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By Ed Oliver Most conservatives wish to be enthusiaiastic about Mitt Romney, but many are beginning to worry. He obviously has no respect for them. He thinks they have no choice but to vote for him. He is in serious trouble of losing his base.
MassNews: Are you aware of our readership? Mainly conservatives and independents? Rappaport: Yes. MassNews: Is there anything you’d like to say to our readers? Rappaport: Yes. One of the things that we, as Republicans in particular and conservatives and even moderates, have is a zero tolerance. If somebody does not agree with us on one part of one issue or a couple of issues, we just toss them. We won’t consider supporting and voting for them. Ronald Reagan used to say that if somebody agrees with me 90% of the time, they’re not a 10% traitor, they’re a 90% ally. We need to be focusing on what is going to get us farther down, move our agenda forward better. Ultimately, I’m convinced that I’ll be able to do that, help move our collective agenda forward. We all, I think, believe the same things. We want to make people’s lives better. It’s just really a function of how we’re going to do it more effectively. MassNews: Does government have a role? Rappaport: I believe that government does have a role, but I think we need to focus on what it can do well, not on everything. That’s one of the problems we have. That’s how you get a $22 billion budget. It’s trying to do everything for everybody, in which case it does a whole lot not very well for not very many people. MassNews: You’re not one to shock everyone with a huge flip-flop on some issue? Rappaport: I haven’t in 20 years in political life. One of the things people know about Jim Rappaport is what they see is what they get. I’m pretty clear. It’s funny, people say to me, why aren’t you doing this and why aren’t you doing that? I say, you know what, I don’t know what’s been confusing about what I’ve said. I said last fall that I was going to run for lieutenant governor. I said in January I was going to run for lieutenant governor. I said in April I was going to be running for lieutenant governor and that I was going to run through the primary and then ultimately to the November election and be sworn in next January. So, I think I’ve been pretty clear
on my communication. I find that for me, it’s
a lot easier just to be straight, clear, because then
you don’t have to remember as much. When you
flip-flop and do this, that and the other thing, it
ends up getting really confusing. I’m just a
simple, direct person.
We have a $22 billion budget which is the gross national product of a small nation. We ought to be able to set the proper priorities and take care of the needs of our citizens. It’s not about cutting, it’s
about reallocating. It’s about spending the money
more wisely. We’ve got $40 million in "clerks"
in the courts that have been shoved down our judges’
throats over the course of the last three years. They’ve
been told by legislators that they’ve got to
take cousin Sarah or brother Joe in the Salem District
Court.
Beacon Hill’s got to get back towards taking care of those who need to be taken care of, not those who are well connected or powerful. The problem is that most of this money is going to those people who are powerful or well connected. What the judges and lawyers tell you if you talk to any of them, as I have over the course of the last eight months, they tell you what we need is clerical help, people to set up appointments, send out judgments and notices and default notices, set hearing dates. We need people who are going to push paper, make the system move faster. That’s what we need. MassNews: What’s an example? Rappaport: We need $2 to $4 million at the police lab in Sudbury so we can get DNA tests back in two to three months instead of six to nine months. Do you remember that little girl who got killed in San Diego in January? I read a lot of mysteries and stuff like this. I didn’t know until January that you could do a DNA test in a week. I thought that you had to grow something and then they had to put them in a spectrometer and all this fancy stuff. No. It’s a function of getting the computer time to be able to do the analysis of the sequencing. That’s what it’s about. If we don’t do this, it makes it harder for our police to catch people in a timely way. So that means criminals are less afraid of our system of justice. And the people lose faith in our system when it takes so long between the time a crime is committed and the time somebody is punished for it and sent to jail. So if we can shorten that period, it will create in people a better sense of justice and the fairness of our system.
We as a state will save $140 million a year for the next five years if we bid this out. That is even with paying the owners six-year income guarantees for some of the people who will be let go. It’s unbelievable. This is $140 million a year. So this is just one program. MassNews: How else would you save money? Rappaport: There’s a variety of other programs that can be restructured and re-crafted. At the same time we’re telling our cities and towns that they’re going to have live on less money, we’re also saying we’re not going to let them bid out their contracts on an open-bid basis. We require them to have prevailing wage agreements, which basically drives up their costs. We’re doing something that doesn’t make any sense. We’re spending $5 million subsidizing betting in the dog tracks at the same time that we’re spending $1 to $2 million dollars for gambling-addiction programs. There’s a whole lot of stuff that needs to start making some sense. If you’ve got somebody in there like me who basically has spent their career doing forensic accounting in all of my variety of businesses, we’ll be able to go through these budgets in ways they’ve never been gone through before. We should also have budgets that someone with a modest accounting background ought to be able to understand. You need a Ph.D. in accounting to understand our current state budget. It’s done that way to hide it from the people so that they won’t be able to scream and yell about some of the outrages that exist. MassNews: And that budget keeps going up at least a billion a year. You wouldn’t sign billion-a-year increases, would you? Rappaport: No. There’s no need to. We have a budget which has gone from $13 billion to $22 billion in the last nine to ten years. MassNews: Didn’t you pledge not to raise taxes? Rappaport: I’m the only major party statewide candidate who has signed the no-new-taxes pledge, and I absolutely would stand by that. There’s absolutely no reason to have to raise taxes. When you look at the tax package that the Democrats have put through and you know what? The people are going to get hammered. I look at the toll increases as tax increases. If you live, for example, on the inner North Shore and you’re a family making $50,000 a year, you come to work through the tunnel or over the bridge and if you smoke, you just got almost a thousand to a $1200-dollar-a-year tax increase on a family making $50,000 a year. Think of that. That is huge. MassNews: But the Democrats are saying the average tax increase is only $351. Rappaport: Right. Well, if you commute, add another $250 to that. If you smoke add another $350 or $400 to that. So there you are. You’re now at about a thousand to $1200 dollar increase. And the Democrats will say, well, it’s only $351. Well, you know what? Do you know what $351 means? It means cable for a year for that family. It means telephone for nine months. It means food for the better part of a month. It means half a month’s mortgage payment. That’s real money to these people. And the Democrats are saying, oh, well, it’s only $351. You know, if the Republicans say that they crucify them. So, it’s very clear that we do not have a revenue problem. We’ve got a spending problem and we need to get tough on it. MassNews: By the way, one thing that Governor Weld did was create lifetime registration on automobiles. Then one day, I was in the Registry and saw a little sign on the wall, effective September there’s no more lifetime registration. It was real quiet, but they got rid of that. Now you have to keep going back and paying. Would you bring that back? Rappaport: I’ve looked at it. I
do remember when they passed it and it seemed like
it made some common sense. One of the things that
government seems to get away from oftentimes are things
that just seem to make common sense, and things that
intuitively in our gut make sense to us. Then government
does it the opposite way. I remember when we used
to get a license every couple of years. Then they
went to five years. Even the federal government figured
out you get passports every ten years, so how much
am I going to change in the next ten years? Do my
license for ten years, be done with me.
I don’t know if you’re aware, but there are a lot of non-crimes clogging up the courts, like things to do with domestic violence. DSS gets over half-a-billion-dollars a year. They’ve got an army of social workers out there pouncing on families for infractions and seizing their kids. And the Fatherhood Coalition and those groups also have similar complaints where these restraining orders are handed out like candy and they have to keep going back into the court. They’re separated from their kids and they get arrested for things like running into their ex-wife at the store. There are all sorts of petty non-crimes that are clogging up the courts. So you’ve got DSS, a huge agency trying to find something to do and a reason for being there, and you’ve got family courts that are hurting families and separating fathers from their kids. Would you at least open your door to groups like Justice for Families, a family-rights group that deals with the DSS problems? Rappaport: I already have. I’ve been very actively involved in helping groups combating domestic violence for the better part of 15 years, because it is an insidious societal problem. On the other hand, if you listen to any legitimate sociologist as to why there are the problems in some of our communities, they say it’s because of single-family parents trying to bring up the kid with no male influence. They say that one of the ways to help limit the number of kids who drift into the life of crime is by helping to try to retain family units. So, on the one hand, we have a societal objective, yet we have a whole other division over here. Although there are instances when DSS actually does important work, they seem to have forgotten what their mission is: to try to figure out how we put families back together, not how do we separate them forever. There are some bad actors. There are some bad men just as there are some bad women. There are men who forego their duties and obligations as fathers. There are men who beat women because they either come from a history of having been a battered child or having seen it as a kid, or they come from an environment where they are drug or alcohol addicted. There are some people who need to be separated from their families. On the other hand, we have a system where oftentimes because of problems between spouses, the children are used as weapons and the courts are used as a tool or a pawn in that battle between the parents. DSS has to do a better job of differentiating when there is a true wrong and when they are being used as pawns. MassNews: Would you do something to make DSS better? Rappaport: Well, let me give you an example. Look at the Amirault case. A man and two women were accused of actions that, frankly, anybody at the time could have told you were this side of ludicrous. They just didn’t make any sense. And both women were let out. The man, who’s been in there now for, what, 16 years, was recommended for a commutation for two reasons. One is that the parole board is not allowed to pass on the innocence or guilt, but they said that the sentence was tremendously excessive based on what comparable sentences were. He served over 16 years, longer than what many first-degree murderers serve, rightly or wrongly. Secondly, they said there were significant concerns about -- I’m paraphrasing somewhat -- significant concerns about the efficacy of the conviction process. That is something that the parole board never does. Yet this man is still in jail today. That’s not right. And his sentence should be commuted and it should have been commuted for one of two reasons. It should have been commuted because you as Governor supported their decision and felt that the sentence should be commuted because of the problems with the conviction process. Or you support your parole board, because they voted five to nothing. And this is a parole board that’s considered the most professional in the country. It wouldn’t agree to vote five to nothing that today is Monday. Yet they voted five to nothing that this man’s sentence should be commuted. That’s been a big failure. I think that that’s something that Mitt Romney and Jim Rappaport should make happen next January. 
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