Standing in front of hundreds of politicians and citizens and multiple television cameras, Gov. Charlie Baker used Tuesday's State of the Commonwealth speech to highlight his administration's track record as he enters an election year where three Democrats are looking to unseat the most popular governor in the country.
Baker, who is a Republican, painted a picture of a government comprised of differing ideologies working in harmony to produce bipartisan accomplishments. He presented himself as a pragmatic negotiator who could overcome those ideological differences to get results while working with a Legislature dominated by Democrats.
But Rachel Cobb, associate professor and chair of the Department of Government at Suffolk University, said there's some dissonance between the governor's statements and the reality they refer to.
"For example, with his health care expansion there's been some cuts, but it didn't sound that way if you were listening to the speech. Or that [with] his pro-environmental stance, he's actually proposing pipelines. You wouldn't know that," Cobb said. "He's choosing his words carefully."
While he received several standing ovations, not everyone was so smitten. State Sen. Sonia Chang-Díaz immediately criticized Baker for the amount of education funding he set aside for the upcoming fiscal year, funding she said was "just plain inadequate for the job" in a statement to WGBH News.
"His budget proposal would leave K-12 funding down more than 5 percent since 2002, when adjusted for inflation," she said. "That means more cuts to classrooms, in reality."
The Massachusetts Democratic Party quickly released a statement criticizing the governor for failing to make good on his promise to improve the MBTA and described his attempts to cut Medicaid costs as detrimental to the working and poor.
All three of his opponents — Newton Mayor Setti Warren, former state Secretary of Adminstration Jay Gonzalez, and activist and entrepreneur Bob Massie — released critical statements following his speech varying on the message that the governor is not doing enough to distinguish himself from the rancor of Republican-controlled Washington.
Cobb said his message of bipartisanship was also deliberate for another reason. Baker promoted all the additional funding his administration has allocated in conjunction with the Legislature while avoiding a focus on the wave of budgetary restraints he's tried to implement, thereby salvaging some conservative credentials.
"He really made the cause for the role of government to positively impact people's lives, which for a Republican, especially [one] coming from a long tradition of valuing small government and having the least impact on people's lives, was particularly surprising," Cobb said.
Click on the audio player above to listen to the full interview.
