- John Kerry’s blog has pictures of JK and Deval at the Perkins School yesterday.
- … And there’s more at the Democratic Daily.
- ABC World News Tonight covered the race as making history, whoever wins.
- Joan Vennochi asks, “Who stole Kerry Healey’s moderate Republican brain and turned it into something only a very angry, very conservative voter could love?” Indeed. We could have been having an interesting, productive, and incidentally much closer race right about now.
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A few months ago, I commented that Republicans in Massachusetts are a different breed than the national GOP: hence Weld’s confontation with Jesse Helms. The moderate, maverick real estate is where Weld, Celucci, and Romney have all camped out into order to win elections for governor. I also thought that it was foolish to try to tar Healy with the national party because of this divide.
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But who expected Healy to voluntarily vacate that ground in this campaign? What a blunder, and one only reinforced by our governor’s continuing romance with the more extreme elements of the national GOP. The combined effect of Healy’s campaign for governor and Romney’s campaign for president may be to erase the remaining daylight between the local and the national GOP. If so, this could move the state Republican party from “moribund” to “defunct.”
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Maybe Yes on Question 2 will be a good thing, if only to give conservatives in this state the means for the creation of a new “Conservative” party to challenge the extremely unhealthy circumstance of government without opposition without being tarnished by the Republican party’s new-found values.
I think that a double standard exists in politics, but I don’t think that is Healey’s problem right now. If anything, she tried to take advantage of the double standard in her parking lot ad (blondie v. the big bad black man… guess who she is?) and that’s what backfired. I think that if a man had run those same ads, it would have been exactly as distastful and offensive: no more and no less.
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The Vennochi column sort of inferred that if a man had been running those ads, they might have been more effective. I don’t think so. They angered so many different groups (Would Jane Doe have stayed silent if they were from a man’s campaign? Would the lawyers association? I certainly hope not: both groups had very good reason to be upset, and I think both presented their side eloquently) and so many individuals that I think the end result would have been exactly the same.
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So, in summation, I do think that a double standard exists, but I don’t think that it has anything to do with Healey’s poll numbers or the reactions to hre strategies. People are sick of this sort of thing, no matter who it comes from.