Copyright © 1998 by the Boston Phoenix, Inc. All rights reserved.

This Just In: Do not pass go

A populist tax-cutter stays on the sidelines

By Dan Kennedy

The big winner in this week's court decision to keep a tax-cut question off the November ballot may be Secretary of State Bill Galvin, who obviously learned that a little politeness can pay large dividends. Because even though antitax activist Barbara Anderson was on the losing end of Suffolk Superior Court judge Allan van Gestel's decision, Anderson has slammed the door on her on-again, off-again threat to run against Galvin.

Galvin and Anderson have clashed before -- most notably in 1996, when the Democratic secretary ruled that an Anderson-led petition to repeal a legislative pay raise would be unconstitutional. That, in turn, led to talk that Anderson, codirector of Citizens for Limited Taxation & Government (CLT&G), might run, either as a Republican ("This Just In," News, December 12, 1997) or as a Libertarian.

But Anderson says Galvin's staff actually provided CLT&G with a considerable amount of assistance after the Tax Equity Alliance for Massachusetts (TEAM) challenged the tax-cut petition, arguing -- correctly, in van Gestel's view -- that CLT&G had fallen just short of the required 64,928 signatures.

"If we had had the problem with him on this petition that we had with him on the pay-raise appeal, I would definitely consider running," Anderson told the Phoenix on Tuesday. "But the impression we had is that his office, the Elections Division and their lawyers, were very helpful and did a very good job. That the teachers' union kept this off the ballot is not the fault of the secretary of state's office." (TEAM obtains much of its funding from the Massachusetts Teachers Association.)

No doubt Galvin won't be too surprised to learn of Anderson's decision. After all, she sat out both the Libertarian and the Republican conventions, which chose, respectively, Provincetown finance-committee member David Atkinson and former public-safety official Dale Jenkins, of Boxford, as their candidates for secretary of state. But Anderson still could have run as an independent -- and though her star has faded somewhat during the 1990s, she remains popular with many voters who supported her tax-cut crusades in the '80s.