"Daniel Winslow cuts an independent path" by Eric Moskowitz | Globe Staff, April 26, 2013
Representative Daniel B. Winslow likes to eat Marshmallow Fluff, the made-in-Massachusetts confection that makes up in sugary nostalgia what it lacks in nutrition. But that is not why Winslow left 10 tubs of Fluff stacked in a pyramid outside the office of Governor Deval Patrick’s budget director in December, a red bow on top.
Patrick had just proposed fixing a deficit partly by cutting aid to cities and towns. Winslow objected and was certain he had better ideas to offer. Nobody however “reads six-page, single-spaced letters in state government,” especially from a freshman Republican, he explained later. So he affixed his ideas to the marshmallow props, invited reporters along for the delivery, and tweeted every step of the way. When his Fluff was rebuffed by the administration, he gave it to charity, tweeting about that, too....
That sandwich was Mitt Romney's favorite lunch.
Related: The Boston Globe is Full of Fluff
What is Your State Legislature Doing Today?
Your tax buck at work!
The episode was classic Winslow, who brings to his current campaign for Senate not just an unusual resume — having served in all three branches of state government — but a reputation as both an ideas person and a showman.
Unquestionably bright and eminently quotable, Winslow is now trying to convince voters that he is the right fit to replace John F. Kerry in the Senate.
As a judge and a Norfolk town official, as the top lawyer for Governor Mitt Romney’s administration, and now as a GOP representative in a Legislature dominated by Democrats, the 54-year-old Winslow, a married father of three, has won honors for innovation and drawn an outsized share of media attention.
Admirers see him as a rare policy wonk with a glint in his eye, able to think big, dive deep, and sell serious ideas with ebullience. Skeptics, especially in the state Legislature, see him as a self-promoting maverick, too clever by half....
This is the same Winslow who held a “beer pong” fund-raiser — albeit with water — to attract millennial Republicans, hired his own private detective to investigate a controversial Patrick administration nominee, and weighs in as a regular commentator on the true-crime current affairs show “Nancy Grace.”
Particularly unfiltered on Twitter, Winslow has likened Massachusetts House Speaker Robert DeLeo to a North Korean dictator and riffed that US House leaders from both parties in Washington needed “psychotherapy or an enema” for failing to compromise on a payroll-tax dispute, addressing them, “Dear Idiots...”
In the first debate for the three Republican primary candidates, Winslow arrived dramatically late — “We hear you’re looking for a candidate,” he joked, breezing through the lobby — and landed the most one-liners.
When the moderator cited the Fluff incident and asked whether his “out-of-the-box theatrics” make him a poor fit for the often-staid Senate, Winslow didn’t bristle so much as embrace the question.
The Fluff, he said, was not a gimmick but a means to an end....
“I’m in the loyal opposition. My role is to poke back against and speak truth to power, and I intend to do the same thing down in Washington,” he said that night. He called his “theatrics” no more fanciful than the founding fathers donning headdresses and dumping tea overboard instead of writing letters.
Power already knows truth. It covers it up with mouthpieces and lies.
Performance, with a purpose
To Winslow, his stunts are always in service of ideas, always in good humor. “For god’s sake, can’t we have people in politics who can take a joke or poke some fun at themselves?”, he asked in a recent interview. “Everybody’s so damn stuffy in this business.”
Eric Kriss, a Bain Capital co-founder who worked with Winslow in the Romney administration, called him an uncommon blend of optimism and tenacity, pragmatism and creativity.
“I don’t think he’s wacky for the sake of being wacky. He’s not unstable,” said Kriss, who was budget chief for Romney when Winslow was the governor’s legal counsel a decade ago. “He is trying to participate in the game of political theater in an attempt to get his views better known.”
I'm not wanting to these days.
In 2010, after winning the Massachusetts House seat once held by friend Scott Brown, Winslow vowed to serve only three terms, staged his first State House press conference before being sworn in, and filed four dozen bills as a freshman, several times the norm — raising eyebrows among some lawmakers, who questioned whether Winslow was charging toward a run for attorney general or for governor.
Instead he jumped into the Senate race after Brown decided not to run, brushing aside suggestions of opportunism.
He views the Senate special election as a chance to rebrand the GOP as a socially inclusive party focused on smaller government and free-market principles. Because Winslow has been pitching for years the need to reach out to women, minorities, and young voters — long before Romney got trounced among such voters — he considers himself the man for the job.
“Massachusetts has an opportunity to set the agenda, to set the tone, and to set the direction for our country” ahead of the 2014 midterms, said Winslow. He believes tentative economic recovery can become full-blown success, “if we can only unfetter that American spirit from the excessive burdens and crushing regulations . . . and take some of our freedom back.”
Despite being a ready quote on Beacon Hill for a decade, Winslow in March polled the lowest name recognition of any Senate candidate from either major party.
Aware that time is short in a compressed primary season to make up those numbers, Winslow has been campaigning at breakneck speed against GOP competitors Gabriel E. Gomez and Michael J. Sullivan, reminding voters in an overwhelmingly Democratic state that he offers the most moderate politics of the three. A Republican who supports gay marriage and drives an electric car, Winslow believes that if enough people hear his pitch and review his record, he’ll get the votes he needs.
Electricity comes from fossil-fuel burning power plants.
The colorful character on the campaign trail isn’t a construct of political handlers, it’s who he has been since childhood....
Early on, a sense of urgency
Often taken for a Brahmin, Winslow had a modest, rural upbringing, living partly in a trailer where a UMass dorm complex now stands in Amherst.
Then if he wins he will be right at home.
His mother, the daughter of Italian immigrants, worked as a nurse. His father, who can trace ancestry to a colonial coffin-builder, fought in Korea and settled in Amherst after attending college on the GI Bill. Initially an antenna repairman, he stopped scaling towers when his sons were born.
Daniel was the first of five boys, one of whom died in infancy, an early memory seared on Winslow’s mind. That loss seems partly why his mind and body are always churning: “I don’t know how much time God gives me on this earth, and I want to get something done before I go.”
Winslow’s father eventually built a telecommunications business, mortgaging everything, his son said, after refusing to pay a kickback to a “prominent politician” dangling a public loan. The experience imprinted Winslow with a sense that government can help or harm business. It also inspired his Tufts University thesis on the corrupting role of money in politics.
Winslow successfully challenged Beacon Hill Democrats for drawing unconstitutional legislative districts after the 1985 state census and again with congressional seats after the 1990 US Census.
“In court it was a level playing field,” he recalled. “The Democrats were just not used to a fair fight, and so they were really bad at it, shockingly bad.”
That's what happens in a one-party state dominated by liberal Democrats.
In both lawsuits, Winslow and the GOP teamed with the Black Political Task Force, initially a marriage of opportunity. But task force leader Joyce Ferriabough-Bolling said she saw in Winslow a commitment to diversity, affirmed in his later advocacy for women and people of color in Republican circles and at white-shoe law firms.
Even though she has long been a Democratic consultant, Ferriabough-Bolling praises the man she calls “my buddy Dan Winslow” and even wrote him a campaign check in 2010. “He’s shaking things up,” she said. “You may like him or dislike him, think he’s a showboat or not, but I look past that to the fiber of the guy.”
But as his name recognition was on the rise, it wasn’t always for his legal work. In 1990, while a 32-year-old member of the Norfolk Planning Board, his house was firebombed by an allegedly frustrated strip-mall developer after Winslow pushed tough but far-sighted zoning changes to preserve the town’s rural character.
Winslow started mowing his lawn in a bulletproof vest but refused to move or resign. The developer was never charged but instead ordered to keep away from Winslow for life. A Globe investigation a decade later uncovered widespread complaints against the same developer in nearby Franklin.
Why the anonymity, and why am I afraid of who (rhymes with) it might be?
It was Winslow’s Republican legal acumen that won the attention of Governor William Weld, who nominated him for the Wrentham District Court bench in 1995....
Judge Winslow printed bright-orange bumper stickers to brand the cars of recidivist drunk drivers and ask motorists to report erratic driving, but he abandoned them after a test on his own Volvo, amid a torrent of criticism from civil libertarians and defense lawyers.
A chance to remake judiciary
At 44, Winslow walked away from the robes, job security, and pension to join the newly elected Governor Romney in 2002....
Romney agreed with Winslow’s assessment that the judiciary was a haven of waste and cronyism, giving him freedom to revise the nominating process for judges, emphasizing blind resume reviews and curbing a pattern of politicking by candidates. Winslow also set in motion a shift to funding local courts based on case load, not the whims of Beacon Hill.
Many Winslow plans, however, ran aground with the Legislature and the unions. He clashed in particular with advocates for the poor. Critics found him to be a smart-aleck but admired his accessibility.
He tried unsuccessfully to close some courthouses and centralize the hundreds of lawyers dispersed among state agencies in a streamlined office.
“Some of that energy and some of that type of effort took some folks off guard,” said Martin W. Healy, general counsel for the bar association, today a Winslow admirer. “People weren’t prepared for a legal counsel to be as active.”
Several top officials from the Romney years said the data-driven Winslow was as much an all-around adviser as lawyer to Romney.
Romney endorsed Winslow’s desire to return to the bench but backed down from an ugly confrontation with the Governor’s Council, some of whom saw Romney and Winslow as smug outsiders.
“They feel they are better than us,” Councilor Christopher Iannella said at the time.
They are in $ome ways.
So Winslow took a lucrative law firm job instead and sought public office at a lower level, running successfully for Norfolk moderator with a plan to boost town meeting participation through door prizes, music, and free food.
What?
Historic win brings a chance
The shuffle after Brown’s Senate win created an opening for Winslow to run for the Massachusetts House, after the local state representative advanced to state Senate. Winslow rubbed some new colleagues the wrong way when he refused to accept per diem mileage payments and described the House as a stale club “desperate for ideas.” Some veterans say he has flitted among issues — labor relations and ethics reform, high-speed tolling and cigarette pricing — more for attention than results.
Senate may bristle.
He’s “like a bee going for the pollen and then moving to the next flower and not bothering to come back,” one senior Democrat said.
Winslow faults the Democratic speaker for sidetracking many of his proposals but points to successful measures he authored, including one to adopt a national standard for defining “intellectual disability” in place of arbitrarily strict state regulations that he said barred some deserving people of benefits.
Winslow said that he is better equipped to compromise in the US Senate than his GOP opponents — where they want to repeal Obamacare, he proposes fixes — and that as a judge and politician he has mastered patience and humor without shying from a fight.
He’s sure that brand of socially liberal, fiscally conservative politics, combined with his unflagging energy, is the best way to attract independent voters beyond the primary in Massachusetts.
But without the name recognition that Sullivan enjoys, or the wealth and personal story that Gabriel Gomez leans on, Winslow acknowledged he’s not getting the traction he thought he would on a statewide stage.
What can the Globe possibly be talking about, and why are they hiding his wealth?
Winslow said he just hasn’t had the time to create the buzz he’s often so good at generating. And grass-roots hustle might not be enough to get the votes he needs.
That has not slowed him down....
--more--"
Related:
"The debate over Homeland Security has cropped up in the GOP primary contest....
In interviews with the Globe, the three Republicans took an array of positions on whether Marathon attack suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev should be held as an enemy combatant, from a strong yes to a nuanced no....
State Representative Daniel B. Winslow, Republican of Norfolk and a former judge, said, based on the current information available, that the suspect did not have ties to a foreign organization like Al Qaeda. Winslow was comfortable with the Obama administration’s decision not to classify Tsarnaev as an enemy combatant and to charge him in federal court.
“Times of attack are the times when we should embrace our Constitution more tightly,” Winslow said.
Better be careful, Dan.
See: Do You Support the Constitution? YOU'RE A TERRORIST SUSPECT!
Related: Outrage in NJ: Mother arrested, guns taken, for speaking at public meeting
Did you see why there was such outrage and why that is a story? I guess some religious fundamentalism is accepted in Amerika.
On Homeland Security, there are also areas of agreement. All five
candidates said last Friday’s lockdown was the right call. And all five
said they thought the death penalty should be an available punishment
for those found guilty of terrorism....
--more--"
Prognosis:
"Dan Winslow: The most intellectually eclectic of the candidates, Winslow prides himself on his ability to find creative solutions and on being bold enough to take early stands, even at the risk of being wrong. Those qualities — plus his politics-isn’t-personal gregariousness — have made him a newsmaking force at the State House even though he’s only in his second term as a state representative. They could also make him a Senate standout, a figure with real appeal to the independents that a GOP senator would need to hold the seat in subsequent, non-special, elections.
That said, it remains to be seen whether Winslow has the perseverance and persuasiveness needed to get things done in today’s Senate. Without those twin talents, the risk is that he’d be less an influential iconoclast than a mere political gadabout given to attention-getting gimmickry."
Looks like a winner to me.
