The Truth About Charlie
Today on Twitter, I said I was thinking about writing a piece about why Charlie Baker is a terrible governor. The tweet became one of my most popular tweets ever, and I encourage you to go look at all the replies for a depressing litany of all the ways in which Charlie Baker has made life in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts worse for almost everyone who lives here.
Reading all these replies, you’d think that Baker would be as reviled in Massachusetts as Chris Christie is in New Jersey. But he isn’t. He is, in fact, one of the most popular governors in the United States.
So why is a guy who is so manifestly terrible at his job so popular?
I think it’s because most people don’t pay attention to politics, and so what they know of Charlie Baker is the story that has formed around him: he’s a competent manager, a friendly guy who just wants to get things done, and a guy who cares more about doing the people’s business than he does about toeing the party line.
The fact that none of this is true doesn’t stop the story from spreading and being repeated as fact. And while I think we need to keep repeating the many ways he has failed the state, we also have to change the story.
With that in mind, here’s how I read Charlie Baker’s biography. I don’t know if my story is any more true than the current dominant story, but mine has the advantage of lining up with the facts.
Charlie Baker was born rich. So he never really had to work for anything. But he got into Harvard, presumably because his father went there. He was a C student, one of those children of privilege with no real drive or motivation who take up elite college spaces that high-achieving non-wealthy kids would get if college admissions were actually meritocratic. He played basketball, but not well enough to get past the JV team at Harvard. So he was an okay athlete and an okay student. Nothing special. But he did have one very special skill.
Charlie Baker’s greatest, indeed, as far as I can tell, his only skill, is getting people to like him. He’s not very smart, but he’s smart enough to know that this is literally all he has going for him. (Well, this and generational wealth.)
After college and grad school, he joins the Pioneer Institute then gets appointed to the Weld and Celucci administrations. It’s safe to say that he trades on his one skill to get all of these positions. People like him, so they get him jobs.
He becomes CEO of a health insurance company where he’s probably making more money than he ever would in government. But of course, everybody hates health insurance companies. So he’s got to go back to politics. Because the truth about Charlie isn’t just that he can get people to like him. It’s that he needs to. And this fuels his ambition. So he does what he has to to get people to like him.
In Massachusetts, that means building an image as a moderate, which appeals to voters, while pursuing radical policies which appeal to the Republican voters outside of Massachusetts who he desperately wants to like him. (Because though he likes being liked and is good at it, no amount of adulation will ever be enough, but that won’t stop him seeking more.)
He’s a people pleaser, and this may be a good qualification for being a political appointee or a junior staffer at a think tank, but it’s a terrible quality in a leader.
His inept response to the COVID-19 pandemic exemplifies this. He doesn’t want to close businesses down because his business buddies don’t like that. He doesn’t want the government to help people who aren’t rich, because his Pioneer Institute buddies don’t like that. He wants teachers back in school to free parents up to work because that’s what rich people want, but he doesn’t want to do anything to make schools safe to be in, because if he appears not to be defunding public education, Republicans outside Massachusetts will brand him a liberal. He knows the virus is serious and that voters want to see him appearing to be serious, so he wags his finger at young people having parties and devotes taxpayer money to an ad campaign rather than doing anything substantive that might actually save lives. Because ask Gretchen Whitmer how Republicans like substantive public health measures.
When asked whether he voted for Biden or Trump, Charlie Baker answered that he “blanked it” because he was terrified to anger anyone: Trump is wildly unpopular in Massachusetts, but he still wants Trump voters elsewhere to back his eventual Presidential bid.
It’s my hope that this is the beginning of changing the narrative about Charlie Baker, and that he will finally be seen clearly by Massachusetts voters not as an affable technocrat, but as a coward so desperate for people to like him that he believes in nothing at all.
