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Republican Charlie Baker Wants To Run A More Efficient Mass. Government

The 2014 election is Republican Charlie Baker’s second race for the corner office. Four years ago, he ran and lost to incumbent Gov. Deval Patrick by 6 points.

VOTER GUIDE 2014: Who’s on the ballot?

MORE CANDIDATE PROFILES: Don Berwick, Martha Coakley, Mark Fisher, Steve Grossman

This time he’s running a different campaign and aiming for better results — focusing on his experience as a problem-solver, visiting urban centers, and meeting with more minority voters who traditionally vote Democrat.

A ‘Second Trip To The Plate’

On a recent morning, Baker visited the gateway city of Lowell for the 11th time this campaign season.

On this particular trip, Baker — whose income the last three years according to tax returns averaged around $750,000 — met street workers at the United Teen Equality Center.

As Baker circled the room shaking hands, the ’90s R&B song “Return of the Mack” welcomed him.

Once the pleasantries were over, he dived straight in to the quantitative questions. “So tell me, give me the numerator and the denominator,” he asked.

He was trying understand how many of the teens who go through this program end up back in prison, but the way it came out — as a math fraction — was a glimpse into the analytical brain behind his 6-foot-6 frame.

Baker went to Harvard as an undergraduate, where he also played basketball. His first job out of college was with the New England Council. He then joined the Mass High Tech Council.

A few years later he moved to the Midwest to pursue a MBA at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. After graduating, he worked as a consultant for a couple of years before leaving to help launch the Pioneer Institute, a free-market think tank.

“We wanted to create a market-oriented think tank in Massachusetts,” he said, explaining the decision to create the organization. “We felt that most of the public policy research being done was classic one-team-on-the-field stuff.”

In 1991, Baker joined the Weld administration as undersecretary of health and human services. He quickly rose through the ranks, becoming secretary of health and human services and then secretary of administration and finance.

“I’ve been in a lot of meetings with Charlie … where I’ve sat for hours and everybody in the room probably had no idea what the speaker was talking about,” said Richard Tisei, who was Weld’s campaign chairman at then. “And Charlie would get up and within 30 seconds take a very complicated issue and pretty much boil it down to something everybody understood.”

Tisei and Baker have a long, tight-knit history. In the ’90s, they were colleagues. In 2010, they were running mates — Tisei was the Republican lieutenant governor candidate during Baker’s failed bid for the corner office.

That 2010 defeat is a loss Baker doesn’t scrutinize publicly.

“It’s my second trip to the plate and I think in some respects I’m just more familiar with the nature of campaigning,” he said.

Pundits say the 57-year-old is softer, nicer this time around, but Baker insists there is no “new” Charlie Baker.

“Hopefully many of us learn from the first time we do something and we do it differently and hopefully better the second time,” he said. “I certainly feel more comfortable as a candidate this time. I wear a tie less this time than I did the last time.”

His uniform these days often consists of a button down collared shirt paired with khaki pants. And that’s what he wore when we met at Phillips Park in his hometown of Swampscott.

“The reason I picked this spot here is because my wife and I spent a lot of time here as young parents becoming old parents,” he said looking out at the grassy lawn that serves as the town’s baseball and football field. “Our kids went from being young to being up and out of the house.”

He speaks nostalgically about his three children and his time as a selectman in Swampscott. Baker describes himself as fiscally conservative and socially moderate — the son of a Democratic mother and a Republican father.

“I’ve always been pro-choice,” he said. “I’m pro-marriage equality, always have been.”

But his primary focus this election is the economy.

He said one lesson he learned from his previous run was the need to simplify his message. He said four years ago he tried to talk about too many ideas simultaneously. This time, he’s trying to keep his agenda limited.

“For me, it’s really jobs, schools and communities. It doesn’t solve everything, but for most people it sure takes care of the things that matter most,” he said.

Baker is a results-oriented manager, with a desire to find ways to make government more efficient.

“I don’t think motive is enough,” he said. “And I think in most circumstances, in most situations, if you’re well-intended that’s great, but if you don’t know what the right questions to ask are or just the right lens to look at something through, your ability to solve whatever problem it is you’re trying to solve is probably gonna be limited. And a big part of public service is about problem solving.”

But Baker’s own legacy in public service is not problem-free.

In a recent Boston Herald radio debate, Democratic front-runner Martha Coakley questioned Baker’s competence overseeing the construction of the Big Dig.

“Charlie Baker — we can call him Charlie “Big Dig” Baker — talks about spending now against Democrats?” she asked. “He left behind that mess that wasn’t overseen … I came in as attorney general with federal, state, civil, criminal cost overruns … and we sorted that out.”

Baker said the federal government significantly reduced how much money it was willing to reimburse the state in the middle of the project. Still, he said, he worked with the Clinton administration to figure out a way to pay for the construction.

“The fact that this keeps coming up just says to me that the Democrats have no new ideas,” he said.

Wooing Voters Across The Aisle, And Women

Even with the digs about the Big Dig, a new WBUR poll shows more Democratic primary voters have a favorable opinion of Baker than an unfavorable one. To win this election, Baker needs to peel away some of those Democrats, especially women.

In 2010, he lost the women’s vote by 24 points. His wife, Lauren Baker, is trying to help chip away at that gender gap. She’s a lot more visible than she was four years ago.

“One of the things that we learned was that we didn’t really allow people to get to know Charlie as a person,” she said at a recent “Women for Charlie” phone banking night in Brighton. “I think voters, especially women, want to know about the kind of person that a candidate is. They want to know about is he a good father, is he a good husband, is he a good friend, is he a compassionate person? And those are the kinds of things that I can talk about.”

She lets others, such as Tufts University political science professor Jeff Berry, discuss her husband’s practical, political experience.

“He certainly has a good record as a budget manager in the Weld administration,” Berry said. “But Baker does evoke the patrician image of the Republican Party.”

In between his years in government and his unsuccessful bid for governor, Baker joined the private sector as the CEO of the state’s second largest health plan — Harvard Pilgrim Health Care. He’s credited with bringing the company back from the brink of bankruptcy and turning it into one of the nation’s top health insurers. And, most recently, he worked for the venture capital firm General Catalyst, based in Cambridge.

From Berry’s perspective, Baker’s private sector work should be an objective selling point in this governor’s race, but it depends how the story is told.

“Baker is going to run as a dynamic, problem-solving businessman,” he said. “And the Democrats are gonna portray him not as a bright, dynamic capitalist, but as a greedy plutocrat and someone who’s really out of touch with everyday Americans.”

In reality, Berry said, Baker fits into a long tradition of moderate Republicans. But the trouble is, registered Republicans are a dying breed in Massachusetts.

So in order to win, he’ll need a lot of votes from across the aisle.

Republican Fisher Aims To Be Massachusetts’ Next General Manager

The race for the Republican gubernatorial nomination pits former CEO Charlie Baker against lesser known general manager Mark Fisher. The business owner is bringing some Tea Party flavor the race for the GOP nomination.

Just a mile or two off the Mass Pike here in Auburn outside Worcester, there’s a railroad spur lined with plain-colored metal buildings. These are companies with names like Consolidated Fabricators, American Steel and Aluminum Corp. and Merchant’s Fabrication, Inc.

Inside Merchant’s, you’ll find a man bidding to be the next Massachusetts governor at the control panel of a metal cutting machine.

“We start off with sheet and plate, flat stock or tubing, round or square,” Fisher said. “And we shear it, bend it, roll it, punch it, weld it, water-jet cut it. It’s fabrication rather than machining. A lot of people get it confused.”

This shop makes small prototype parts for Keurig Green Mountain coffee roasters and big parts for General Electric power plants around the globe, and a lot of other stuff for a lot of other companies you’ve never heard of. Inside the small bookkeeping office, Fisher has his desk. On it sits a portrait of Jesus Christ, a mug with the GOP elephant and a tape measure.

“Taking something from paper, an idea,” Fisher said. “And making [it] into something concrete. I like doing that! I like taking an idea in your head and making something concrete about it.”

Fisher has an idea for Massachusetts — an idea of a state that runs more efficiently, more like a business.

“If things were going well in Massachusetts, running as a Republican wouldn’t have a chance to win as dogcatcher,” Fisher said. “But I’m saying, ‘No, things are terribly wrong.’ I think we’re becoming dysfunctional. Listen to the mayors of our cities and towns. The fraud and abuse. The scandals with DCF. On and on and on. The drug lab, the compounding pharmacy. Illegal immigration. These are Democrat problems. Isn’t it time for a change? Let’s get a Republican in there.”

But Fisher does not want the Republican he’s running against, Charlie Baker. Fisher says Baker is really just a Democrat. It’s why Fisher embraces his Tea Party label; he considers it a true alternative for conservatives, even though he has to defend that label all the time.

“There is this bias: Tea Party, bigoted, racist, nativist, blah, blah, blah,” Fisher said. “It’s tough to fight through that.”

Fisher is not a Harvard graduate like Baker. He grew up in western Massachusetts, in Westfield to working-class parents. His mother had a second-grade education. He got accepted to college but decided to go to work for an envelope company. He joined a union. Eventually, he did go to college, earning a mechanical engineering degree at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He later earned an MBA there, too. And on the campaign trail, he tells his audiences that schools should go back to teaching wood shop and home economics.

“You should have been a carpenter,” said Lillian Reiss to Fisher at the Deutsches Altenheim, an extended care facility in West Roxbury. “You hit the nail right on the head!”

A defining issue for Fisher is state support for illegal immigrants, such as in-state tuition for their children or state-issued driver’s licenses. He says giving those benefits takes public resources away from other worthy programs for citizens, meaning less money for social welfare and for unemployed workers.

“What I’ve been saying is, illegal immigrants, they have 50 states to choose from,” Fisher said. “If the benefits are cut off from one state, it doesn’t solve the federal problem of them coming to the United States, but with regard to Massachusetts, it will solve the problem in that particular state. Where are they going to go?”

Out on the shop floor at Merchant’s, one of the company’s eight employees is welding a flange onto a steel pipe. Wanderson Amaral is an immigrant from Brazil. He’s on a green card and just passed his citizenship test. Fisher wants to be there when he takes his oath.

Amaral says there was a time, before he worked for Fisher, that he was in the U.S. illegally for about 18 months. He thinks illegal immigrants should be able to get driver’s licenses, and he says he told that to his boss.

“Because I think some people really do the way I do,” Amaral said as he got the next pipe ready for welding. “They pay tax. They’re still illegal but they pay tax. They have kids, they like to be here, they have a house. And they don’t have a license. You know what I mean? It’s not everybody who’s bad.”

Amaral said he and Fisher agreed to disagree. But Amaral agrees with his boss that there is a ton of abuse of public resources. It bothers Amaral that he knows people who get housing assistance and still drive nicer cars than he does. It also bothers him that he knows people who lie about their income to get waivers from public fees like school busing charges. Amaral said the system is poorly run and he thinks his boss would fix it.

“I just disagree a little bit on the [driver’s] license,” Amaral said. “But the rest I really, you know, I think he can be a good governor.”

Company foreman Jason Puckett said Fisher is a good guy.

“You know a lot of bosses you work for try to micro-manage you,” Puckett said. “He’s confident I can do my own thing. And when he sees stuff get late he’ll come out and check me, for sure! But he’s not about micromanaging people. He’ll get people he trusts, put them in a position and say, ‘This is what I need from you.’”

Puckett said Fisher has increased benefits to workers and started sharing profits, too. The foreman said Fisher has always given workers what they deserve, and they’ve seen him bothered when he sees people get something they don’t deserve. But Puckett and other workers at Fisher’s company never expected he’d run for office.

“It was a surprise!” Pucket said. “He had expressed his concerns, like anytime something when you said, ‘Can you guys believe this?!’ You know? And then one day he said, ‘Look, this is what I’m gonna do,’ and we’re like, ‘Whoa!’”

Fisher said he has the will to get to the state’s corner office and the willingness to be flexible.

“Those are skills that I think I have that can bring to the governor’s office. And, like I said, common sense. I think a lot of people are frustrated by the lack of common sense.”

Fisher says if he were elected governor, he would sell his metal fabrication company in Auburn to focus on being general manager of the commonwealth.

With Public And Private Sector Experience, Steve Grossman ‘Knows Both Systems’

At the annual Malden Democratic City Committee cookout, state Treasurer and Democratic candidate for governor Steve Grossman boosted his party bona fides by invoking the one name everyone under the tent holds in high esteem.

“Monday will be the fifth anniversary of Ted Kennedy’s passing,” Grossman, 68, reminded the party faithful. “And we all came together the night that Ted Kennedy was waked. And I remember coming over here and it was raining, it was just misting a little bit. It was as if God was weeping because he had lost one of our best, and I’ll never forget that.”

Grossman’s ties to the Kennedy family go back three generations. He pointed out that in 1910, his grandfather Max Grossman — then only a boy — handed out literature for Ted Kennedy’s grandfather, John Francis “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, who was running for mayor of Boston.

‘He Knows Both Systems’

The walls of Grossman’s second floor State House office are covered with photographs and mementos marking his career as a businessman, philanthropist, Democratic fundraiser and one-time chairman of both the state and national Democratic committees. Grossman is seen in the company of presidents, prime ministers and royalty, including the late Jordanian monarch, King Hussein.

Grossman was on the White House lawn in 1994 to attend a ceremony announcing a historic agreement between Israel and Jordan. Then president of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Grossman had been asked a few weeks before by King Hussein’s nephew if he could help secure some loan forgiveness for Jordan as a goodwill gesture. Grossman said he made a few calls, and with the help of then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, obtained $700 million in loan forgiveness for the country. Grossman says after the agreement was announced, Rabin spotted him on the White House lawn.

“Rabin shakes my hand, whom I know well, and he turns me 90 degrees and he says, ‘Your majesty, I’d like to introduce you to Steve Grossman,’” the treasurer recalled. “And the king looks at me and he says, ‘Mr. Grossman, I know exactly who you are. My family and the people of Jordan will never forget your kindness, and your support.’ That he knew about this, and knew to connect it to me, was a little mind-boggling.”

Whether for a king or a constituent, Grossman is quick to pick up the phone to make things happen. At the Democratic cookout in Malden, Grossman pulled out his Blackberry and called the head of the state’s unclaimed property division to expedite the return of some unclaimed money. The division oversees $2.4 billion in unclaimed property, and Grossman has used the program to win supporters in the Legislature, including Rep. Cory Atkins, of Concord.

“He gave a list of people in our district and we called them, said go in and get your money! So we look like heroes,” crowed Atkins, who is one of 87 state legislators backing Grossman’s bid for governor.

“What I really like about Steve is that he has experience both in the public and private sector,” Atkins said. “Generally in government we only get one or the other. And neither are complete. He’s very down to earth. He knows both systems.”

Reinventing The Family Business

After graduating from Princeton and Harvard Business School, Grossman went to work in the family business — the Massachusetts Envelope Company, now known as Grossman Marketing Group. After two years in sales, Grossman left to work at Goldman Sachs. He stayed there for three years until he got a call from his father.

“He said, ‘Steve, Jerry’ — my uncle — ‘wants to sell his interest in the business. I can’t run this by myself. Are you interested in buying Jerry’s interest in the business?’ I said, ‘Dad, I’ll be right over.’ Because the thing I wanted to do all my life was to be in business with my father.”

Grossman became president and CEO of the company, a title he held for more than 30 years until he was elected state treasurer in 2010. Grossman boasts his family business has been a union shop for 62 years and never had a matter go to arbitration.

“We’ve reinvented the business a number of times over the years,” Grossman boasted. “I think any business almost needs to reinvent some portion of itself every year to stay current with the needs of the customer. It’s always about superior customer service, it’s treating your employees right.”

Sheila Ryder has worked for Grossman Marketing for 30 years and calls Grossman fair and a great business leader. She says about 25 years ago she needed to take six months off after adopting a child. “And I spoke to Steve about that and said I understood leaving for six months just wasn’t a reasonable request. And he said, ‘It’s more than reasonable. We support you, we value your work, we value you personally. And go home, take care of your baby, and come back to us in six months.’”

Grossman’s success in business allowed him to pursue his other interest — raising money for Democratic candidates. He was a major fundraiser for Michael Dukakis’ 1988 presidential campaign, catching the eye of Democratic operatives, including MarDee Xifaras.

“In terms of Steve being an incredibly intelligent guy, well informed on the issues, very articulate, but also totally committed to Democratic activism, to democracy, to participation in politics, to use an old fashioned phrase,” said Xifaras, a long-time Democratic operative from southeastern Massachusetts. “And really to his core believes in the kinds of things that are at my core, and so we’ve been best buds ever since.”

Xifaras helped Grossman become the chairman of the Massachusetts Democratic Party in 1991, and he went on to helm the Democratic National Committee in the late 1990s.

The ‘Repairer Of The Breach’

By Grossman’s side for the the last 46 years has been his wife, Barbara.

Grossman’s mother, Shirley, met her future daughter-in-law at an alumni weekend at Smith College, where Barbara Wallace was an undergraduate, and decided to play matchmaker for her son. After an awkward phone conversation, Steve and Barbara met for a movie date and hit it off. The couple now have three sons. Barbara Grossman says her husband is a genuinely caring and compassionate person.

“It’s not an act, it’s not. I mean everyone talks about transparency, but Steve really is truly concerned about people’s well being, almost to a fault,” she said. “I mean, his father was known for, if you admired his tie, Edgar would whip his tie off and give you the tie. I mean Steve is that kind of person.”

Grossman credits his wife, a professor of drama at Tufts University, with helping him improve his speaking abilities on the campaign trail. He also credits another family member, his late uncle Jerome Grossman, as being his political mentor.

“Jerry was a progressive, activist, liberal leader,” Grossman recalled. “Jerry died last year. Jerry’s autobiography says it all. His blog was called, and his autobiography are called, ‘Relentless Liberal.’”

Steve Grossman is trying to follow in his uncle’s footsteps in carrying the progressive label. This is the second time he has run for governor — his bid in 2002 came up short.

Quoting the prophet Isaiah, Grossman says he wants to be the “repairer of the breach.”

“When you are given the imprimatur of leadership by the people of the commonwealth, and they say, ‘We need you to play a leadership role to help lift us up, and build one commonwealth that levels the playing field and leave no one behind,’ there is something about being elected to office in a democracy that gives you the credibility and gives you the foundation on which to build, unlike anything else.”

Grossman favors universal pre-kindergarten. He’s calling for an increased prominence of arts in education. He supports making earned sick time state law, just as he did at his family business, and has said he will not vote to repeal the state’s casino law, but will accept whatever the voters decide in November.

While the question of casinos will definitely be on the ballot this fall, Grossman must win Tuesday’s primary against Martha Coakley and Don Berwick for his name to be on the November ballot as well.

In Governor’s Race, Coakley Seeks Another First

Martha Coakley, the state attorney general and Democratic candidate for governor, met me at a coffee shop on the main street of this western Massachusetts city, where she was born 61 years ago.

She grew up some 20 miles north in another factory town: North Adams. That’s where her parents settled after her father, who served in the Navy, returned from World War II.

“My dad bought part of an insurance agency up there, and we basically grew up there,” Coakley said. “I talk a little bit about it mirroring the kind of TV shows we saw in the ’50s and ’60s: ‘Father Knows Best’ and ‘Ozzie and Harriet.’ My dad walked to work often. My mom stayed home. We had five children. We had family vacations together. We were involved in our church. And we, of course, were in a city where there were lots of big families, and my brother and sisters all had friends from the families, too, so I loved it.”

If Coakley is elected governor, she’ll be the first woman to be elected to the position in Massachusetts history. Jane Swift became acting governor when Gov. Paul Cellucci resigned in 2001, but was never elected on her own.

Coakley has often been a pioneer. In the fall of 1971, she was part of the first class to include women at Williams College.

“I enjoyed most of it,” she said. “We were still in a minority, so we were spread around the campus, but it’s a great school, just a great opportunity.”

Coakley remembers working with other women to put together the college’s first guide to health and sex.

“It was a different time period,” she said. “In the ’70s, Roe v. Wade had been decided, and I think we were all making sure that women had the right health information. Williams hadn’t been really equipped to deal with gynecologists and women’s health issues.”

After Williams and then Boston University Law School, Coakley served as assistant district attorney in Middlesex County. As an assistant DA, she worked with colleges and universities as they began to address sexual assault on campus.

“And we saw through the ’80s and ’90s the need to do more education with the colleges around making sure that young women had a way to report it, to go to the local authorities, not to just have it all done in-house,” she said.

“She worked hard,” said Scott Harshbarger, who was the Middlesex County DA who hired Coakley in 1986. “She earned credibility with police and her colleagues.”

Coakley worked for many years in the DA’s child abuse unit. With Gerry Leone, she prosecuted English au pair Louise Woodward for the killing of an infant in her care, 8-month-old Matthew Eappen of Newton.

“She’s very intelligent and very good on her feet and she’s a good strategist,” Leone said of his former colleague.

Coakley says her work on child abuse led her to start an adult sexual assault unit.

“Because many of the issues we saw with children who wouldn’t come forward, or weren’t believed, were true also for young women on college campuses, in marriages, who had been physically or sexually assaulted,” she said.

In 1997, Coakley became the first women elected Middlesex district attorney.

In that role, she reached an agreement with one of the defendants in the Fells Acres Day Care sexual assault case. Cheryl Amirault had been convicted of assaulting four children, but the conviction had been controversial because a judge had concluded that the children’s interrogations had been so tainted by errors in the investigation that they could not be used at trial.

But the Supreme Judicial Court sent Amirault back to prison. Coakley then agreed to push for a reduction in Amirault’s sentence to time served, in exchange for a promise from Amirault not to grant television interviews and not to profit in any way from telling her story. Coakley was criticized at the time for imposing that restriction on Amirault. She defends the agreement.

“And one of the issues for the families involved, the children particularly, many of whom were now teenagers or adults, was they were not averse to her getting parole or getting out as long as they didn’t feel that were now going to be the targets of her on television,” Coakley told me. “I believed and still believe that those children were telling the truth about what had happened at Fells Acres.”

Coakley went on to become the first woman elected as Massachusetts attorney general. She says she’s proudest of two accomplishments. One of them is prosecuting lenders for violating the state’s foreclosure laws.

“We’ve kept over 30,000 people in their homes,” she said.

Then, she added: “The second thing that I’m really proud of is our challenge to the Defense of Marriage Act.”

Coakley sued the federal government, contending that DOMA was unconstitutional because it forced Massachusetts to treat same-sex married residents differently from heterosexual married couples, and because it impeded on states’ rights under the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Supreme Court struck down DOMA.

Recently, Coakley negotiated an agreement with Partners HealthCare. If approved, it would allow Partners to take over three more hospitals and sign up hundreds of doctors on condition that Partners cap its price increases for most of the next 10 years. But a report from the Health Policy Commission predicts that the agreement will drive costs up.

And the Republican front-runner in the governor’s race, Charlie Baker, the former head of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, criticized the settlement in a recent WBUR debate. “The agreement that the attorney general negotiated with Partners is so complicated, I’m not sure it’s enforceable,” Baker said.

“Totally disagree with that,” Coakley said in response. “It is comprehensive, but it’s all clear what it means. It really levels the playing field, not only for consumers, but for the next five to 10 years, cuts the cost curve.”

Coakley lives in Medford with her husband, retired Cambridge police Deputy Superintendent Thomas O’Connor Jr.

If she is elected governor, she says she hopes to finish the South Coast rail project that would link Boston with New Bedford and Fall River. She supports allowing the gasoline tax to rise at the inflation rate.

“We need a predictable source of income, particularly for roads and bridges that are crucial,” she said.

She also said she would like to make pre-kindergarten available to all parents and longer school days available to districts that want them. She added that it’s time to reevaluate the Patrick administration’s decision to join the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program, which replaced Massachusetts education standards with national standards.

“It’s a good time now to look at where we’ve gone, what we’re accomplishing and really, what the demands of the next 20, 30 years are going to be on our teachers and on our students,” she said. “We should at least rethink it.”

Coakley said she’s concerned about placing too much emphasis on testing. She said she would like to give teachers more autonomy in the classroom.

When Coakley ran for the U.S. Senate in a special election in 2010, she won the Democratic nomination but lost the general election by five points to Republican Scott Brown. For Democrats, it was a devastating loss of the seat held by Ted Kennedy for 47 years. Many Democrats blamed Coakley of taking the election for granted. She was criticized for taking a vacation over Christmas and for scoffing at shaking hands with voters at Fenway Park in the cold.

It’s not clear if anyone could have beaten Brown. He enjoyed the support of seniors fearful that they would lose their Medicare benefits with the implementation of Obamacare, and he received $1 million a day in the final days of the campaign from Tea Party members and others across the country.

This gubernatorial election is Martha Coakley’s chance to reshape the perceptions of her formed, fairly or not, by that loss.

Health Leader Berwick, Now A Candidate, Seeks ‘Compassionate Government’

“Can you hear me on the porch?” asked Donald Berwick as he looked from his audience in the living room of a West Roxbury home to the overflow crowd on a side porch.

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“Yes, we hear you fine,” a man called out, “and you’ve got our vote.”

Berwick, 67, chuckled, but he didn’t let up. This was a roomful of potential donors, a roomful of prospective volunteers, a roomful of regular voters, and with just a few weeks before the Sept. 9 gubernatorial primary, Berwick felt the urgency. He knew he needed their support.

The Democrat from Newton launched into his stump speech, highlighting the ways he says he is unique in the 2014 race for governor.

“I’m the only candidate for governor committed to single payer health care, Medicare for all,” Berwick said. “I’m the only candidate opposing casinos and for the casino repeal. My focus on poverty, if you haven’t heard it yet, it is very strong. I think this is a commonwealth that can end hunger. Chronic homelessness — zero.”

Berwick’s positions are built on a foundation of what he calls progressive values: a commitment to social justice, equality and compassion. You’ll hear these words in every Berwick speech. They are rooted, he said, in his childhood.

‘We Need Not Be Embarrassed To Say We Help’

Berwick grew up in rural Moodus, Connecticut, the oldest son of the local doctor and a civic-minded mother.

“It was a very small town, everyone was in it together. You literally knew everybody,” Berwick said in an interview. “So the sense in the town of being connected to each other and responsible for each other was extremely deeply woven into my experience as a kid.”

Berwick left Moodus for Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he attended Harvard University as an undergraduate and then as a medical student. Berwick and his wife Ann, who chairs the state’s Department of Public Utilities, raised four children.

“We’re a very close family,” he said. “We spend as much time together as we possibly can,” much of it outdoors, he added.

Weekends were often spent hiking in New Hampshire and eventually in parks all over the world. Berwick made it a point to travel with each of his children.

He remembers his first time on an airplane, when he looked down at mile after mile of homes, highways and farms, and realized how many people he did not know. But he still felt a small-town connection to all those unseen faces.

It’s a connection that is central to his run for governor.

“It’s become naïve or unpopular to talk about a compassionate government, but that’s what I want,” Berwick said. “We need not be embarrassed to say, you know, we help. That’s what we do, as a nation, as a state, and we use government to do that.”

‘Sir’ Berwick Hits D.C. Backlash

Berwick trained as a pediatrician and took care of children for about 20 years before shifting to the executive side of medicine. In 1991, he founded a nonprofit, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), in Cambridge. Now with more than 140 employees, IHI has a presence in every state in the U.S. and more than a dozen countries. Berwick and his organization gained a reputation for tackling complex problems through the 100,000 lives campaign, which documented reductions in medical errors that were killing patients.

He’s widely respected, if not revered, by many health leaders for the results he’s achieved, but also for his leadership style. Former employees say he urges them to take chances and calls failure as an opportunity to learn. He does not want to hear, “that problem’s too big,” or “that can’t be done,” said Joe McCannon, who’s worked with Berwick since 2001.

“Don absolutely will not settle for that,” McCannon added. “He’s just relentless in his optimism and his belief that change is possible. And that’s totally infectious.”

In 2005, Queen Elizabeth II knighted Berwick for his work to improve the United Kingdom’s National Health Service. In 2010, President Obama tapped Berwick to run the agency that oversees Medicare and Medicaid. He was in charge of an $820 million budget and some key aspects of Obamacare. Berwick’s supporters cheered, but the backlash hit hard and fast.

On his Fox News show in 2010, host Glenn Beck called Berwick “the second most dangerous man in America” because, Beck said: “Not only does he want to blow up the best health care system in the world — not perfect, but the best in the world — his idea of a fix is to make our system just like Great Britain’s health care system.”

Beck and many Republicans were particularly concerned about Berwick’s support for “redistributing health care.” Berwick believes if the U.S. succeeds in making health care a legal right, the change will be redistributional, because poor Americans will then have access to something that more prosperous Americans already enjoy.

But opposition to Berwick grew, with 42 Republican senators eventually telling Obama they would not vote to confirm him. Berwick’s recess appointment lasted only 17 months.

“I don’t think Mother Teresa could have been confirmed in that environment,” said Tom Scully, a Republican who ran Medicare and Medicaid under President George W. Bush.

Berwick was held in high regard inside the federal health agency, but became the target of conservatives’ frustration about Obamacare, Scully said.

“He’s kind of an academic,” Scully added. “I don’t think he was particularly astute at the politics, but he was thrown out as the nominee in the most intensely partisan, heated time in health care in the last 50 years.”

Berwick said he’s proud of the drug and prevention benefits for elders that took effect during his tenure and a program to reduce hospital readmissions. Some colleagues thought the experience would sour his interest in politics, but instead it inspired his run for governor.

Taking His Message On The Campaign Trail

Standing in socks, his head covered with a scarf, Berwick addressed about 200 men in turbans and women wearing delicate embroidered head shawls at the New England Sikh Study Circle in Milford. It was his second stop on a Sunday packed with appearances.

“I think Massachusetts can be a beacon … an example of the direction the country ought to go,” said Berwick, drawing a contrast between the blue Bay State and Capitol Hill.

His stump speech was well received there.

“You couldn’t have spoken better to Sikhs than you did if you had been coached,” said study circle member Sarbpreet Singh. “It was wonderful to hear the words social justice, equality — those are absolutely fundamental to the Sikh faith.”

Berwick asked Singh to send him some literature, so that he can learn more about the faith.

At the August Moon Festival in Quincy, the reception was more muted. Berwick weaved through the crowd, as he passed out flyers and pointed to his picture on them.

“I’m Don Berwick, that’s me,” he said repeatedly. “And I’m running for governor in Massachusetts. So please, I’d love your help, thank you very much.”

Berwick received a lot of friendly but blank stares, even when politics and health care overlapped. At a booth run by the Joslin Diabetes Center, Berwick paused to ask three women about their work and the rate of diabetes among Asian-Americans.

The women hadn’t heard of Berwick, but Chihiro Hernandez said, “It’s great to have someone in the race who understands the issues.”

Back in the West Roxbury living room, later that day, some supporters challenged Berwick.

A woman who said she plans to vote for Berwick was worried that she won’t be able to persuade others to do the same. How, she asked, does Berwick plan to pay for all the things he’d just mentioned: prison reform, pre-kindergarten classes across the state and more funding for state colleges and universities?

First, Berwick said, he’d cut money that is being wasted now. For example, he said it costs a lot more to keep drug offenders in prison than it would to fund the services they need to beat the addiction.

Second, Berwick said the state would save billions by moving to single payer health care.

“If I’m successful,” he said, “the insurance companies will come out of the woodwork fighting this, because this threatens the insurance company business.”

“You’d get rid of the insurance companies?” came a woman’s question.

Berwick nodded.

But they’re huge employers, the woman added. What do you do about people who are displaced?

“There’s a transition problem that’s serious, I totally agree with you,” Berwick said. “This has to be a transition plan, not a violent plan. But we’re talking about the biggest job creating strategy we could have in the commonwealth … because of what it does to businesses.”

Berwick pointed to Vermont where a study projects substantial savings as that state moves to single payer health care. As with Medicare, Berwick said people would keep their doctors; the change would be in how physicians are paid.

Getting back to revenue, Berwick said he’d end most tax loopholes. And he’d raise taxes, but only on higher income earners.

“I cannot see burdening, a $30,000 or $40,000 or $50,000 wage earner, who’s having trouble making ends meet for her family, with higher taxes,” Berwick said. “But I certainly can see going to people who are at the higher end of the wealth spectrum, they owe more. And I’m going to have that battle. If I’m governor, we’re going to go for fair taxation.”

As the admittedly select West Roxbury event ended, I couldn’t find anyone who doesn’t support Berwick. But even if he can build on this momentum, he has very little time left.

Berwick does not appear daunted.

“We’ve got the strongest message, we’ve got a very strong field operation,” he said. “We’re in very good shape for this last intense couple of weeks before the election.”

The primary is on Berwick’s 68th birthday. At a time when some people are slowing down, Berwick said he expects another 30 years of vigorous, vital work, which he hopes will include the corner office on Beacon Hill.