Cullen on DeLeo

Kevin Cullen of the Boston Globe is very skeptical about the new Speaker of the House, Robert DeLeo. As the title of his column says, he feels that DeLeo is cut from the same cloth as Sal DiMasi: typical politician from "the neighborhood" who cut his teeth in Massachusetts politics and who won't change a thing. You can read the whole column here but I love the following sections:

Listening to Bob DeLeo promise to clean up Beacon Hill inspires about as much confidence as hearing Moe, Larry, and Curly promise to do a good job with the plumbing.

We're told that the new speaker is more conservative than his predecessor. This is all very interesting information, given that there are approximately as many people living on Mars as there are Republicans in the State House. The Legislature is about as ideologically diverse as the Cuban Parliament. The idea that anything up on Beacon Hill is going to change because Bob DeLeo differs with Sal DiMasi on slot machines, seat belts, and the death penalty is, like Dianne Wilkerson's take on campaign finance law, patently ridiculous.


A couple I know, working people, were having coffee a while back, and they were reading the paper, and every other story was about some pol stealing or getting himself a fatter pension, and they coined a word to describe what's wrong with state politics: "lawyerticians."
It's perfect, and it describes so many on Beacon Hill, especially in leadership: They are politicians, so they are always on the make, but they are lawyers, so they think they know how far they can go without getting into trouble. Sometimes it turns out to be too far anyway, but even it if it's not, it's too far for anybody who isn't getting a piece of the action to think it's any good.

Did I mention that Bob DeLeo is a lawyer?


Watching Sal DiMasi slap Bob DeLeo's cheek the other day, as if the new speaker were getting confirmed again at Holy Rosary in Winthrop, was not exactly comforting.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.


With apologies to The Who, we just got fooled again.