Looking Ahead With Don (With Apologies to Steve)
Confessions of a Kayyem Delegate, Part Two: Not #OneCommonwealth, But Rather #AllMeansAll
When Juliette Kayyem's campaign for governor ended for lack of sufficient delegate voting support at the Massachusetts Democratic Convention in Worcester on June 14, I renewed my support for the gubernatorial candidate I had deserted seven months earlier.
On my way out of the DCU Center, I filled out a volunteer card at Steve Grossman's table in the exhibit hall. A moment later, I was outside and saw Steve finishing up a television interview. I told him I had been with Juliette and would be coming back on board with him. He thanked me for my support.
I had no idea that I would bolt from Steve Grossman yet again -- and within a week's time. And back again in Worcester. Yes, Worcester!
Ken Donnelly, from his website
The catalyst for this personal political odyssey-in-a-week was Ken Donnelly.
Ken is my state senator in Arlington, sitting in the 4th Middlesex seat. He's also a retired professional fire lieutenant in Lexington and a member of the firefighters union. Ken is a talented leader.
During the balloting at the state convention, Ken voted for Don Berwick, M.D., for governor of Massachusetts. I took it to be a vote of altruism. I heard there was some negotiating going on behind the scenes at the convention, especially among labor leaders, to help Kayyem get to 15 percent of the delegate vote and a slot on the primary election ballot in September. Maybe Berwick was getting the same treatment. Maybe Ken's vote was part of the plan.
Then Don Berwick scored his knock-your-socks-off third-place victory at the convention, just a small tad behind Attorney General Martha Coakley, the Democratic gubernatorial who today polls highest in the state. (I think she is fundamentally flawed as a candidate -- not just the last time around with Scott Brown, but this time as well.)
Ken's vote for Berwick got my attention. It was the single most interesting political event of the week. I could not stop dwelling on it.
Two days later, on Monday, June 16, Ken formally endorsed Dr. Berwick. So did a second state senator, Dan Wolf of Harwich in the Cape and Islands, the founder and CEO of Cape Air and someone who had himself toyed with running for governor in 2014 to succeed Deval Patrick.
Those endorsement got my attention even more. Since then, three more state senators -- out of total of 40 senators and 36 Democrats -- have endorsed Dr. Berwick, and two state representatives have done so, too.
More than all the speeches at the convention, more than the balloting at the convention, more than Juliette Kayyem's loss, more than the convention itself, these endorsements by Senators Donnelly and Wolf were the most compelling actions of the week for me. They disrupted my political outlook. Within five days, they became the impetus for me to sign on with Don, too.
Don Berwick’s convention, from his campaign website
Here's why I made this unexpected shift.
Start with my general ideology as a Democrat. Though born and raised in the East, I'm a bred-in-the-Midwest Democrat. I came to political life in Indiana, where Democrats win statewide elections by the slimmest of margins (5% or less) and Republicans win by blowout margins (10% or more).
For Democrats to win in this competitive climate, they have to focus on meat-and-potato issues. The economic agenda. Jobs. Jobs. Jobs. It's the economy, stupid. The issues of Paul Krugman and Robert Reich — himself a former Massachusetts gubernatorial candidate. The economic agenda of labor. So I gravitate to Democrats who talk about jobs, employment, and economic justice. (You have to, in the Midwest, because Democrats can quickly separate themselves into "economically liberal but socially conservative" -- Democrats who tout good NRA scores, or oppose abortions, or who heel to the interests of IBEW members at coal-fired utilities and UMW miners who extract Midwestern coal.) In Massachusetts in the 2014 race for governor, no one does the economic liberal agenda better right now than Steve Grossman.I'm especially fond of his small business loan program funded with new state deposits in community banks. (No, I've not taken out a loan, but I've wondered about it ...)
The beauty of Juliette Kayyem's campaign, as I discussed in Confessions of a Kayyem Delegate, Part One, was her attention to a new set of campaign issues. Laced into her policy statements on these issues was a sense of political realism: We'll do what we can do, on the hardest issues.
The difference between Juliette and Don, as I have noted before in social media and even a bit too aggressively in person at the Arlington gubernatorial candidates forum a couple of months ago, was on the early signature Berwick issue: establishing a single-payer healthcare financing system in Massachusetts.
Juliette believed, and probably still does, that it's not possible to get single-payer approved in the Massachusetts General Court. She reasoned that if it cannot be judged as politically feasible, it's not worth the time of the governor. Better to work on other progressive liberal issues. It's a fair judgement to make. Implicitly, the other Democrats make the same judgement; it's why even today Steve Grossman says he'll "lead the discussion." It's the less-risky view.
When five state senators out of 40 (and two state representatives out of 160) signed on with Don Berwick in the first few days after the convention, something clicked for me. I realized the what Juliette Kayyem claimed was politically impossible just might be feasible. Difficult? Yes. Pipe dream? No, not really. Not anymore. "Incipient" might be the better description.
I chewed on that thinking all last week. I read and re-read Ken Donnelly's endorsement of Dr. Berwick. I thought about the power of Don's convention speech. I pondered the list of liberal goals he's promulgated for Massachusetts and realized that he's building something new: a slate. It's a slate of candidates for governor and the legislature who share common goals for improving Massachusetts.
We no longer need to wonder anymore if Don Berwick can work with legislators. Instead, we have legislators already lining up to work with him. That's a powerful reality. We don't have to worry if he's a loner. Instead, we're watching him build his own Beacon Hill team.
Last week in Arlington, Berwick supporters sent me emails asking me to join up with them. From Newton, my cousin Susan Davidoff beckoned. (Susan's an amazing volunteer campaigner, and I'd like nothing more than to campaign beside her. I tried to get her on the Kayyem team, telling Juliette that she'd need a dozen volunteers in Newton just to counteract Susan's work for Berwick or anyone else.)
On Saturday, an email arrived from the Berwick campaign. We're opening our first field office, it said. It's going to be on Main Street in Worcester, to serve the campaign in Central Massachusetts. Come on out and meet Don.
Well, I sure knew the way to Worcester. I stole a few hours from work at home, plugged the 319 Main Street address into the Waze app on my iPhone, and headed out Route 2 to I-495.
The office was lined with quotes from Don's speech at the DCU Center the week before. (The office director's father printed the quotes carefully on newsprint.) The office is large, with several gathering spaces, a conference room, a kitchen, and a couple of small offices. It's quite a find. It's also on the ground floor of Mechanics Hall, whose events listing shows that thousands of people will come past the Berwick signs in the Central Massachusetts campaign office's windows.
Like Juliette's campaign before, there was a table full of policy papers. A group of 25 people introduced themselves to each other and gathered to welcome Don.
And Don was ... wonderful. He listened to everyone, really and truly listened. Slowly, even leisurely. Respectfully. He took in comments from the Worcester residents. He did not rush. He had places to go, but he was present in the here and now, not mentally gearing for the next destination.
He acknowledged some holes in his policy platform, holes he's interested in plugging as he learns more about what Massachusetts needs. He pictured the Worcester office not as a field sales office pushing the Berwick brand but as a collegial office where policies and political strategies tailored for Central Massachusetts would be formed and melded into a decentralized campaign.
He showed himself as a smart guy, an organizational leader, and a physician with the un-rushed bedside manner of listening to a patient in detail and asking lots of questions before making a diagnosis and prescribing a cure.
At the end, there was a discussion about the power of students and the academic community in Worcester. Don listened to a young woman who'd just graduated from the College of Holy Cross in Worcester and is heading down to Yale in Connecticut for a public health graduate degree. She pointed with pride to the Jesuit underpinnings of education at Holy Cross.
"What does that mean to you?" Don asked.
I don't remember the young woman's answer well enough to quote, but it was a personal and soft-spoken statement linked to the Ignatian spiritual core: Find God in all things.
I think Don knew the kind of answer he was going to get, but he also knew it was an answer the young woman would find significant to give. That's why he asked the follow-up question: "What does that mean to you?"
As he asked, and the young woman answered, I began to picture the Berwick bumper sticker I held in my hand soon pasted on the back of my Subaru Forester.
Don Berwick Introduces His ‘All Means All’ Theme at the Convention, from his website
Now we come to the religion corner of this essay: #AllMeansAll. It's the hashtag Don rolled out for the state convention, and the name of the tour he's now taking around the state. It's the fundamental belief that in state government, Massachusetts can serve all its citizens in their highest possible aspirations.
For me, #AllMeansAll, viewed in religious terms, is the Jesuit saying: Find God in All Things. To the Unitarian-Universalist, it's the inherent worth and dignity of every person, based on the old Universalist belief in universal salvation because no loving God would damn anyone to Hell. To the Jew, it's the eloheinu echad in the Sh’ma: Our God Is One.
The #AllMeansAll hashtag is also qualitatively superior in aspiration to the #OneCommonwealth hashtag of Steve Grossman, unfortunately. In "One Commonwealth," I see an implicit top-down view of all things and all people; they are subsumed into the One Commonwealth. It's centralizing diversity, emphasizing conformity with a single vision.
To me, #AllMeansAll is decentralizing, honoring differences in individuals, seeking to serve individuals as the mission of a state government administration, rather than a sort of one-size-fits-all liberal view of a powerful state.
So, #AllMeansAll seeks to serve every Bay Stater, each in their individual dignity and expression of the ultimate. It's a difference in emphasis that's important to me. Your mileage may vary, especially if you're supporting the very worthy campaign of Steve Grossman. I just think that again, as with joining Juliette Kayyem in late 2013, I've found someone worthier.
On my way back to Arlington from Worcester, I moseyed onto some back roads and found myself stopping in Hudson, my first visit to that town. I remembered it was the home of Republican Governor Paul Celluci, a man of good accomplishment and record who died just about a year ago. That's where I stopped and put the Berwick bumper sticker on my car.
Doug Davidoff: New Yorker, New Englander, Tar Heel, Hoosier, Chicagoan. Father, Democrat, Unitarian Universalist and Jewish. History Lover, Traveler, Sailor. Writer/Editor. Aspiring Vermonter. Principal Consultant for Straight Talk Public Relations at www.StraightTalkPR.com. Personal website: www.DouglassDavidoff.com.