Another bite:
The twin secrets of this campaign: Healey was a better candidate than people thought, and Patrick wasn’t as good as he’s been made to seem.
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Healey could have been the champion of the victim, the savior of the taxpayers — one moment a vigilant protector of a women’s right to choose, the next moment a fiscal watchdog . She wasn’t.
Now she seems to be reversing everything that has gone so miserably wrong. Romney was out before, so he’s in now. Healey ignored women before; she’s surrounding herself with them now. She talked almost exclusively of Patrick’s shortcomings before; she’s touting her own accomplishments now.
Huh?
Please share widely!
Patrick’s 25 points up in the polls, and yet the big secret is he’s really not that great a candidate? Wow, that is seriously on the down-low.
If your choices were Adolph Hitler and Ernie Boch, III, I think Ernie would be up by at least 25 points. But that doesn’t make me a great candidate. Kerry has managed to turn off anyone that was willing to give her a chance. Including me.
Kerry healey first set out to run as a kind of humorless (no EB III, she), charmless Bill Weld. Ok, there was a bit of immigrant bashing added as the special wedge issue. But, that aside, her themes were going to be “two party balance” and “taxes, taxes, taxes.” Early on, it became clear that this wouldn’t work. That’s when she started trying to make Deval Patrick into Willie Horton–with the results we’ve all seen. Morally, it was a truly reprehensible move, but I’m not sure its tactical stupidity was at all obvious. (After all, some of us were a bit worried about a tightening race not that long ago.) And, again, she was going nowhere, anyway–maybe not 25 points down nowhere, but nowhere none the less. That’s the stupidity of Mcgrory’s column: in explaining how well she would be doing if she’d not employed the attacks of the past month, he prescribes the very approach that failed her at the start of the campaign. Oh, and the other idiocy in that column: M. treats Healey’s attack ads as lamentable, but then says she’s recovering her dignity and reputation. Why? Because when consumers everywhere refused to purchase Evil Race-Baiting Muffy, the product managers pulled her and rolled out Genial, Wonkish Muffy (a humorless Chris Gabrieli, if you like). How is it that a strictly opportunistic personality makeover, sans apology (and, for that matter, with the worst ad still running) rehabilitates character or reputation? Eamned if I know. Perhaps McGrory will explain that in his next column.
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P.S. On Deval’s strength as candidate: those of us who got on board at the time he first started remember well just how impossible his even getting the nomination was going to be, according to knowing commentators. Anyone around BMG as long as you have been also knows how much argument there was on this site about electability. I’m counting no chickens before election night returns come in but…my how far things have moved since then.