Who’s a Winner?

Nantucket’s voters gave a slight edge to Martha Coakley in the special election two weeks ago in which Scott Brown captured the “Kennedy” seat in the United States Senate. Why did the island support the loser?

The initial conventional wisdom espoused by most commentators after Scott Brown’s capture of the “Kennedy” Senate seat two weeks ago was that the voters were expressing their unhappiness with the state of the economy and the lack of jobs, as well as the complexity of the health care bill and the “it ain’t broke, so don’t fix it” perception of the current Massachusetts health care plan. In fact, since poor economic conditions also exist here on the island, one might have thought that the Nantucket electorate would have joined in with their Massachusetts brethren in signaling the winter of their discontent. The majority of them did not.

Actually, the commentators and politicians could not have been more off the mark about what drove the Brown majority. Most of them are now coming around to the view, expressed only by a few right after the election, that the real driving force of the Brown vote was the behavior and attitude of our elected officials in Washington. Certainly the economic problems and health care issues are very real to all residents of the Commonwealth, but the real driver of the voters’ message on January 19 was that Congress has become so dysfunctional that something drastic needs to be done about it. And besides being dysfunctional, there is the perception of an almost complete lack of transparency, which only compounds people’s frustration. The justifiable focus of people’s ire is the Congress, where the dysfunctionalism has reached an art form and the behindclosed door deals make the “smoke-filled room” shenanigans of the past look like penny ante poker games.

On top of that, the notion that power corrupts seems also to have finally made a dent in the voters’ psyche. The root of that corruption is both economic and psychological. The special deals that Congress has bestowed upon itself in the form of pension and health care benefits – far richer than anything to which ordinary mortals might aspire – are causing people to wonder what the senators and representatives are doing to deserve it. Worse, most recently in the case of the health care legislation, it is in the back room deals done with politicians and labor unions to secure their support. The psychological and intellectual corruption is in the view held on both sides of the aisle that there is no room for differing views or for accommodation other than that reached by obtaining economic incentive.

The result is that not much of substance gets done.

Are there parallels in Nantucket? While perhaps not to the same degree as their Washington counterparts, our local politicians are susceptible to many of the same pressures.

The current proposal to eliminate the town’s human services department is a case in point.

Reasonable people can disagree, and indeed they do, about whether eliminating the one and onehalf positions that comprise the department and turning the funding over to private organizations to coordinate the function is wise and whether the net $35,000 saving resulting from the job elimination is significant. What is off-putting is the lack of information about why the decision was reached and how it was reached. That is what has gotten people as upset as the decision itself.

Was it really a good “business” decision based on weighing of objectives, costs and benefits? What political considerations may have gone into the decision? Is the ad hoc Human Services Study group being used as a smoke screen for a political decision? Was it really the result of a personnel issue? Was it a decision based on personal rivalries or piques? We will probably never know. What seems clear from the tenor of the discussions so far is that the decision is being driven by the chair of the Board of Selectmen and not by the town manager.

Unfortunately there is no Scott Brown who is running for selectman this go-round in April. Is there anyone on whom the voters can focus their desire for and expectation of transparency and intellectual honesty in our local government? Anybody who, one might hope, will throw a stink bomb into the business-as-usual process of local government?

Maybe we on Nantucket should take a leaf from the mainland’s playbook. In the future, perhaps, we should keep our eyes open for a candidate who has done something daring, like posing in the all-together for a mainstream publication. It may be our only hope of finding a winner. I

Daniel W. Drake “The “Lighthouse Keeper” reflects the views of the author and does not represent the editorial position of The Nantucket Independent. Please send any comments to ddrake@ackquack.com.