Charlie Baker is consistently one of America’s most popular governors, having twice won election as a Republican to lead Massachusetts. His bipartisan, results-driven leadership throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, along with the pragmatic policy agenda he has advanced in his two terms as governor, has brought him local support and national renown.

Governor Baker joined the Manhattan Institute to discuss the lessons he has learned from leading the commonwealth during these daunting times and, more broadly, from his efforts to transform government services and improve the ability to live, work, and learn in Massachusetts.

Event Transcript

Michael Hendrix:

Welcome to the Manhattan Institute's conversation with Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker. I'm Michael Hendrix, Director of State and Local Policy at MI, and we're delighted you're joining us for a continuing series of conversations with America's leading governors.

Michael Hendrix:

Governor Charlie Baker was sworn in for a second term as the 72nd governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 2019 after a first term focused on moving Massachusetts forward through what many have praised as his bipartisan results-driven leadership. Governor Baker has used public-private partnerships to spur economic development, eliminated Massachusetts structural budget deficit without raising taxes, and ensured the Bay State continues to be a national leader in education among other achievements. He's also led the state through one of the toughest periods in our nation's history, and the state's history, facing the global pandemic of COVID-19. So for all of that and more Governor Baker, thank you for joining us.

Gov. Charlie Baker:

It's nice to be with you, Michael.

Michael Hendrix:

Let's dive right in.

Gov. Charlie Baker:

It's been an interesting seven or eight months. I was listening to you sort of take a look back and you're reminding me that I need to go back and take a look at the state of the state that I delivered in January of 2020, see how much different it would appear to be contextually than the 2020 we've ended up living through, which is true for everybody.

Michael Hendrix:

I think that is definitely true. And I hope we can go through some of that. COVID-19 has devastated the Northeast and New York, and at the Manhattan Institute we know all too well its toll. So where are we in Massachusetts today with COVID-19?

Gov. Charlie Baker:

Well, I would say that at this point in time we're in a far better place than we were in last spring. One of the big lessons I learned from all this is if you have high population density, and a lot of global travel, and a ton of mobility, the chances of COVID-19 taking a pretty big swing at you were extremely high. And the places, if you look around the U S, either back in March and April, or the places that have taken a pretty big hit this summer, they tend to all share some of those characteristics, especially the ones around density, which certainly New York would know something about.

Gov. Charlie Baker:

I would say at this point in time, we're in much better shape than we were in before. And that's primarily because people here in the Commonwealth did the things that so many folks in the public health community recommended that they do. We went through an early shutdown, which was incredibly painful. It was an incredibly painful decision to make, and it was an incredibly painful sort of element to watch play out over the course of the time period in which we had that stay at home advisory in place. But it did do what it was supposed to do, which basically broke the back of the trend up in new cases and hospitalizations and ultimately deaths here in Massachusetts.

Gov. Charlie Baker:

We're clearly on the other side of that mountain at this point in time and have been for a long time. The good news, the part that I take the most satisfaction in, and a big tip of the hat to Lieutenant Governor Karyn Polito and our Economic Affairs Secretary Mike Kennealy, and all the folks that worked on their reopening advisory board, and the people of Massachusetts, and the companies and employers here, is we still had a 10% positive test rate in Massachusetts on May 18th when we began the process of reopening. And since then, as we've reopened the economy and added back 500,000 jobs and continue to increase mobility, we actually saw our positive test rate go from 10% back in May to under 1% today. And it's stayed under 1% at this point for quite a while. And that's with a fairly significant increase in testing over that period of time.

Gov. Charlie Baker:

We still have a really long way to go. We're, well, like New York and New York City in particular, we have big connections to the tourism and travel, and conventions and conferences, and all our colleges and universities, and our financial institutions, and our healthcare institutions are in many cases global players. And there's just not a heck of a lot of global stuff like that that's going on. And the biggest statistic I'll give you on that one is Logan Airport used to do about 450,000 passengers a day before COVID. And now it does about 50,000. And that by far and away from my point of view is the biggest sort of indicator out there about how much COVID is very much still with us in terms of our economy.

Michael Hendrix:

So you talked about the lockdown, what are some of the other lessons learned from COVID-19? One of the things that we're trying to wrestle with in New York is in nursing homes. What could we have done differently? What are some of the lessons learned there? What are some other lessons learned that you've had in Massachusetts?

Gov. Charlie Baker:

Well, I think one of the biggest lessons everybody should learn from this experience, and I certainly hope we don't forget, is the global supply chains during a global pandemic in a period of scarcity don't really work the way they work under normal circumstances. I never expected or anticipated that I would become an expert in the global acquisition of personal protective equipment, but I spent a tremendous amount of time on the phone calling practically everybody I knew around here who had any kind of connection to the countries that were most likely to be able to produce, manufacturer and perhaps make available for us, if we can figure out a way to get it to the states, PPE.

Gov. Charlie Baker:

We had a very sort of significant and well-publicized event where I found a gentleman here in Massachusetts who had good relationships with folks in China who were in the PPE space, but I needed to find a way to get a private plane, a big one, to bring that here to the Commonwealth, And I ended up asking the New England Patriots, the Kraft family, who are friends of mine, if they would be willing to make their plane available, and their pilots, to find a way to bring back to Massachusetts some of the gear that we were able to acquire in China.

Gov. Charlie Baker:

And over the course of the past seven or eight months, not only have we significantly enhanced our PPE delivery with global solutions, almost all of which were done by chartered planes of one kind or another, but we also provided resources to companies here in Massachusetts that were in other lines of work that said, "Look, we're willing to make hand sanitizer. We're willing to make gowns. We're willing to make coveralls. We're willing to make masks. We're willing to make gloves." And some of these companies are pretty well known for doing other things. New Balance, which obviously is a global player in the footwear and athletic wear space, got into the mask making business.

Gov. Charlie Baker:

Merrow, which is a company down in Fall River, which makes probably the most robust industrial sewing machine in the world, got into the business of making coveralls and gowns. And I don't mean just like a few, I mean like millions. 99 degrees, which was a fashion manufacturer up in Lawrence, got into the business and making gowns. What we really provided in those cases with some resources to help them sort of reconfigure their manufacturing processes and then as much help as we could with respect to getting FDA approval or whoever else they needed approval from to make their products sellable here in Massachusetts. But I think that lesson for all of us is one we'd better not forget because this is certainly not the last time we'll be dealing with issues like this.

Michael Hendrix:

No. And I find it remarkable that you have, last time I checked, an 81% approval rating for how you've handled this pandemic. Why do you think that is? Is it procuring jets to bring in PPE? Is it working closely with businesses? What do you think, when Massachusetts citizens look to you and say, "Yes, we approve of the job you're doing," what is it you think that they're looking at and applauding and encouraging you to continue?

Gov. Charlie Baker:

Well, I certainly think the fact that, as I said, we had a real calamity on our hands in March and April and May, and through that period I think we did a news conference pretty much every day for about three months. I get letters and emails all the time from people who said that it was really important to them to tune in every day to hear what we had to say about what was going on here in the Commonwealth, and they appreciated the fact that we brought in some of the experts from around the area to talk about particular issues that people had concerns about, that we were pretty aggressive about messaging over and over again the things we thought people could do to actually help the cause.

Gov. Charlie Baker:

We tried to stick to some of the deadlines and timeframes that we talked about with respect to when certain things would happen. The reopening, as I said before, it did not turn into a calamity. Just the opposite. Our positive test rates and our cases per hundred thousand actually continued to go down after we started bringing people back to work, because we spent a lot of time with the employer community and the public health community coming up with guidelines and advisories about how to reopen safely.

Gov. Charlie Baker:

So I think a lot of it just has to do with the fact that we took our job as sort of communicators incredibly seriously, and tried very hard to make sure people knew what we were thinking and what we were working on, and then what we thought would happen, and when. Then tried to make sure we stayed pretty close to that schedule. And I think the other thing is, as I said before, if you bring 500,000 people back to work and you don't see a big increase in your positive test rate, in fact, you actually see a continued decrease, it gives people a sense that we are in fact safer than we were.

Gov. Charlie Baker:

We also dramatically increased our testing, and said we would, at a pretty significant clip over that period of time. And we've been pretty aggressive about creating testing capacity, wherever people need it based on the testing results we get. So if you're in a community that appears to have a bit of an outbreak going on, you're likely to have our Stop The Spread program show up in your community to make free testing available to people in a pretty easy and accessible way.

Gov. Charlie Baker:

We also did spend a lot of time with our long-term care community, and through a series of funding initiatives, but also audit issues and staff support issues and testing, I think we got people to a much better place than we were at in March and April and May. And that has continued to be the case as we've moved forward since then. But there's no question that in some respects, the hit that took place and the tragedy that it became in long-term care facilities, especially senior care facilities, not just here in Massachusetts, but across the country and across the world, was probably one of the biggest and most tragic events associated with COVID since the start.

Gov. Charlie Baker:

I mean, my dad is 92, and I talked a lot about him in some of those press conferences. I didn't see him for a hundred days and neither one of us is much on the phone, but we tried to get better at it. But that sort of inability to visit with him, to see how he was doing, just get a look at him, was an incredibly painful experience for me. And I know it was incredibly painful for everybody on both sides of those circumstances, for the better part of four months in the midst of a pandemic when there was significant fear and concern about what was going on in long-term care generally. And I talked about it because it bothered me just like it bothered so many others.

Michael Hendrix:

This has been a tough time for many, and Massachusetts is not spared of that, or even you. But I do want to take this moment to pivot, to look back even further over your time in office. I think that for one period you were the most popular governor in America for 11 quarters straight. What is the Baker secret recipe for being governor?

Gov. Charlie Baker:

You know, my career is sort of split between time in the public sector and time in the private sector. I worked for two governors in the 1990s. Governors Bill Weld and Paul Cellucci, I was in their cabinet. And I come from what I joke is a mixed marriage family. My mom was, she passed away, she's a Democrat, was a Democrat. My dad is a Republican. My dad actually worked in DC in two Republican administrations. So I grew up listening to both sides on pretty much everything at a very vibrant and loud dinner table. I have friends when I was a kid who basically said, "I'm never coming back to your house for dinner. I'm going to get called on. I'm going to be expected to perform. It's way too complicated."

Gov. Charlie Baker:

But the best part that I got out of that was an understanding and an appreciation for the fact that disagreements don't necessarily define character, which I do think has become too much a part of the way our national dialogue takes place. And I think one of the things people here in Massachusetts do appreciate is we've tried pretty hard to focus on the work and not on what I call the noise. And in the end, everybody who's in public life, every elected official, in my opinion, Democrat Republican, if you accomplish things around dealing with the opioid epidemic, or you accomplish things around dealing with the pandemic, or if you accomplish things around dealing with economic development, or education reform, or environmental policy... We have some of the largest deep water wind and hydro projects in the country going on here in Massachusetts, which were developed and pursued on a bipartisan basis... Everybody wins if you get those things that people really care about done in your community, your state.

Gov. Charlie Baker:

I think what most people really want more than anything out of their government, whatever your point of view or your political party is, they want you to focus on the things that are going to help improve the quality of their community and the quality of their life. And I think in the haze of political combat people forget about that sometimes, and we've tried really hard to stay on that. And I think for most people in Massachusetts, they think that's worked.

Michael Hendrix:

Disagreements do not define character, I think is a really important point. And it makes me want to ask a CEO question. How did you pick your team at the beginning? Not just a lieutenant governor, but a chief of staff, policy team, communications team, and so on. All of the staffing and appointments at the beginning that are instrumental in taking your vision and the way you see the world and translating that into reality through your time in office, that's not easy. How did you approach that?

Gov. Charlie Baker:

So I had a real advantage having served in the cabinets of two governors. I worked in state government in the '90s for eight years. I came in with Bill Weld when he got elected. Paul Cellucci was his lieutenant governor. And then after Weld left, I served for Lieutenant Governor Cellucci as his chief financial officer for two years. So I had been up close, involved in a transition, and so I had some idea about what it was like.

Gov. Charlie Baker:

And I will say this, the fact that you basically have to staff the leadership team top to bottom in a multi-billion dollar operation in the 60 days between election day and inauguration day, I mean, there's no other large organization I can think of anywhere other than government where we try and do it this way. So it is kind of the card we're dealt. But having been through this a couple of times I think helped a lot.

Gov. Charlie Baker:

But the way we staffed it was Lieutenant Governor Karyn Polito and I basically created what I would describe as a list of the people we knew. She had served in the state legislature for 10 years. Her family is in construction and development, but she'd served for 10 years previously in the legislature. And we both served in local government. So it wasn't like either one of us were strangers to people who would consider working in the public sector. And we knew a lot of people who've been both in and out of the public sector and the private sector. But we basically created a list, and then just started to work the list. And answered the phone whenever somebody called with a thought or an idea, whoever they were, about somebody that we should talk to that might have either thoughts about candidates or be interested in a position themselves. And then we literally just tried to pick the best person we could find.

Gov. Charlie Baker:

And we ended up with an administration that at the beginning was some combination of people we knew, people who were referred to us by other people we knew. Some were Democrats, some were Republicans, some were Independents. We didn't spend a lot of time worrying about the letter at the end of their name. But they were all people who had some experience in the public sector for the most part, or at least at had worked with it so that they had some idea about how it worked. But they were all people who were subject matter experts in their area and had actually managed something before.

Gov. Charlie Baker:

I think those two elements in particular were critical. If you pick somebody to serve in one of these jobs, who's never run anything of significant size, they may discover early on that it's a lot more complicated than it might look from the outside. And it's really important to get people who actually know the material because there's a lot of it in every one of these spaces. And you will be challenged from the day you show up by the advocacy community, by the folks who are part of the executive branch agency that you're involved in, to demonstrate not only that you know something about it, but that you're willing to think about it, willing to listen, and committed to try and make it better.

Michael Hendrix:

You're still very much the governor of Massachusetts, but I want to talk a bit about your legacy to move from the beginning, now to where you are today and looking forward. What do you see now looking back as the most legacy-defining initiative from your time as governor?

Gov. Charlie Baker:

Well, I certainly think the work that we did on the opioid epidemic, which at this point, I mean, it's still a huge issue, not just here but elsewhere in the country. But we did a lot of work on this early on, and I think a lot of that work was important and made a big difference. And we're doing the best we can to sustain it as we move through this really unusual and difficult time.

Gov. Charlie Baker:

I think the second thing is we put a lot of work into rethinking the way our Medicaid program work. I think a lot of the stuff that we did there, which is to try to make it more of a community-based program that really does have the ability to proactively reach out to people and to support them where they are, has made a big difference. I'm really hoping one of the executive orders that I issued during the pandemic, which was to make telehealth available across the Commonwealth and paid the same way you would pay for a traditional in-office visit, I hope we're able to get legislation passed that delivers on that.

Gov. Charlie Baker:

We're currently in the process of modernizing our public transportation system, which was woefully under-invested in for probably 20 years. That one is a little invisible. I don't really think it's one of those things that anybody is going to notice right away. But by the time we get to the end of our term, we will have constructed the largest extension of the Green Line, which is one of the four rapid transit systems here out into Somerville, a project that was on the books forever and for one reason or another never got done. We'll also be pretty close to having commuter rail service from the South coast, New Bedford and Fall River up into Boston, which is something people have been talking about since the early 1990s. And we'll have invested billions of dollars in upgrading and modernizing our signal systems, our tracks, our switches, the electronics, all this stuff that in many cases is 30, 40, and 50 years old and desperately needed to be brought up. It'll enhance reliability. It'll improve speed. It'll make the system safer.

Gov. Charlie Baker:

And I guess the other thing I would mention is we spent a lot of time and a lot of effort on those energy projects. And while those take a long time and won't necessarily be done, they'll be far enough along that literally thousands of kilowatts, megawatts of energy will be available here in the Commonwealth using either hydro-power or deep water wind, and we'll be replacing and continuing the process of replacing fossil fuels. And it really does set the table for really significant movements on a go-forward basis to continue that progress

Michael Hendrix:

For context on this Green Line Extension, you prior to being governor also had a role in transforming Boston's infrastructure, but also for our New York audience, we have our Second Avenue Subway Extension that costs $2 billion per mile to extend, and that we've been talking about since the Great Depression that we would actually achieve, and we only just finished that now. So I think that even those invisible accomplishments actually matter a lot. When you look ahead-

Gov. Charlie Baker:

The credit for that stuff will be probably returned to people years down the road. But it's the sort of thing that a guy like me who tends to be a little nerdy can get pretty excited about.

Michael Hendrix:

Well, speaking of getting excited about, what are you excited about, nerdy or not, as governor for the rest of your time in office? What are you looking forward to as your priorities?

Gov. Charlie Baker:

Well obviously, we're going to continue to manage our way through this pandemic and do what we can to find ways to safely help people get back to work, and stay employed, and stay employed safely. But we also have a lot of work to do with respect to K through 12 education, which I think is just going to be a challenge for people because of the hit that COVID took the people's psyche around here generally. I think that's going to be a big part of how we sort of continue to move forward.

Gov. Charlie Baker:

I continue to think that we have a lot of work that we're going to continue to need to do in the climate space. We've made a number of proposals to the legislature to make it possible for us to create a lot more resilience in our Commonwealth and in our cities and towns. And when I talk about resilience, I mean for communities to succeed, for downtowns to succeed, for all of us to succeed going forward, we need to adapt many of our public infrastructure assets to the fact that they were built to serve one kind of climate and we now live in a different kind. The storms are much more intense. They're far more frequent. A lot of the culverts and other infrastructure that was put in place once upon a time and exists now is just not equipped to deal with this stuff, and that translates into huge flooding events and massive disruptions.

Gov. Charlie Baker:

Look, that stuff's not going to get any better, and we've proposed a number of ways to try to move that forward here in Massachusetts. And I hope we do, because whether you're talking about reducing your carbon footprint, or we're coming up with ways to enhance people's ability to work, live, and move around in your Commonwealth. You've got to work both sides of the street on the climate question.

Michael Hendrix:

And another, I think important thing that you're going to be working on is selecting a position to the Supreme Judicial Court. If I have this right, you are going to be in a position to, over your time in office, have selected the entire bench of the Supreme Judicial Court. The last governor to do that was John Hancock, the first and third governor of Massachusetts. What does that mean? What does that mean to you? How are you approaching that?

Gov. Charlie Baker:

With great care and appreciation of the significance that's involved. You know, it's kind of a quirk of sorts in some ways, and a tragedy in others. The main reason we're going to be able to do this is it's a seven member court. One member decided to retire early. Another member, just recently the Chief Justice Ralph Gants, tragically had a heart attack and died. I think the one thing I would say about the SJC here in Massachusetts is it's always had a reputation for putting people on the bench who have extraordinary legal minds and legal credentials and experience. The Governor's Council, which is an elected body of eight, needs to approve or disapprove of the folks we nominate to serve on the bench.

Gov. Charlie Baker:

We've nominated five candidates so far. The Governor's Council unanimously approved the five that we nominated. They are generally considered to be very smart, top tier legal minds with terrific life and legal experiences, even-tempered moderates, which is reasonably consistent with sort of how I think about myself. And what we need to make sure we do is fill those last two seats with two more people who bring that same level of excellence and quality and commitment to the bench.

Gov. Charlie Baker:

You know, I'm not a lawyer so for me, this was one of those things that I knew I would need a lot of help on when we took office. And we have an incredibly strong judicial nominating commission that's done great work for us. Everybody has to basically go through that process before they get to the lieutenant governor and myself. And obviously the people who serve on the bench at every level are critical to the sort of execution of justice and government in your city and your Commonwealth.

Gov. Charlie Baker:

I really do think it's a unique opportunity, but it's one of those unique opportunities that came with some really sad facts around it. And we'll do all we can to make sure that we live up to the long and storied history of the longest sitting appellate court in the United States of America, which is the Massachusetts SJC.

Michael Hendrix:

[inaudible 00:30:51].

Gov. Charlie Baker:

I can't hear you, Mike. I don't know why.

Michael Hendrix:

Can you hear me now?

Gov. Charlie Baker:

I can hear you now.

Michael Hendrix:

Excellent. Just on a brighter note, knowing your taste for pop culture and speaking for myself as someone with family just outside of Worcester, what is your favorite all-time movie filmed in Massachusetts, even in part? I think for myself, I'm going to have to pick Field of Dreams just for that scene in Fenway. What would it be for you?

Gov. Charlie Baker:

Well, it's not possible to pick one. But I think one of my all-time favorite movies, it's about Boston, or Massachusetts, although a lot of it wasn't filmed here is Good Will Hunting. But The Fighter, which was the wonderful movie that starred Christian Bale, who I think won an Academy Award and Massachusetts' own Mark Wahlberg, which was the story of Micky Ward who's a fighter out of Lowell, was a great movie. The Departed, which was in some ways quintessential Boston crime movie, starring Jack Nicholson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, and Mark Wahlberg. Those guys seem to show up a lot in our movies. It was a great movie.

Gov. Charlie Baker:

I mean, if you're old enough to remember The Friends of Eddie Coyle, which was a 1970s sort of dark, film noir crime cop movie is called by a lot of people the quintessential Boston crime movie. The Town, Ben Affleck, that's a great movie actually which ends up in Fenway Park, but for different reasons than the one we were talking about. And then I'll close with this one, Little Women, which was just remade again, was filmed here in Massachusetts.

Michael Hendrix:

Really Good.

Gov. Charlie Baker:

Set in Massachusetts. That's a great movie and a great story. But there's actually a lot of movies that are about Massachusetts, many of which are filmed here, and some of which actually are not. But I think the best part from my point of view is that in many cases even the ones about Massachusetts end up having people we think of as being from Massachusetts who have pretty significant roles on them, which makes them a little more like a hometown show.

Michael Hendrix:

Totally. Encapture the spirit of Massachusetts.

Gov. Charlie Baker:

Right.

Michael Hendrix:

And on that note, Governor Baker, that's all the time we have. Thank you so much for joining us and for this wonderful conversation.

Gov. Charlie Baker:

Thank you, Michael. Take care and good luck.

Michael Hendrix:

Thank you so much.

communications@manhattan-institute.org