Weekly roundup - In Brady they trust
Baker-Wolf contest three years from now?
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The state's dominant team had taken a few punches to the gut last season, and needed to get up off the turf and score a morale boosting win.
As captains surveyed the upcoming schedule, a favorable matchup on paper loomed to be played on a neutral, if not friendly field, with someone named Brady leading them into battle.
This Brady may have been a little shorter and less made-for-TV than the one Bay State football fans are used to cheering on, but Democrats knew that, like football, modern politics is a team sport, and the party had a deep bench.
Rep. Michael Brady, a lunch-pail Democrat if there ever was one, solidly defeated conservative state Rep. Geoff Diehl in a special election on Tuesday to fill the Brockton-based Senate seat previously held by the late Thomas Kennedy. Whether it's a harbinger of things to come for Democrats, or just a solid victory in a district that already hued blue is in the eye of the beholder.
Diehl, who hails from Whitman in the more red suburbs of the district, outraised Brady two-to-one and had considerably more financial support from super PACs behind his campaign, but Brady had the party machine behind him, and Democrats were bent on proving that with a little oil it could hum again.
Brady may lack the polish that one typically associates with a politician, particularly one on whose shoulders were riding so much expectation. But Democrats flooded the district, particularly Brockton, with familiar faces. State representatives traveled down to knock doors and the party siphoned hundreds of volunteers from the networks of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Treasurer Deb Goldberg and Boston Mayor Marty Walsh to drive up turnout.
Gov. Charlie Baker, who invested time and capital in trying to help elect Diehl, chalked up the loss to external forces that helped drive up turnout in Brockton, Brady's hometown.
"As Senator-elect Brady said last night the turnout in Brockton was really the thing that turned that campaign and that election," said Baker, noting a contested mayoral race in that city was also settled.
While it's true that according to unofficial vote tallies Brady racked up enough votes in Brockton alone to win the district, Democrats bristled at the notion that this was anything but proof that when pushed they can run a better ground operation than the GOP.
While the Senate special served as Tuesday's main event, two out of the four state lawmakers running for mayor were victorious. Sen. Robert Hedlund, now one of the six Republicans in the Senate, will be trading in his State House office for one in Weymouth Town Hall, while Fitchburg Rep. Stephen DiNatale won his race to succeed Lisa Wong as mayor of that north-central city.
On the losing side, Rep. Michael Finn and Rep. Thomas Stanley lost their mayoral races in West Springfield and Waltham. With Brady, Hedlund and DiNatale on the move, the number of special elections soon to be on the docket grew to four around the state, not counting the partisan presidential contest in March.
Baker, despite playing an active role on behalf of Republicans this cycle, may not have anything to worry about just yet, especially considering his continued cozy relationship with Democrats on Beacon Hill.
Sen. Daniel Wolf's formal decision not to seek re-election in 2016, however, conjured visions of a Baker-Wolf contest three years from now. The Cape Cod senator, briefly a candidate for governor in 2013, said his decision to step away from the Senate is not a calculated move to position himself for another gubernatorial run, but should his path lead him there he's not saying no.
"It's not quits. It's just taking a different form," Wolf said. "I will take the same energy, and passion and love for the people I'm serving now as an elected official back to the district and serve there in the ways that I have in the past and hopefully that will have more of a footprint across the Commonwealth."
With Election Day 2015 behind him, Senate President Stanley Rosenberg summoned reporters to his office on Wednesday to announce a "deal" with University of Massachusetts President Marty Meehan over funding for university contracts. Rosenberg, ostensibly a UMass booster who counts the Amherst campus as a constituent, had been getting the lion's share of the blame for Meehan eyeing almost $11 million in campus cuts after the contract money was dropped from an end-of-year spending bill.
What followed was a bizarre afternoon of cross-communication that only served to paint a picture of the UMass-Senate relationship as more strained than ever, rather than the repaired partnership Rosenberg sought to portray.
Rosenberg said Meehan had agreed to put $5 million into financial aid if the president could deliver the $10.9 million in collective bargaining money in the next supplemental spending bill. University officials, however, initially balked it being characterized as a deal, interpreting a press release (which was actually never sent out to the media) as suggestive that Rosenberg was expecting the financial aid money in exchange only for his political support. UMass wanted the check.
In the end, the two sides agreed that a deal, had in fact, been struck, only to have House Speaker Robert DeLeo say that despite the House supporting the money just a week ago, the window for funding the contracts may have closed, with a new fiscal year bringing new financial challenges.
The overarching budget bill that sparked all this drama had been signed by Gov. Baker on Monday, a $326 million spending bill that became law just in time for lawmakers and the governor to say they had met a deadline to close out spending for the fiscal year that ended in June.
Comptroller Thomas Shack, however, was not impressed, and wrote to legislative leaders lightly admonishing them for waiting so long and giving him insufficient time to close the books and file the requisite financial reports that get reviewed by outside auditors and credit rating agencies.
The House and Senate's march toward the end of formal sessions for the year continued with the House passing several veterans bills, including one criminalizing the impersonation of a veterans for financial gain, in the tradition of memorializing Veterans Day with new laws paying homage to service.
The Senate also passed a bill targeting the black market for "re-homing" adopted children, as the two branches continue to operate out of sync.
STORY OF THE WEEK: Democrats get back on the board with a win in Brockton.
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