking severe, some curious, some festive. A man with a Hitler-like mustache and a tattooed arm points at the bloodied corpses. A local photographer had been called to record the event. He took one exposure and left, his daughter recalled many years later. In the weeks that followed, he sold thousands of prints, charging 50 cents a piece. Souvenir hunters collected pieces of the ropes as well, and even branches and bark from the tree. What happened that night became "a living secret" in Marion, writes Cynthia Carr, "still pulsing just under the surface. People had never stopped talking about it, at least in private, because they had never stopped having feelings about it." At the same time, the prevailing public attitude was to hush things up, to let the past recede. No point in dwelling on it.

Carr had heard about the lynching as a child on visits to Marion, the town where her father grew up and where her grandparents lived. A family story suggested that her grandfather had gone to the square that night as a spectator. As an adult, Carr learned that her grandfather had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and when she saw the famous photo for the first time, she searched nervously for his face in the crowd.

She didn't see him. But she wanted to understand what happened in Marion and how a grandfather she loved could have been implicated. "Our Town" is the result of more than a decade of probing her family history, the town's history, and the community psyche that never quite healed.

Carr's investigations began when she found out that there was a third black male dragged from the Marion jail that night but that he had been spared by the mob and released. This third man, James Cameron, was living in Milwaukee and had written a memoir called "A Time of Terror." Carr, then a writer at the Village Voice, wrote about him in 1994, which led film crews and reporters to descend on Marion, attention that was not entirely welcome in the town.

When the media blitz faded, Carr went back. Eventually she took an apartment in Marion and, over the course of a year, spoke to anyone she could find who knew something about that night in 1930. The essential facts were on record: On August 6, three young black males, Tommy Shipp, Abe Smith, and Cameron, attempted to rob a white man named Claude Deeter who was parked on a country road with a young woman. In the struggle, Deeter was fata