Charlie Baker finally got what he wants — the chance to govern and administrate without the hassle of running for elected office.
Baker said as much on Wednesday morning, when he announced he would not be running for a third term and Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito would not run again or seek the governor’s office.
“If we were to run, it would be a distraction that would potentially get in the way of many of the things we should be working on for everyone in Massachusetts. We want to focus on recovery, not on the grudge matches political campaigns can devolve into,” Baker said in a statement.
Those last seven words, in particular, pull back the corner of the curtain on Baker’s mind and offer insight into what makes one of the nation’s most popular governors tick.
There are people who love politics and can’t get enough of it: James Michael Curley and Joe Biden are my examples. They enjoy running for office because, when you boil it all down, they love to hear themselves talk and they want people to love them.
It takes that sort of fierce, unquenchable animus to propel someone again and again into an election fight that bruises egos, including weeks spent on campaign buses and airplanes away from loved ones and home-cooked meals.
Charlie Baker has always been a reluctant politician who wanted to manage on a grand scale and dream up and roll out big ideas. He was smart enough to define himself politically — as he noted in a Wednesday press conference — not simply as a moderate Republican, but also as a politician whose political perspective matched the one held by “the vast majority of people in Massachusetts.”
To put it simply, Baker is a guy who loves governing. But he is less enthusiastic about the process he has endured to get to the point where he can govern.
Running again meant Baker would have immediately faced attacks from Republican gubernatorial candidate Geoff Diehl.
The former legislator declared his candidacy months ago. By grabbing Donald Trump’s endorsement, he cast himself as the candidate most closely aligned with the loudest voices currently dominating the Republican party nationally.
Die-hard Republicans I talked to this week gave Diehl slim to no chance of beating Baker in the 2022 Republican primary if the governor had decided to run. But Baker’s Wednesday statement made clear that even an easy primary win wasn’t enough to lure Baker into a third-term run.
Running against and beating Diehl would require Baker to talk about the man he doesn’t want to talk about: Trump.
There are Massachusetts Republicans wringing their hands today over Baker’s, and — more specifically — Polito’s decision not to run. In their minds, the decision amounts to a declaration that moderate Republicans are abandoning the party to Diehl, party chairman James Lyons, and, ultimately, Donald Trump.
They know a Trump Republican can’t get elected governor in Massachusetts. If they need a sympathetic shoulder to cry on, they can call on progressive Democrats who learned after U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s poor showing in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary that a progressive can’t win in Massachusetts either.
Some readers will point to former Gov. Deval Patrick to prove me wrong, but Patrick was a skilled-enough politician to appeal to progressives while reassuring Massachusetts’ unenrolled moderate voters that he was listening to them.
The final question that remains for Charlie Baker is if he will re-enter politics in 2023 and build a presidential campaign machine after assessing next year’s congressional midterm results.
If Trump-aligned politicians like Diehl score wins across the country in 2022, Baker will be less inclined to run for president. But if the winds of moderation blow across America next fall and sweep candidates into office who are cut from the same cloth as Baker, he might find it hard to resist the call from national Republican moderates to wade once again into the political arena.
