Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

The Final Pitch- 8 days to go until the Norfolk, Bristol and Middlesex Special election- GOTV!

By

Friends,

As many of you know, the race to succeed Scott Brown as the Massachusetts State Senator from the Norfolk, Bristol & Middlesex District is shaping up to be terrifically close.

We as progressives are blessed with a phenomenal candidate, Dr. Peter Smulowitz, who is Smart, articulate, shares our values, and is a door-knocking machine.

Through the outstanding efforts of Peter’s seasoned campaign team, his legions of hardworking volunteers, and the candidate himself, this race, which a progressive newcomer has no business contesting (let alone winning!) is going to go down to the wire.

Peter is within range to win this race. But to close the deal, he needs our help.

The Smulowitz campaign is working to assemble a massive election day operation. For this operation to succeed, we need YOU.

Please see if you can take the day off from work or school to help us turn out Peter’s supporters on May 11th. If you can’t, please consider helping us in the evening, with 4pm-8pm being the most critical four hours of the entire campaign. (most people tend to vote after work). With your help, we can put this seat back in the progressive column where it belongs, and put an abrupt end to the Republican momentum in the Commonwealth.

If you are able to volunteer, please email the campaign at:

smulowitzforsenate@gmail.com

or call (781) 444 0881

See you in Needham on the 11th!

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Comments

  1. not to call your defeated opponent on election night. Having a tough time with tough questions in this video. Not sure medical school training will be much help in managing a relationship with those who have more power than you do. I would like to be a fly on the wall when he treats Terry Murray like a difficult patient.  

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    p>

    Needham –

    State Senate candidate Peter Smulowtiz says he has been reaching out to state Rep. Lida Harkins supporters after defeating her in a contentious Democratic primary on April 13 but that he has never tried to contact Harkins.

    “I haven’t spoken to her personally,” Smulowitz told the Needam Times on Monday.

    “Right now, I know there are hurt feelings. Through other mechanisms, we tried to reach out to her supporters. There are things that have occurred that have made it more difficult to reach out to her.”

    The “hurt feelings” were the a result of campaign fliers the Smulowitz campaign distributed that tied Harkins to disgraced former House speakers, noting she received campaign contributions from funds tied to Charles Flaherty, Thomas Finneran and Sal DiMasi. Harkins felt the fliers disparaged her service as a representative.

    Harkins, who has represented Needham on Beacon Hill for 22 years, has said she will not endorse either Smulowitz or his opponent, state Rep. Richard Ross (R-Wrentham), in the general election.

    Asked by the Times why he chose to ignore the tradition of reaching out to his opponent following an election, Smulowitz became visibly upset, saying they are his “own reasons.”

    “I respect her service to her community … We never intended to tarnish her record,” Smulowitz said. “My intent behind it was to demonstrate that Beacon Hill isn’t working, to go along to get along, that standing up behind leadership isn’t working. We can’t have that approach. You can’t always vote with leadership”

      • There is plenty of blame to go around on this video. Certainly, victor Smulowitz should have graciously called his defeated opponent on election night, or the next day, or immediately after this editorial chat. However, the journalists have nothing to be proud of here: their focus is on a personal spat that happened in the past, not on the important issues that affect the district and the election may help to decide in some measure. That may help to explain some of the candidate’s frustration. “Entertainment Tonight” is often more substantive.

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        p>What leaps out from this video is “insiders” versus an “outsider” with the seasoned Republican pol and the interviewers as unmistakably the former, and Smulowitz, for better and for worse, the one who has barged uninvited into the clubhouse.

        • should arrive an hour and a half late for a videoed interview with “insider” seasoned political reporters who might distribute said interview to a major media outlet. Is any seasoned media consultant giving this guy advice? It’s not too late!!  

          • Getting the meeting time wrong was not a good start. It’s exactly the kind of thing small-town small minds latch onto to cluck over and remember for 43 years, while they still call him a carpetbagger for not being conceived in Memorial Park.  

          • I completely agree the man should have been on time. I love WickedLocal, which is the paper of record for much local news, journalists in general, and local journalists in particular. I believe the candidate did apologize.

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            p>None of that is the point.

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            p>The point is that this is a trivial issue in the context of the many serious issues that (a) confront the district, and (b) distinguish the two candidates.

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            p>Posters to BMG on occasion bemoan the lack of substance in our politics and the attention given to trivial issues. The portion of the interview shown here, this video, and the subsequent discussion is a perfect example of why such issues remain front and center, to the collective detriment of the Commonwealth.

              • Is as follows:

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                Democratic state Senate candidate Peter Smulowitz is clarifying comments made yesterday regarding conversations with his primary opponent Rep. Lida Harkins.

                Smulowitz told the Needham Times Monday that he had not spoken to Harkins since the April 13 election but called the Times on Tuesday to clarify that he actually spoke to her on election night.

                “All I was focused on at that time was thanking her,” Smulowitz said, noting the general election was not brought up during the call. “She was so gracious on the phone.”

                Harkins, who confirmed she would not run again for state Senate or her House seat in November, said it was a short conversation, in which Smulowitz thanked her for her concession but he did not ask her for her support in the general election.

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                p>Although it is hardly fair to blame the newspaper for this error, since the candidate himself made it!

            • The point is that this is a trivial issue in the context of the many serious issues that (a) confront the district, and (b) distinguish the two candidates.

              Posters to BMG on occasion bemoan the lack of substance in our politics and the attention given to trivial issues. The portion of the interview shown here, this video, and the subsequent discussion is a perfect example of why such issues remain front and center, to the collective detriment of the Commonwealth.

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              p>It is indeed unfortunate, but a fact of life, that the press and the public do focus on trivial issues like a candidate being on time and thus “getting off to a bad start” for an important interview with key media opinion makers, never mind “forgetting” you had indeed made the traditional courtesy call,as silly or trivial as it may seemed at the time to an “outsider” candidate. For one thing its easier than focus on the complicasted complex issues of the day about which the reporter and the public know next to nothing.

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              p>Look what happened to Governor Patrick when he bought $10,000 worth of curtains. We’re still hearing about it.  

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              p>Thank you Apricot for posting the corrections. It sounds like this candidate has learned his lesson the hard way. (Is there any other way?)

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              p>I hope he wins.

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              p>I will contribute.  

              • He definitely has a PR learning curve to climb, but I also think that we shoot ourselves in the foot by being so quick (oh, I mean collective “we”,  not you and me or progressives or whatever) to latch onto “gaffe” stories and let that drive our opinions.

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                p>Doing politics/being a politician is probably really difficult and you gotta be slick to play it right, I think.

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                p>Yet what so many of us hate is slickness and politicians’ ability to play a game too deftly.

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                p>And playing a game well means that you’re accepting the rules of the game, when so many of us are rightly sick of the Game itself.

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                p>A politician who just says no to the rules–whether wittingly or no–is a kind of manifestation of all that we want to see:  someone not practiced in the often sleazy “art” of politics.  

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                p>Yeah, it is a double-edged sword, and I’m not trying to call this interview a win for Smulowitz.  (it’s obviously not).

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                p>FWIW, I”ve had a few run-ins with the Needham power base, and none of this institutional obsession over this split surprises me. Disappointing but not surprising.  I am not sure if Smulowitz was surprised by it, though I guess if you go negative you have to anticipate fall-out.

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                p>It is so clear in that painful interview that Smulowitz is holding back.  I can only wonder what unpleasant episodes have gone on under the radar of Needham’s intrepid observers/bloggers.  One way to interpret Peter’s discomfort is that he’s trying and failing to play the game.  And/Or that he has a lot more stories about his efforts to be in touch with Harkins that he is not sharing.  I am willing to bet money that there’s a lot more going on here, and he was prudent not to share (more Harkins defenders piling on).  Maybe even the effort to censor and navigate the trickery of what to reveal/what not to reveal is what tripped him up about calling.  

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                p>BTW, I didn’t mean to post that link a hundred times on this thread.  I will be sure to pick up the phone to apologize, and then contact Wicked Local to film my interview afterwards.  

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                p>But yeah.  He’s got a learning curve to climb.  

                • –a way to delete posts, say, within the first 15 minutes of posting

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                  p>I would have deleted those multiple posts…  

    • with congrats on election night?

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      p>That’s how it’s suppose to be.

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      p>Regardless Schmuck-O-Witz should have reached out to her later on.

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      p>He really is pathetic as a candidate.  I’d like to see him win so I can “torture him every afternoon” on this blog.

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      p>(where have I heard this before?)  

    • All of Needham is abuzz about this idiotic story.

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      p>I cannot believe how much the N.Times is trying to fuel the fire of a 2 week old story.

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      p>More to the point, they got the story completely wrong.
      http://www.wickedlocal.com/nee…

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      p>Sour grapes run deep in Needhamland.  

      • they reported what Smulowitz initially told them (and they asked him repeatedly, as we see from the video).  Then he changed his story, so they reported that too.  Can’t blame the paper for that one.

        • Yes, I agree, they reported what they were told.

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          p>What I take issue is the way they are framing the race and “news” about the race.  This “He didn’t Call!” statement was immediately spread around and repeatedly.  They wrote it up as a freaking story instead of any of the other substance issues.  They made a fact (he didn’t call (though he did, apparently) into a LATE BREAKING STORY.  They are feeding the raw angst that many Lida Supporters are still carrying around.  

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          p>I accept that it is a legitimate story that there is a division between Lida Democrats and other Democrats.  But that WASN’T what the story they led with was…. the story they put out there was, “HE DIDN’T EVEN CALL–THE IDIOT!!!!”  And that was blogged, emailed and twittered over and over again from their site.  

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          p>If the story was, “Division Between Democrats Still Raw; May Cost S the Election”, then that would be fair, to my mind, and they could have outlined the steps and flubs the winner made to patch up with the loser.  “Not calling” would be one of the DETAILS–not the STORY.

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          p>Furthermore, there has been a rumor that Smulowitz did not call Harkins on the phone; I think the interview was trying to plumb that rumor and play “Gotcha”, which is why they were so loud about spreading that detail around–they know there’s an audience ready to believe anything.

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          p>And, the Time board has made their biases against Smulowitz very clear, in these and other ways.  Maybe they were just cranky because Smulowitz was late (which was a big mistake), but they sure were aggressive about the line of questioning and were very proud of their Big Get.

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          p>I watched that video, and like I said earlier in the thread, it’s clear to me (as well as knowing some of the gossip that flies around the Democratic circles) that there is more that Smulowitz DID do to approach Harkins, short of calling her on the 19th century invention called a Phone, and I also know that Harkins has made her utter rejection of Smulowitz–and unwillingness to talk turkey–very, very plain.  Whether or not she specified that the terms of “Not Helping Peter, No Way No How” had the caveat “*Unless he calls on the phone”, I can’t say.  I just know that on the street, no one is under any illusion that Harkins was ever much inclined to help Smulowitz.  

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          p>Maybe there was a window where she would have been able to be courted and he missed it. Perhaps, but I think that it was a very small window, and I’ll bet it came with very very specific requirements.  Really, a lot of the anger is about having an upstart come in and up-end the apple cart (and the pecking order for Rules of Ascension).  I have strong suspicions that “He didn’t mend fences!!” actually means, “He didn’t mend fences–by which we mean Bowing and Kissing Our Feet and Telling Us That We Are Essential To His Success or Failure”.  

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          p>There’s no way to illustrate or prove that, of course.  These are my suspicions, having had my own run-ins.

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          p>If the Wicked Local story was, “Division Between Democrats Still Raw and COsting Needham Dem”, then they could have gone into the bases for the raw feelings, such as the culture/generational struggle that is underlying this resentment.  They could have talked about the negative campaigning and explored the veracity of Smulowitz’s claims.  They could have explored what happened in the last race where an upstart Needham Democrat tried to make a run for that seat, and lost against Scott Brown.  Sara Orozco was similarly treated to the haughty disdain of the Establishment and The Way Things Are Done, and people are still talking about it (“She didn’t wait Her Turn”). Harkins didn’t publicly undermine Orozco, but she didn’t help, at all. On the surface–we are all Democrats, we support our Democrats.  Under the surface–tearing Orozco and her campaign down.  They’re still talking about it.  

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          p>In short, I disagree with the way the Times turned a DETAIL into a BIG STORY.  đŸ™‚

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