“He had to hear me screaming and crying.” Those eight words, which describe a 14 year old girl begging for help during a sexual assault while a uniformed police officer, in this case Republican Congressional candidate Jeff Perry, stood 15 feet away and did nothing, have captured the public’s attention since Andrew Ryan reported the story for the Globe. Google trends shows the impact:
The response of the three men at the top of the state’s G.O.P. has been to brush off the cries of the victim and stand by Perry.
Thus are narratives formed — Republicans are not sympathetic and don’t care about women — and gender gaps widened. In my opinion, Perry’s perverse behavior offered Charlie Baker a rare opportunity to refashion himself from robot to reasonable, and heartless CEO to ordinary Dad. Instead, he uttered an incomprehensible series of beeps and whistles when asked about the issue yesterday on Howie Carr’s show and didn’t even acknowledge that a confessed sexual assault on a child is a bad thing. Scott Brown, master manipulator, simultaneously stood by Perry and claimed he didn’t know much about the issue. Look for that position from the “father of two lovely daughters” to change, especially if Keating wins and Perry turns radioactive. As to Willard, well, as David said, who really cares what he thinks anyway — the man is approaching Harold Stassen territory — but he certainly did his national aspirations no great help by standing by a child molester’s wingman, as it were. Election results will show if my thesis is correct.
(But maybe your point was that he’s such a has-been that his first name is properly forgotten, in which case, way meta.)
Just a typo. Thanks. Fixed!
soft on sexual assault.
I have a theory as to why – 80% of MA’s 70,000 teachers are women, and public school teachers, to their credit, exercise their right to vote with more frequency than they do in other professions– But, not to their credit, they vote in lockstep with the MTA, which not only endorsed Patrick but gave him a couple mill for outlandish attack ads against Charlie Baker. I have heard many times, “I’m holding my nose and voting for Patrick because I’m a teacher, so I have to” – some democracy we have, eh?
teachers, unlike all other Americans, don’t get the benefit of casting a secret ballot.
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p>Please. This is one of your silliest comments yet. The gender gap is far from unique to MA – it’s the GOP’s biggest electoral problem nationally. Events like l’affaire Perry, and other party members’ response to it, are part of the reason why.
“L’affaire Perry” has nothing to do with anything – it’s a red herring you guys are using to try to distract voters because you are seriously worried that you might just lose ONE seat to someone from a different party. It’s the most vicious campaign I’ve ever witnessed and I sincerely hope it backfires so that you will see that this disgusting style of incessant mudslinging is not welcome here in the tenth.
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p>And if you really wanted to explore the gender issue in a serious way, you might ask yourself WHY so few women hold elected office in this bluest of blue states. Why couldn’t you so-called PROGRESSIVES get behind your female candidates Shannon O’Brien for Governor and Martha Coakley for Senator the way you have for Bill Keating and Deval Patrick? Were those women just too “silly” for you?
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p>Even in “progressive” MA, the only female congressperson is someone who could hardly have been elected but for her late husband’s accomplishments and name. For that matter, I guess the same could be said at the national level about former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
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p>YOU guys aren’t exactly batting a thousand when it comes to standing behind women and closing the gender gap in American government. Republicans might even have a better record of getting behind strong women – the chair of our state party is a female and two of our top-of-the-ticket candidates this year are named Karyn and Mary. People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. But don’t take my word for it – I’m just “silly”!
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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01…
bold mine
But your comment was, indeed, silly, as both lightiris and Bob demonstrate downthread in more detail than I did. Around here, when you say silly things, people will call you on it, whether you’re called Miracle Girl or Miracle Boy.
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p>You may recall that Hillary Clinton won the primary easily here.
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p>Beyond that, though, you’ll get no argument from me that Beacon Hill isn’t in many respects an old boys club. That’s part of what we’re trying to change. But Republicans sure don’t make it easy on themselves with shenanigans like what’s going on with Perry, Baker and the gang. And I’m sorry to disappoint you, but things like l’affaire Perry have everything to do with why Republicans cannot break through the gender gap in elections. Character is important – even Michael Graham says so. It only looks “vicious” because a candidate has been caught lying and won’t admit it, even when some in his own party are begging him to.
I did a quick search for past comments of mine that have used the “s” word (“silly”) in relation to comments by other BMGers. I came upon two, one directed at our old friend John Howard (who was then posting under the pseudonym “they”), and one at RMG blogmeister Rob Eno. So I’m pretty comfortable with my record.
That’s pretty funny.
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p>I teacher in a public school and am MTA. I don’t know any teachers who feel they “have to” vote for Patrick, and I know a lot of teachers in a lot of schools. I also know lots of teachers who will vote for Patrick without holding their noses.
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p>Teachers vote for Dems for lots of reasons, but most importantly they like having a job. They like funding for their schools. Anti-public education Republicans don’t exactly appeal to teachers. Good grief.
I didn’t have to hold my nose. But, then again, I’m not a teacher. He got lots of applause, though, when he spoke about education. Our students are #1 in the country, thanks to their teachers, according to our Guv.
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p>And, of course, teachers are enabled by Patrick’s commitment to funding K-12. Pittsfield’s Mayor Ruberto praised the Governor for fulfilling that campaign promise during the worst economic downturn in our lifetimes. The Mayor said that not only was Pittsfield able to hold the line in terms of staffing, but had actually hired 45 or 50 new instructors over the past 4 years.
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p>The best line of the night, however, was probably after Deval said he listened to the other candidates (as he listens to everyone). He heard Charlie Baker say he’d cut the state’s education budget by $2 Billion! I think Deval said that’s 50%.
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p>The line was, “Charlie Baker thinks state government is a math problem. He thinks if you cut the budget, it will make everything better. I think about the people who are behind each line in the budget. They don’t want the government to solve all their problems. They just want some help in solving their own problems.”
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p>Vote Republican if you want to see your neighbors out of work. If you want to see teachers laid off and students (our future workforce) receiving inferior education. Vote for Republicans if you want to see fewer firefighters in your community, fewer first responders, fewer police officers on the job.
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p>Meanwhile, read the headlines. The Massachusetts economy is growing out of the Great Recession at twice the national average. Our unemployment rate is dropping. Vote Republican if you want to reverse these gains.
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p>As for me, I’m going to get up early and go canvassing in Great Barrington, to spread the word about all of this, and to motivate good Democrats to get out there on November 2 to make sure Deval can “Finish What He Has Started”…
TaxPayer funded commute on a friday to the Taj Deval I see.
Yeah that’s going to win you the election. đŸ˜€
And Charlie Baker has NO plans for cutting education funding – that’s just a shibboleth that Dems trot out every single election against their opponent regardless of who he is.
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p>The $250 million RttT funds Patrick secured from the federal government amounts to about $1,000 a year for four years, for an average-size school and the bureaucratic strings attached will require far more money than that in man hours putting documents together and compiling data that tie individual teachers to student performance (this is a Democrat initiative, and it’s kinda scary).
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p>RttT is like a Trojan horse to teachers, and since Massachusetts is tops in the country already, we get nothing out of it but MORE layers of bureaucracy at the Dept. of Education.
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p>If you teachers really want to examine what Patrick has done for you, you should look at how much of the education funding YOU should be getting is instead going to the blob in Malden. Or the new blob that Patrick set up on Beacon Hill. A million bucks for an Exec. Office of Education, on top of the Dept of Ed we already have. Mitch Chester and Paul Reville earning over a quarter of a $mill between them while special ed teachers are being laid off – great priorities, Deval!
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p>And as for Republicans – it was REPUBLICANS like Bill Weld who set the ball rolling back in 1993 on the landmark Ed Reform law which authorized charter schools, established an accountability agency, and gave billions in additional funding to schools in exchange for high standards. As a result of that legislation, our kids score at the top on the Nation’s Report Card – instead of continuing that effort, Deval has dismantled it – selling out our top-notch national standards as a favor to his buddy in the White House, scrapping the MCAS, de-funding the state’s accountability agency, and politicizing the process for approving charter schools.
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p>And as for the teachers unions – take a look at the nonsense the Bridgewater-Raynham union just pulled in trying to stop parent volunteers from keeping the library open. It’s getting a little ridiculous, don’t you think? Time to bring back common sense, and stop the petty games the unions are playing because they have no one telling them to cut the crap.
You seem to enjoy speaking for teachers, but you imply that you are not one yourself. This is not an honest method of argument. If you can substantiate that all, or even most teachers hold the views you attribute to them, you should do so. Otherwise, you should stop making those attributions, especially since testimony here rebuts them. Anytime someone claims without substantiation that an entire class of people holds some belief, it makes a bad smell – just like manure.
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p>BTW, a “mill” is one-tenth of a penny. I don’t think anyone else is worried about a quarter of one of those.
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p>The unions force YOU to pay $1,000 a year in dues so they can unleash negative attack ads on Republicans. If you don’t support those tactics, you either have to leave this profession or suck it up. THAT is why I make the assumptions I do about an entire class of employees, as you put it.
I’m not a teacher, so all your statements containing the word “you” are wrong. If you’re going to continue to comment and post here, I would appreciate it if you’d pay attention and use more honest arguments.
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p>Just to clarify – Are YOU a teacher?
No one is “forced” to pay dues to the MTA. If someone doesn’t want to join, they don’t have to, but they DO have to pay the equivalent amount in an agency fee. Your anti-union claptrap may play well among your friends of equivalent “expertise,” but you just sound silly here.
are getting a little ridiculous. Get back to me after you’ve taught a dozen or more years, then I might take your “teachers think” riffing more seriously.
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p>http://www.boston.com/yourtown…
NYT on 2008 election:
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p>If the same fractions hold true in MA then 52 percent of our 4.2 million registered voters are women: 2.18 million people. If 80 percent of MA’s 70,000 teachers are women, as you write, that’s 56,000 people. Even if all of them vote Democratic, as you argue, they still comprise just 2.6 percent of all the women voters in the state, and an even smaller 1.3 percent of all voters: marginal, not determinative, numbers, even taking turnout into account.
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p>I realize I may have lost you by now, given all the facts, but in more lyrical terms: The reason most women don’t vote Republican is because Republican candidates don’t represent their positions — 56-44 in 2008.
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p>Positions like those taken by Baker, Brown and Romney today are part of the reason why.
I don’t have any hard data on it, that’s why I referred to it as a theory – but that said, my impression was that only 2 million voters typically turn out (half those who are registered) and many education-related employees (not just faculty), as well as private school teachers and higher ed faculty and employees vote Democrat as well because they too believe that the Democratic party is more supportive of their profession. You might be surprised at how many charter school employees vote Dem (to my consternation). So we’re not just talking about 50k people. Esp. since it isn’t just those specific teachers, it’s their family, friends, and anyone else they can persuade to vote for Dems.
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p>I’m not blaming the teachers– self-interested economic motives drive a lot of people’s political choices, and since women make up such a huge part of the teaching class, it stands to reason that their overwhelming proclivity to vote Democrat might influence the gender gap data for the parties.
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p>As for positions taken by Republicans, what are you speaking of? If you mean abortion, you can’t use that reasoning against Baker since he is pro-choice, too.
But, I apologize if I offended you. Consider that quip retracted. Your comments are welcome here.
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p>As to the broader point, positions taken by Republicans like, for example, standing by a guy who stood by and did nothing while a girl was illegally molested.