Radio Show Troika Raises Massachusetts Public Debate to Boiling Point : Politics: Self-styled ‘governors’ are praised as voice of the people or denounced as ‘hacks, hokum and hyperbole.’

At the stroke of 4 on the studio clock, the theme music from “The Mod Squad” is played, then a gavel bangs and the barbs start flying.

State officials and administrators are denounced as “greedy, shameless hacks.” The state’s latest tax-hike plan is branded as “illegitimate.” Gov. Michael S. Dukakis becomes “Pee Wee,” Lt. Gov. Evelyn Murphy “The Lady from the Wax Museum” and rotund House Speaker George Keverian “The Democrat from Gino’s Pizza,” while Boston Globe writers are tweaked as “bow-tied bum-kissers.”

It is Tuesday afternoon at WRKO Radio, and for the next two hours, nothing and nobody in Massachusett’s liberal Democratic Establishment is safe from attack by the self-styled “governors of the commonwealth”--acerbic talk-show host Jerry Williams, muckraking Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr and fervent anti-tax crusader Barbara Anderson.

Williams, Carr and Anderson have formed an on-the-air troika that has raised political debate in this state to new heights--or taken it to new depths, depending on your view.

Supporters praise them as the voice of the people, defenders of the underdog, champions of the average taxpayers. Critics--particularly those most often on the receiving end of their barbs--denounce them as an example of “trash” radio at its worst. “Two hours of hacks, hokum and hyperbole,” wrote a Boston Globe reporter recently.

What is certain is that the three are no garden-variety radio gabfesters. Massachusetts is in the throes of a monumental budget crisis that has forced the governor and the Democratic leadership in the Massachusetts Statehouse to cover. Last week Standard & Poors made the state’s credit rating the lowest in the country, citing a poor economy and a “paralyzed budgetary process.”

Into the leadership vacuum has stepped this unlikely trio, who by most accounts are driving the debate on how the state should deal with its problems.

Their tirades against bloated state payrolls, high taxes, ballooning budget deficits, official corruption, cronyism and incompetence in government have become the stuff of almost daily political discourse in the Bay State.

“They represent a frustration that we all feel in the commonwealth,” said Alan Macdonald, executive director of the Massachusetts Business Roundtable, an association of chief executive officers from the state’s major corporations. “There’s a majority (of Massachusetts residents) that’s totally frustrated by the state’s lack of ability to get spending in line with normal revenue growth.”

Their clout is often awesome. On several occasions during budget debates last summer, for example, Statehouse switchboards were overloaded for hours with calls generated by their over-the-air suggestions to voters to express their displeasure to their representatives.

The radio triumvirate’s opposition also was instrumental in the scuttling last month of a $1.2-billion tax package that called for a 40% sales tax hike, a 50% increase on capital gains and a near doubling of the 11-cents-a-gallon gasoline tax. The plan was looked on by many House leaders as their last best hope to combat a state budget deficit that has swollen to more than $825 million.

“They are devastating,” said four-term Rep. Eleanor Myerson, a Democrat from the fashionable Boston suburb of Brookline. “They get on the radio and scream and holler and give out the names and phone numbers of legislators and say: ‘Never vote for them again.’ We can tell they’re effective. The callers all say the same thing.”

Also effective are their ceaseless assaults--usually spearheaded by Carr, the Herald columnist--on the “hacks” in state government: people on the public payroll who are related by blood or marriage and purportedly gained their lucrative jobs only because of their family or political connections.

“If you are in this building,” Boston Democratic Rep. Mark Roosevelt told a Globe reporter recently, referring to the Statehouse, “you hear more and more people talking about getting out. . . . The long-term effect is a nastiness and vindictiveness that poisons the body politic.”

Dukakis, who has become increasingly embattled since his failed presidential campaign last year and as the state’s fiscal ills have worsened, has publicly alluded to the troika’s pervasive influence. Last July, for example, in a lengthy speech defending his legacy as the state’s longest-serving chief executive, he spoke of the “talkmasters and columnists” whom he claimed had given politics and public service a bad name.

“As long as things were going well,” he said, referring to the vaunted economic prosperity the state enjoyed during much of this decade, “they were kind of gnats.” But now, he added: “We’ve got to take them on.”

Even before the three joined together as a radio team, they were each individually forces to be reckoned with on the Massachusetts political scene.

Williams, 66, the “dean” of talk-show radio hosts in Boston, who was a passionate on-the-air advocate for civil rights and American withdrawal from Vietnam in the ‘60s and ‘70s, was widely credited for the repeal three years ago of Massachusett’s automobile seat-belt law.

Carr, 37, whose column appears thrice weekly in the Herald, a tabloid owned by Australian-born press lord Rupert Murdoch, had become the scourge of state government with his “hack family of the week” reports--the ones that now often are the source of his on-the-air attacks.

Anderson, 46, executive director of the 10,000-member Citizens For Limited Taxation, engineered passage in 1980 of a measure known as Proposition 2 1/2 that, among other things, put stiff caps on increases in property taxes, the major source of local government funding. She often is referred to as the “Howard Jarvis of Massachusetts,” an allusion to the architect of California’s 1970s tax-slashing Proposition 13.

Earlier this year, their voices had become among the most strident in opposition to tax increases and other Democratic-proposed measures to combat the state’s mounting deficit.

“This state has been so dominated by Democratic politics for the past 25 years that it’s somewhat like what was going on in Eastern Europe,” said Williams, whose afternoon talk show airs Monday through Friday from 2 to 6 p.m.

Then in April, Ron Doyle, a columnist for the Middlesex News in Framingham, wrote a column in which he described them as “an unlikely tag-team of political bomb throwers” who had emerged as “the all-powerful, unholy trinity of state politics.” He questioned rhetorically who had appointed them as governors.

That was all it took for Williams to call Carr and Anderson and propose that the three of them go on the air as the “governors” for two hours a week as part of his regular show.

“I do feel like I’ve created a Frankenstein monster,” Doyle recently lamented. “They’re out of control, and I don’t see any end in sight.”

After the opening theme is played each Tuesday, Williams bangs a homemade gavel that was sent to the group as a gift and calls the session to order. He then asks for reports from the other two.

Carr usually announces his “hack family of the week,” although in the most recent show, his chief topic was a report in his newspaper about the two state revenue department employees who had been suspended in connection with an audit of his income taxes.

Carr, a constant critic of Dukakis, charged that the audit was politically motivated. The audit, which was launched earlier this year, has been discontinued.

Anderson, who usually does not indulge in the name-calling and high-voltage attacks of the other two, usually gives a report on the status of tax legislation and government spending.

Then the floor is opened for other business. Mock resolutions often are debated. In addition, state officials are frequently “fired” or state agencies “abolished.” Votes are most always unanimous.

To some Bostonians, the show is nothing more than harmless political satire.

Not so, however, to the Boston Globe, the state’s biggest newspaper and frequent target of the “governors”--particularly Williams and Carr.

Last month it published a four-part series titled “Poisoned Politics” that came down hard on the talk-show trio, pointing out their inaccuracies and tendency to descend into personal attacks. “Cynicism is the Hallmark of ‘Governors on the Airwaves,’ ” read one of the headlines over the second of the four articles, which was devoted exclusively to a report on Williams, Carr and Anderson.

In addition, Globe columnist Alan Lupo has referred to Carr as the “last surviving member of the Borgia family,” while Editorial Page Editor Martin Nolan has compared him to Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels.

Globe Editor John R. Driscoll denies that the series was prompted by fears over the growing influence of the trio. “The series is just part of a whole lot of coverage we’ve been giving on the atmosphere in Massachusetts,” he said.

But Mark Jurkowitz, a media critic for the Boston Phoenix, said in a recent article that the Globe’s “new aggressiveness” may reflect a deep concern.

“For years--while Dukakis values held sway and the Globe was the official organ of those values--folks like Williams and Carr were merely small voices in the wilderness, with a hard-core but disenfranchised following. Suddenly, however, a rushing tide of anti-government anger has lifted their boats and carried them into the mainstream.”

The triumvirate has perhaps no bigger boosters in Boston than the Republican Party, long the invisible crowd in Democratic-dominated Massachusetts. At a recent state party conference, GOP officials presented Williams with a community service award.

“Republicans are being registered at twice the rate of Democrats,” said Ray Shamie, state Republican chairman. “All of these things have stirred up people to the point where they want to throw the bums out.”

How long the “governors” will stay in office on the radio is a question they are often asked. With Dukakis off the political stage after next year’s elections, the focus of much of the public anger they have tapped into will be gone.

But Carr is philosophical: “There’ll still be lots to talk about. And if we’re not around, at least we’ll be a big part of Boston radio history.”

Times researcher Lisa Romaine in New York contributed to this story.