WHEN BILL WELD goes into the tank, he certainly makes a splash. His double dive last week -- a no-reform "compromise" on welfare and a fat pay raise for state legislators -- showered the third floor of the State House with hypocrisy and deceit. It washed away the last remnants of Weld's image as a scrupulous outsider untainted by Beacon Hill sleaze. And it left him drenched with ridicule even from his loyal supporters.
I wonder what Weld will come up with next. A big tax increase, maybe? A return to furloughs for murderers? Vast new powers for the Registry of Motor Vehicles?
Nothing he does would surprise me now. After last week, the only truly safe prediction that can be made about Weld is this: He will continue to sacrifice principle on the altars of expediency and ambition.
Barely a month has passed since he stormed to victory over Democrat Mark Roosevelt. Weld ran on a tough conservative platform and won a resounding mandate from the voters. But political mandates are like newly opened bottles of champagne: sparkling today, flat tomorrow. Weld's landslide has already lost its fizz.
On election night he was soaring. In a robust speech, he declared that his "job is just beginning." He renewed his determination to dismantle the welfare hammock and replace it with a "system that works and puts people to work." He and his boon companion, Lieutenant Governor Paul Cellucci, were looking forward, he proclaimed, "not just to four more years, but to four great years."
They couldn't manage four great weeks.
Last Monday Weld threw in the towel on welfare, the state's most urgent crisis, without even trying to revive the tough reform plan he had campaigned on so insistently (no more free cash, no automatic raises for new babies, no benefits for women who won't work). He could have taken the Reaganesque approach: appeal over the heads of a balky Legislature to the people who, on this issue, agree with him so completely.
But then, Weld is no Reagan, he's a Bush. And the Bush style is to stand squarely on principle during campaigns -- and election-night victory speeches -- then roll over and "compromise" when the voting is done.
So Weld capitulated, cutting a deal with two of the most clueless liberals in the state Senate, one of them an ex-welfare princess herself. The bargain he struck with Senators Lois Pines and Dianne Wilkerson is a disgrace. It shreds the family cap. It dumps the principle that all able-bodied people must work. It imposes no requirements on recipients older than 24 (i.e., on 80-plus percent of the welfare caseload). And it would add $50 million to the budget.
Don't worry, say some of Weld's people: This is all a ploy. Wilkerson-Pines-Weld is just a stratagem to run out the clock on the current legislative session. Come January, they say, he'll reintroduce real welfare reform and fight like hell.
Right. And the stuffed armadillo on his desk will get up and dance the Watusi.
W-P-W may never be enacted, but by signing on to it, Weld gave up the moral high ground he commanded on election night. You don't agree to accept one-16th of the welfare-reform loaf you campaigned on, then go back to the Legislature and demand the whole loaf after all. If you do, the Democrats laugh in your face. Indeed, the Legislature yesterday reopened Weld's veto of the dreadful welfare rider it attached to the state budget in June. This morning, the reforms he campaigned on are all but dead.
But Weld's cave-in on welfare was merely disheartening. His pay-raise maneuver was despicable.
Before the election, he and Cellucci affected a complete lack of interest in the subject. It "isn't even on my radar screen," he said early in November. When Senator Tom Birmingham first proposed raising legislative paychecks to the $50,000 neighborhood, Cellucci snorted: "What planet is Senator Birmingham on?" As recently as Nov. 14, Weld put on a show of apathy: "I really don't have any view" on a pay hike, he shrugged. "It's not something we're considering."
That was a lie. And a dumb lie to boot, on the order of "I didn't inhale."
Bad enough that Weld would plot in secret with the likes of Bill Bulger and Charles Flaherty, for whom dissembling is instinctive. Even worse that he would agree to a pay raise so undeserved, so big, and so immediate. But worst of all was his underhanded manner. He purposely misled the public -- and some of his own aides -- into believing he had no intention of getting involved in a pay-raise scam; the truth was the contrary.
When Weld walked into a State House hearing room Friday morning to testify in support of the pay hike, he was given a hero's welcome. At that moment, his metamorphosis was complete. The clean, crusading agent of change Massachusetts elected in 1990 had become just another conniving pol.
The man who walked out on Ed Meese over a matter of integrity is now history. In his place is an incumbent whose word can't be trusted, a hack cheered by other hacks, a political climber who has apparently let Potomac Fever go to his brain.
(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)
Governor Weld: Just another hack
by Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
December 6, 1994
https://jeffjacoby.com/3411/governor-weld-just-another-hack
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