As of a few weeks ago, Linda Dorcena Forry was a superstar of local politics. She had conquered the city from Mattapan to South Boston, become a familiar host of the annual St. Patrick’s Breakfast, raised her state and even national profile, and was a leading contender to be the next president of the Massachusetts state senate.
On Thursday, Forry announced that she is giving all that up for the private sector. She is taking a job with Suffolk Construction, the politically connected firm run by John Fish.
Forry no doubt has her own reasons for leaving the game of elective politics—perhaps including the practical matter of saving up for the college tuition for four children.
But it’s hard to ignore that she is part of a large exodus from the Commonwealth’s upper chamber, that suggests a political body in decline—the sad diminution of a once-august body.
That’s not just because of the turmoil currently surrounding senate president Stan Rosenberg—although that is obviously a big factor.
But it’s much bigger than that. The senate was already the third wheel in the “big three” Beacon Hill power structure, struggling for relevance as Governor Charlie Baker and House Speaker Robert DeLeo plotted course. Senators have been flooding out of the chamber, and talented replacements are hardly rushing to take their place. And, with rare exceptions, the state senate has ceased to be a launching pad for higher office.
The self-destruction of the well-intentioned but ineffectual Rosenberg could have been an opportunity to reverse that course. Members could have removed him, installed a dynamic new leader—such as Forry—and used the sexual harassment controversies as a starting point to reform and revitalize the institution.
Instead, they chose to freeze lamely in place, hoping for Rosenberg’s eventual return to the presidency, while fumbling on the promise of confidentiality in that investigation, as reported by Mike Deehan here and Yvonne Abraham in the Boston Globe.
It is increasingly the place where few serious people want to be.
Exodus
Before Forry’s announcement, there had already been a mass exodus from the senate, for reasons ranging from death to disgrace.
In just the three years since former senate president Therese Murray closed her final legislative session, in December 2014, 15 of the 40 senators in that room have departed. Forry makes it 40 percent who have left.
That includes some top talent: Anthony Petruccelli of East Boston, who became a lobbyist; Ben Downing of Pittsfield, who took a private-sector energy job; Jen Flanagan of Leominster, who joined the Cannabis Control Commission; Barry Finegold of Andover, who ran unsuccessfully for state treasurer; and Dan Wolf of Harwich, who tried an aborted campaign for governor.
That came after heavy turnover during the Murray years. There are now only eight remaining senators who have been there for a decade or more.
Notably, though, few of the departures have been upward to higher elected office.
One exception was Katherine Clark, who won a congressional special election—against two other state senators, among others—in 2013. In 2010, Scott Brown infamously went from state senator to US Senator, and the same year Michael Morrissey won election to be Norfolk District Attorney.
State senator Barbara L’Italien is now running in the crowded field to succeed Niki Tsongas in congress, but despite having the largest current political base, she is a mere fifth in fundraising so far. As the 2014 state elections showed, voters increasingly disdaining lawmakers in general, and senators particularly, when they reach for higher state office—or consider and abandon it, as Downing and others have done.
These days, it’s more likely for a state senator to drop down a notch, to small-city mayor—a path recently taken by Tom McGee in Lynn and Bob Hedlund in Weymouth.
And in many cases there isn’t exactly a clamor of top talent seeking to replace those who leave.
After McGee won his bid to become Mayor of Lynn this past November, only a single candidate entered a bid for the seat: state representative Brendan Crighton, who will be unopposed in both the primary and general special election.
Give Crighton some credit for that—he’s put in the work to be a formidable foe to those who might also want the seat. Still, it’s a striking level of disinterest.
Even more remarkable, not one Democratic candidate has yet emerged for the Andover-based senate seat L’Italien is leaving open. And the special election for Flanagan’s seat drew such a weak field of Democratic candidates, the nominee managed to buck national trends and lose a blue legislative seat to a Republican.
In part, that’s probably because the state senate is currently lost in a gap between intense interest in national politics and micro-local political involvement. Witness the 14 candidates vying for Tsongas’s seat in Congress on one hand; and the Bernie Sanders-backed flock of new alderman just elected in Somerville.
Whatever the reason, it sure seems as if there’s more interest in getting out of the state senate these days than getting into it.
Big money, no whammies
The opposite was supposed to be happening. After all, a year ago the legislature gave its own members a huge hike in bonuses for leadership posts and committee chairs—which, in the relatively small senate, means big money for everybody.
The base salary for a senator is $62,547 a year. But thanks to those raises, every senator who served the full year made at least $84,000 in 2017—and 27 of them topped $100,000.
That should be attracting more and better candidates to vie for the offices. Those recent special elections, and a scan of how few challengers are lining up so far for the 2018 elections, suggests that it isn’t happening.
The money might be enticing some who should retire to stick around longer.
The only incumbent senator not running for re-election in 2018 so far is L’Italien, and I’m told that no other retirements are expected.
Much of that is a natural result of the recent turnover—the new replacements haven’t been there long enough to move on.
As for the remaining long-timers—well, you need to bear in mind the state rules that base state pensions on an employee’s three highest-earning years. With the much higher senator remuneration that kicked in at the start of 2017, there is a powerful incentive for those veterans to coast through this year and 2019.
Meanwhile, Baker appears headed to re-election and another four-year term collaborating with DeLeo, who has apparently decided to live out his days in the Speaker’s office. The Senate will continue to stumble ahead indecisively with its leadership vacuum. And the chamber will continue to seem less and less relevant.
