My brief talk with Charlie Baker (R MA Gov. candidate)

[Recursion]

His campaign HQ office is next door to my work and I ran into him as I was coming back from voting. He saw my "I voted" sticker and asked (nicely) if I had voted for him; I said no, I supported Governor Patrick. But, I did thank him for running a good issues-oriented campaign.

We also talked a little about outside expenditures; he's been absolutely hammered in ads by the MA teachers' union and some organization called Bay State Future (and frankly the BSF ads have bothered me -- they blame the entire Big Dig on him, when he was only a small part of the problem). I said, "Look, I support Governor Patrick but I thought those ads were unfair, and what's more, who are these Bay State Future people? Where's the money coming from? We don't know."

The ads from his campaign and Patrick's (the D current governor) were both pretty good and laid out the differences of their positions, didn't get into personal attacks, and didn't seem to distort issues as far as I could see. But the 3rd-party ads have been getting worse and worse as the campaign went on -- with no oversight from the campaigns, there was nobody to rein them in. The Chamber of Commerce ran a few howlers against Patrick early on but as far as I could tell they wrote Baker off a while ago and focused their buys up here on New Hampshire -- most of the 3rd party ads were the Bay State Future ones I mentioned, plus a better one by the MA teachers' union. Even when it's helping my guy, I don't like to see undisclosed 3rd-party spending in an election.

We then both laughed at Tim Cahill (the absolute batshit insane state treasurer who's running a teabag/spoiler campaign -- his ads managed to be both hilariously bad and creepy) and I wished him luck today.

Nice enough guy, but I'm glad that he probably won't be the next Governor.