Two Years After Warren, Medical School Lecturer To Run for Governor

Donald M. Berwick ’68, a lecturer on health care policy at Harvard Medical School, announced Monday that he will run for governor of Massachusetts in 2014.

The progressive Democrat and former Obama administration health care official revealed his plans in a press release posted on his website—a quiet campaign launch timed in part, he said in a phone interview Tuesday, to help rally support for his fellow Democrat, U.S. Rep. Edward J. Markey. The longtime Malden congressman will face voters in a special election next Tuesday in his bid for the Commonwealth’s open Senate seat.

Though Berwick has never held elected office, he said he is “encouraged by the record and interest of Massachusetts voters in newcomers to politics like me.”

Berwick, who holds degrees from the Medical School and the Kennedy School, spent years as a celebrated advocate for health care reform while sitting on various advisory committees and councils.

Yet his previous experience working in government has not been without controversy. In July 2010, President Obama appointed Berwick, then a longtime faculty member at the Medical School and the School of Public Health, as administrator at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, during recess, temporarily bypassing Senate approval. But as Berwick helped implement the Affordable Care Act, the Obama administration’s landmark 2010 health care law, he came under fire from conservatives for his advocacy of redistribution of wealth in health care as well as his supposed support for health care rationing—a charge he has adamantly denied. With Senate Republicans vowing to block Berwick’s confirmation hearing, he resigned after nearly 17 months as chief and returned to Massachusetts. Over a year later, he embarked on a “listening tour” of the state to explore a possible gubernatorial run.

Berwick’s trajectory has been compared to that of U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, another liberal Harvard professor who ran for elected office in Massachusetts following a stint in Washington D.C.—a similarity that Berwick said he embraces.

“I’d be doing very well to emulate her,” Berwick said. “I think she and I are very much on the same page. I'm flattered by the comparison.”

As he looks ahead to his own gubernatorial campaign, Berwick is eyeing Warren’s successful Senate run as well as current governor Deval L. Patrick '78’s two gubernatorial campaigns. He said he hopes to use many of the same campaign strategies—including a grassroots approach and an aggressive use of the internet—that helped propel those two politicians to victory.

But Robert J. Blendon, a professor at the School of Public Health and a longtime close colleague of Berwick, said that despite the similarities between Berwick and Warren, he expects Berwick’s campaign to play out very differently than that of Warren. While Warren was able to draw from her past experience as a consumer advocate in Washington to run a Senate campaign focused often on national issues, Berwick faces an entirely different challenge with a gubernatorial campaign—familiarizing himself with a broad range of state-level issues ranging in topic from the fishing industry to charter schools.

“When you're a national figure and you come home to run for governor, you have to reach out to those groups of people that you may not have [previously] had the same involvement with,” Blendon said. “He is going to have to go from one of the world’s renowned people in health care to somebody who really can talk about the problems of day care in Massachusetts.”

Berwick, who last co-taught a Harvard class in spring 2010, the semester before he went to Washington, downplayed his role as an academic. He said that while he loves teaching, he sees himself primarily as an “activist.”

Still, Berwick admitted that he has been molded by Harvard. He named a litany of colleagues who have helped shape his views on policy and activism, including Blendon, Medical School professor Barbara J. McNeil, Arnold M. Epstein, a professor who sits on the faculty at the School of Public Health and the Medical School, and Joseph P. Newhouse '63, a health care policy professor who holds appointments at the School of Public Health, the Kennedy School, and the Medical School.

He acknowledged too that he may come under some of the same attacks that conservatives volleyed against Warren, who was cast as a sequestered Harvard elitist by her opponent former U.S. Senator Scott Brown.

But Blendon said that Berwick will be subject to even more complex scrutiny on the campaign trail in his quest to manage the Commonwealth.

"The issues he's going to face are not going to be just, 'Is he a Harvard professor, and what does he know?’ It's whether or not he could effectively manage a broad range of issues across the state,” Blendon said, adding that for a professor, Berwick has an unusually broad amount of managerial experience.

With his announcement Monday, Berwick became the second Democratic candidate—and the second health care expert with a Medical School degree—to enter the race. Joseph C. Avellone, a health care executive and former Wellesley, Mass. selectman, declared his candidacy for the governorship in January.

—Staff writer Rebecca D. Robbins can be reached at rrobbins@college.harvard.edu. Follow her on Twitter @rebeccadrobbins.