King Sal

If the high-mindedness DiMasi brought to the gay-marriage and healthcare debates showed him at his best, it also only makes it that much harder to comprehend the borderline churlishness he’s displayed on other issues. Take last year’s energy bill. To get it passed, DiMasi seized another large, divisive issue, and brokered another unlikely coalition, this one among environmentalists, businesses, and the administration. But this time, not without also inflicting harsh punishment on members who had gotten out of line, and, more importantly, setting aside some time to mercilessly kick the governor around.

Patrick had garnered praise for his campaign rhetoric on energy policy, and he looked likely to make it a cornerstone of his environmental and economic development portfolio. But in December 2006, on the same day the governor-elect was scheduled to address an energy summit, DiMasi announced he’d be filing comprehensive energy legislation, and that it would be the House’s top priority in 2007. He then involved the administration in the debate on his bill—for which he was hailed as a great compromiser. Given that among the more significant compromises DiMasi struck with Patrick was agreeing not to strip the executive branch of several important oversight powers, the governor can be forgiven if he fails to appreciate the magnanimity. It also couldn’t have helped when, during a press conference announcing the breakthrough, DiMasi used the occasion to happily twist the knife. “I did say it was a great cooperative effort,” he told a roomful of reporters and policymakers. Then he turned to Patrick—a man he towers over—and tossed a grenade at him. “It took 11 months, by the way. Sometimes, when you go slow and steady, you come up with something really, really good.” He made a point of peering at the governor, then asked, “Did you get that?”

“I got it,” Patrick replied, trying to play along.

“Jeez,” DiMasi shrugged. “Very pushy, this guy.”

In the end, DiMasi’s energy measures didn’t make it to the House floor for a vote until the final day of last year’s formal sessions. DiMasi had imposed a strict cutoff date for submitting amendments to the bill—of which members submitted dozens—then blew his own deadline. While the House remained in recess for hours, with members chatting on their cell phones, milling about and snacking on leftover Halloween candy, his leadership team worked in private to consolidate the amendments they were willing to accept, and discarded the ones they weren’t. The green-lighted amendments were introduced on the floor, but as the House clerk began to speed-read each one, DiMasi cut him off. They passed instead on voice votes, without debate. “You’ve got 20 minutes to look at 20 pages and figure out what’s what,” a discontented backbencher says. “I defy anybody to do that.” Nobody could, which seems to account for how DiMasi and his lieutenants were able to sneak through a late rider opening the state’s coastal waters to unfettered wind-turbine development. Blasted as a giveaway to a DiMasi pal, developer Jay Cashman, it’s now the subject of a showdown with the Senate.

In the energy bill’s wake, the same backbencher, who asked to remain anonymous, says, “there’s a lot of discontent in the House with the way things are working. A lot of my colleagues are afraid to confront the speaker. They’re afraid to lose their perks, and I don’t blame them.” The backbencher believes the speaker’s leadership team is becoming “vindictive.” Representative Jim Marzilli is cited as one victim of that new trend. His crime: He filed an energy bill that competed with DiMasi’s, which promptly got him bounced from his vice chairmanship of the influential Health Care Financing Committee. (He did not return calls for comment.) “It’s Sal’s bill, so it goes through Sal’s way,” says a Beacon Hill insider. “Marzilli got a bullet in his head because he had his own ideas on the bill that was the cornerstone of Sal’s agenda.” House minority leader Brad Jones notes the irony. “I’ve said to Tom Finneran, ‘It’s amazing—now people will think of you as a process liberal,'” he says. “Whatever excesses or shortcomings there were [under Finneran], many people would say the current speaker has taken those even further.”

Over the fireplace in his office waiting room, DiMasi displays a framed photo of himself and Patrick. In it, the two are at a groundbreaking ceremony, wearing wide smiles. It’s an apt political metaphor—though, given the year he’s had, Patrick might have been wise to don a hardhat anytime he found himself near the speaker. While the rivals try to play down the conflict, scenes like the energy press conference seem to unfold weekly. When Patrick complained about the slow pace at which the legislature operates, DiMasi teased that he might not have time to take up Patrick’s casino gambling bill for a few more years. Last March, he pointedly labeled the governor and his entourage “dopes” at Southie’s annual St. Patrick’s Day breakfast. Both men say they like each other on a personal level, and DiMasi says his relationship with Patrick is infinitely better than with Mitt Romney, because Patrick is a governor who’s actually interested in governing. But that in fact may be the core of the problem. Patrick’s people expected DiMasi to be a close ally because of their shared liberal positions. On Beacon Hill, though, ideology isn’t as important as raw power. Yes, Patrick and DiMasi “agree on most issues,” says an insider, before outlining the not-insignificant areas where they disagree: “details, process, and who’s the big dog.” An administration source notes that, for a decade and a half, the speaker and the Senate president have been “de facto co-governors.” The governor’s job, this person says, has been limited to handing out state jobs. For nearly two decades, DiMasi thrived under weak Republican chief executives, but now, “all of a sudden, Deval Patrick gets elected governor, and he assumes he’s actually going to be governor. ‘Oh, no! Your job is to fill offices; we do the big thinking around here.'”

DiMasi says Patrick is in line with “a lot of the principles of what we want to do. But, of course, he’d never served in government before.” And, like Romney, Patrick is a CEO governor, accustomed to being the boss, not a partner. “There’s a tremendous learning curve,” DiMasi says. “He’s bright, capable, has some great ideas. And he’s dedicated and passionate about what he wants to accomplish.” Still, DiMasi hasn’t been shy about saying that the governor must show a greater appreciation for the way the legislature does business. “He needs to understand that when he wants 200 police officers and he gets 100, that’s a success,” DiMasi insists. “That’s not a failure. That’s government. It’s all compromise. I didn’t get everything I wanted in the energy bill, but we accomplished a great energy bill. I worked with him on that bill for 11 months to change the things that he wanted. I didn’t go around saying, ‘How come you didn’t agree with my energy bill six months ago?’ I claimed victory, didn’t I? That’s it. That’s a learning process.”

As naturally disinclined as DiMasi is to show deference to higher officeholders, Patrick’s initial fumbling made him even more so. The governor’s first sin was staking a claim on DiMasi’s turf with his reformist rhetoric; his second was a now infamously sloppy first few months in office that dropped his approval rating 20 points and left a lot of political capital sitting on the table. DiMasi quickly stepped in to sweep it up, pretty much in a single flourish. In a speech to the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce in March, he mocked Patrick’s first budget as an obstacle to economic prosperity, saying, “We’re going to have to tell people that this is not a year to expand any programs, it’s not a year to expand any department or initiative.” If there was ever a chance that Patrick, as the new kid, would get a pass while he settled in, it was clear he’d blown it by then.

So far, Patrick’s biggest failures—his push to let cities and towns set their own taxes on things like restaurant meals, his attempt to close corporate loopholes, his stab at revoking the telecom tax exemption—have all come on fiscal proposals. And all have been blocked by DiMasi. The speaker doesn’t yield often, so there’s no reason to expect him to toss two decades of fiscal hawkishness in the trash and expose his members to tax votes that could only hurt their reelection hopes—not for a rookie governor tripping over his own feet. For Patrick, that’s a major problem. He promised lots of people lots of stuff back in 2006, and the governor and his supporters know he has to find new money to put a dent in property taxes and cover a massive transportation funding gap (to say nothing of hiring new cops, investing billions in education and biotech, and the like). And because Patrick’s supporters view fiscal policy through a political lens, when they see DiMasi, a guy who’d earlier raised the minimum wage and battled big business on healthcare, suddenly making a big show of crying, “Hands off the economy!” they can’t help but think things are amiss. “This isn’t about business,” says a person close to the administration. “It’s about a power play. It’s about saying, ‘You may be governor, but I’ve got the biggest dick on the block.'”

Patrick’s casino proposal only heightens the tension. Members are weary and resentful of the attention that gambling has received since last autumn, but the governor’s casino bill represents as major a challenge to DiMasi’s leadership and legacy as gay marriage or healthcare ever did. Casinos have put DiMasi in the unfamiliar position of having to react to another politician’s agenda, and to hash out a highly contentious issue in the full light of a formal hearing process, rather than behind closed doors. Still, when it’s suggested to him that gambling is a wedge issue on Beacon Hill, DiMasi glowers incredulously. “In what way is it divisive?” he asks. “Why is it divisive?” He insists that simply because there’s absolutely no room for compromise, “that doesn’t make it divisive.”

Someone should tell this to the rest of Beacon Hill, because Patrick appears to have found his feet, and has started taking the fight to the speaker. The governor staged an impressive show of force in late December when he packed an unofficial casino hearing full of cheering supporters from the casino lobby and the powerful hotel workers union. DiMasi neither showed up to the event, nor offered comment afterward. Patrick has kept the pressure on since, threatening to include projected casino revenues—a potentially irresistible windfall for House members thirsting for new money that could be had without the nasty stigma of taxes—in his 2008 budget (which he was due to file a week before this article’s publication).

At the same time DiMasi is parrying with a reenergized governor, he also finds himself locked in an uneasy dance with John Rogers, who became DiMasi’s number two as House majority leader after losing his bid for the speaker’s slot. Last fall, DiMasi told the reps hoping to succeed him, including Rogers, to quit their behind-the-scenes jockeying for his job. When Rogers didn’t comply, DiMasi threatened to remove him from his post (the same type of demotion that sparked the Keverian rebellion and brought DiMasi into leadership 20 years ago). DiMasi’s warning eventually wormed its way into the Globe last month. If it continues, the palace intrigue fueled by the renewed rumors that DiMasi is keeping an eye on the door threatens to hamstring his authority, and has already provoked a few eruptions for a speaker who has liked to promote his even-tempered style.

Lounging in his cushy State House chambers—a room full of dark wood, overstuffed leather couches, and yellowing portraits of men who, at one time, used to be like him, used to wield considerable power over the state’s affairs—DiMasi seems unconcerned by the gathering storm clouds. He can’t imagine why things wouldn’t go his way. “We’re an institution,” he says, lightly. “What’s the old expression? ‘Governors come and go, but the legislature is always there.'” Over the legislature’s winter break, he even found time to fit in some political extracurriculars. While Patrick was in New Hampshire, making headlines by stumping for Barack Obama, DiMasi quietly decamped to the Granite State as well. But he was there to work for Hillary Clinton, on whose behalf he campaigned, doing his Sal thing, charming voters and doing what he could to make sure that contest, too, went his way. In the end, it did.