Amid all of the criticism of Boston’s generally wretched broadcast media, WGBH News deserves credit for hosting AG Candidates Maura Healey and Warren Tolman on Emily Rooney’s Greater Boston program last Thursday. Both came off well.
Tolman lost points for being over the top when he said the AG should lead first and worry about statutes later, as it were (he wants to lock the millionaire Market Basket owners in a room until they eat their vegetables, sort of). Healey very appropriately called him on it: the AG is the Commonwealth’s chief law enforcement officer, not its chief enforcer of the political tides of the moment.
Healey lost points for taking an utterly illogical position on marijuana legalization — she thinks it is properly banned because, she asserts, it is addictive and a gateway drug. To be consistent, she should also support a return to prohibition of alcohol and a ban on cigarette sales. Tolman sounded a bit more measured on the subject. She also refused to commit to immediate implementation of “smart gun” controls (and, indeed, her website is utterly anodyne on the subject) which, according to Tolman, can be mandated immediately by the AG (if so, why hasn’t Coakley done so?). He, by contrast, was unequivocal: fingerprint locks on guns, immediately or sooner, if he is elected.
Both of the candidates were congenial to each other, passionate and articulate. Rooney did a fine job moving the discussion along. In one of the most interesting races of this election, the clip is worth a watch. What do you think?
Market Basket is a local institution and this fight is a perfect microcosm of the major struggle in our society today. I like to see some leadership and am not impressed by technocratic lectures on the limitations of the office. It doesn’t hurt to try.
Tolman sounded like he was running for Governor with that silly answer. Oh, wait, he probably is running for Governor…
I think it is important that we don’t seize power and opportunity to make a sound bite and political hay. And the hubris, a 40 year feud and he’s going to get them together and sing Kumbaya?
The Attorney General indeed does her job by requiring businesses to duly pay their workers. Thai Body Works in my town got closed recently for not doing so.
WGBH has shared a good chunk of Attorneys Healey and Tolman, but sticks too much to its own “Greater Boston” branding. Statewide candidates the two progressives are. The screen format for this broadcast should have clarified the Massachusetts-wide nature of the candidacies of our two.
Maura Basket has been a quite popular campaign button pin, but it has been months since I last bought salmon or anything from Market Basket.
Healey had a smash stop in my own town center’s farmers’ market.
I am glad that Tolman, Coakley and an area rep see the key function of mental health and behavioral sciences. I do not believe that behavioral health providers should flatly get a dump of funding and tax-exemption and/or non-profit pedestal-ization (privileged status).
Continuously, we must study mental health in individual minds and the social mind at large. Zoloft has faded as a promise, as our cellular phones make sunshine interpersonal skills hard to practice and exercise.
Under our apps, we now resemble brains in a vat, the vat being either providers Verizon or AT&T.
I am proud that Joe Avellone stood up against opiate abuse. Our general public is receptive to marijuana, alcohol and gambling. I do not hug the public approval or marijuana, because smoking it does not help understand our universe in ways by which may harness its energy (neither wind nor solar).
So what if marijuana relieves pain— it does not boost our cognitive to understand even old science, such as Dirac and Fermi’s.
Our Federal Government should deregulate and subsidize Adderall and Ritaline, because although neither adds I.Q. points to our brains… at least they may help you stare at a page of hard applied math.
I quit cigarettes and tobacco, which Warren Strong fought against.
Our current attorney general fails to impress me in her higher campaign. Our Commonwealth needs more than to be mentally and behaviorally OK, we need boldness.
Great architecture should expand far from Dewey Square. We need to slash the paper-waste of state lottery and honor the monographs and texts of great minds who preceded our Western Civilization’s decline. Everybody should learn at least MCAT Physics. From there, we can crack our heads on the kets and bras of the probabilites of our world’s smallest parts.
I don’t want to be accused of stating things that are not facts, so I will say that it is my understanding that though smart gun technology is available, the major gun makers have not been willing to use it due to pressure from the NRA. Have others heard this?
I am not impressed with Smart Gun technology as a major plank in an AG candidate’s platform. There may be some reduction of gun violence but it is still treating the inanimate gun as the problem and not the deep issues of violence and human behavioral/mental health.
Here’s a balanced article on the subject.
There are pro-gun activists that support “smart gun” technology and those that oppose it. Same for the gun-control camp.
While I don’t dismiss that this might be a deterrent to wrongful use of a gun and that is fantastic, I am much more interested in innovative community-based violence prevention and reduction strategies.
Is most effective at preventing some of the many accidental deaths in the U.S. each year because of children of gun owners showing off the guns to friends, or criminals using someone’s own gun against him. It is not, and is not billed as, the answer to gun violence. Tolman’s proposal is useful because gun makers don’t generally use the technology for the U.S. market due to lack of demand, itself caused because NRA resistance means no state requires it. It is common in Europe. Massachusetts requiring it for new sales would go a long way to creating a market in this country. We can be the leader as we were on marriage equality.
It doesn’t solve for Sandy Hook, it does solve for tragedies like this one.
I was happy that Ms. Rooney not only asked about the militarization of police, but followed up with a reference to Watertown.
Warren Tolman gave an answer I agree with (4:48-5:03):
Ms. Healey, as she has done so often before, evaded the question and missed the point by rambling from police training to dealing with people with mental health issues.
The issue is turning our police into military attack squads. The issue is using “security” as an excuse to allow the government to monitor and record for perpetuity virtually EVERY electronic exchange.
Mr. Tolman has made it clear he recognizes the issue and wants to address it. Ms. Healey has insinuated (through her evasions) that she will continue or enlarge the travesties that are already taking place. Maura Healey would, if elected, follow the lead of her predecessor (she already proudly trumpets her association with Ms. Coakley) and make an already bad situation even worse.
Warren Tolman is the attorney general we need.
I think that is the take away I get from her campaign and his. I think those that want another Governor in Waiting at the AG with a social issues oriented campaign and agenda, they can feel free to vote for Healey. For those of us who want a dedicated AG with policymaking as well as litigating experience, who is a fighter willing to take on the powers that be and is unafraid to take tough stances, that guy is Warren Tolman.
Healey has been the more impressive candidate from a political tactics perspective, she has run a great campaign for a rookie candidate, and clearly has a lot of insiders backing her, but Tolman has consistently been the candidate of labor, the candidate of consumer activism, the candidate of good government, and the candidate of using law enforcement as a tool to fight the NRA and anti-choice extremists but not a bludgeon that would erode our civil liberties. And I think he finally found his voice and got his groove back, this will be a nail biter, but I have become a lot more confident that he can win.
Who’s the one who wants to be Governor? And tried and failed?
And LtGov? Who’s going to be in the holding pattern? Not Maura. She’s running for the job she’s been working hard toward for the last seven years. Try using some facts once in a while, that’s how a case is made and won in court, where Tolman hasn’t been except in front of a green screen in his fake commercial.
EVERY candidate for every position except President has some (perhaps private) vision or fantasy of future offices. EVERY position is a stepping stone to another position. For that matter, the early steps of every professional are the same. I expect EVERY candidate to do that.
I’m voting for one of two candidates in THIS race for THIS office, and I vote by what they say, by what they don’t say, and by their public record.
Here are the issues I care about in this race for Attorney General:
1. Militarization of police
2. Pervasive corruption of public officials
3. Tolerance of police brutality
4. Government surveillance
Warren Tolman has answered each clearly, crisply, and forcefully. Those answers align with my opinions. His actions confirm that he has the chops and the desire to put his answers into practice.
Maura Healey has evaded each question. Her pattern for each has been to meander to a nearby talking-point that she has practiced. The primary “record” she cites seems to be “I’m like Martha” and “I’m a woman”.
Ms. Healey was, for a time, a participant here. She and her staff had ample opportunity to address the four issues I cite, and chose to avoid them.
I am enthusiastically supporting and voting for Warren Tolman.
… but I’m not sure I would characterize it in that manner. I’m also not convinced Tolman is realistic about what an AG can and cannot do: the idea of the CommonWealths foremost lawyer being aggressively ‘proactive’ strikes me as both a fundamental misunderstanding of the job and a inability to grok fully the criticisms continually lobbed against the present holder of the office…. and that those two things aren’t as separate as one might think, at first glance.
Proactivity, with respect to AG Coakley, has redounded to her negatively: such initiatives as she has taken, the Partners deal or refusal to certify the casino ballot question for example, has led to various charges, from rank ambition to outright corruption, levelled against her. Nobody is saying she’s merely aggressively “proactive” in the way Tolman wants to act as AG (as I read his campaign literature and ads, ,etc…) but I don’t think Tolman will find his choices, if he gets there, judged all that differentlu. I think, if he tries to be as aggressively proactive as his campaign says he will be, he’ll find himself under the same sort of criticism as the present AG.
But I don’t think the criticism, per se, either against AG Coakley or a potential AG Toilman is all that valid because the job is one that resists a blanket ‘proactivity’: it exists in the context of the law and the continued interaction with (including intense scrutiny from) the judiciary and to a lesser extent the legislature. The job of AG is one that requires a great deal of perspicacity, discernment and weighing of evidence, facts, law and gut judgement… just to get to the decision to present the case to the courts for their decision… The difference between a good decision and a disastrous decision is paper thin and, certainly, when encompassed by a blunt political reading is guaranteed to cause some degree of pushback (without regard to validity). All this is to say that it’s a tough job and I’m not sure the extent to which the job resists, perhaps by design, ‘proactivity’…
The office can absolutely be a proactive policy-making entity (and I think should be). Most of what an AG does will never get to court. And that’s a good thing. It’s mostly investigations and settlement work, especially in the areas that will make the news and can have the greatest impact on MA residents. Prosecutors have a great deal of discretion in what they choose to investigate or prosecute, so in this regard, proactivity toward policy goals is incredibly important, in fact, essential. The consumer protection statute in Massachusetts, for example, is very powerful and gives the AG a lot of leeway to use it to achieve consumer protection goals.
Yes, actions must be grounded in law, but the law is not a narrow, black & white thing that prohibits its use to meet policy goals. In fact, it’s often the opposite.
Maybe, but part of the problem with Coakley’s record is that in these areas you cite, she went for the wrong policy, not that she was too proactive.
An area that I have been impressed with from Coakley’s office has been health care research. This definitely goes beyond any interpretation of the office as just a narrow law office. They’ve created some fantastic work documenting the market power of hospital groups.
It was just a shame that they failed to heed those findings when working with the Partners deal, though.
While I agree with this.. it’s sorta the essence of my point… it is in stark contradiction to this:
If the law is not ” narrow, black n white thing”, and in fact, the ‘opposite’ then there is no basis for the blanket assertion that any given policy is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’: “use your best judgement” is a far cry from “come with a specific outcome.”
I don’t understand the point you are making, and nothing I wrote was inconsistent.
Sure, the law would largely not provide a clear policy preference. I never said it did, and I don’t think that is the point.
You said that she received criticism because she was too proactive. She didn’t. She received criticism because her policy choices were out of line with what people (at least those who criticized, many of whom were progressives) thought she should have pursued.
So, when the law provides an AG to pursue policy, we judge the AG on whether he or she pursued the right policy (the policy we wanted), not whether he or she pursued any policy at all.
Warren Tolman touts “proactivity” as 1) possible and B) desirable in his hoped for future capacity as AG. This is a theoretical position he holds that he, apparently, thinks will win points with the electorate.
Martha Coakley, in her present capacity as AG, has been accused of inappropriate proactivity, by reason of ‘ambition’ or ‘corruption’ and not because of the outcome. Thus, under these terms, proactivity is neither A) permissible or 2) desirable. This is concrete example of ‘proactivity’ (whatever way, pro or con, you fall upon it) in the wild, that has received mixed reviews from the electorate.
Warren Tolman, should he achieve his goals, will likely face the same sort of choices as Martha Coakley and may be forced to re-assess his notions of ‘proactivity’. I don’t particularly think that Martha Coakley has chosen unwisely, without agreeing or disagreeing with the outcome. I don’t think that you and I, with respect to ‘proactivity’, disagree. I think that the views we might jointly hold are different from Tolmans understanding of ‘proactivity’.
Therefore, I don’t particularly think Warren Tolman understands what the choices are, or their consequences, or the political ramifications of any ‘proactivity’. In short, I’m not convinced, as I said previously, that he fully understands the job to which he aspires. If he did his outlook on ‘proactivity’ would be a little more nuanced… and he would treat the word and the context with more care.
I seriously do not understand your point.
Tolman thinks that proactivity is 1) possible and 2) desirable. The possibility of proactivity need not be discussed. It clearly is possible.
Whether it is desirable is a question for the voters. I support proactivity from an AG as long as their policy preferences align with mine.
What it comes down to is that Tolman wants to use the power of the office to achieve policy goals. Coakley thinks, and has done, the same. Healey would do the same.
I think you are misreading the criticism of those actions. On Partners, the criticism is not that she acted, it’s that she negotiated a weak deal and some believe that is because she didn’t want to anger her funders within Partners. She made a bad policy choice, and one possible explanation for that policy choice hints at corruption. The same is true with regards to the casino challenge. The criticism is about the policy choice and the motivations for those choices, not whether or not she should have been involved as AG.
If you think it’s that Tolman would go well beyond the bounds of the office, I think that’s a different issue. He has not implied that, and, as shown in practice, the bounds of the AG’s power are very broad.
I think that’s a ridiculous charge against his intelligence. I think he knows very well and thinks that the voters will support his use of the office to achieve certain policy goals.
William Galvin is investigating the AG’s handling of a settlement with a lobbyist.
This may not be the voters judging, but it’s a criticism on the policy choice made by Coakley’s office. Again, this is not a criticism of whether Coakley could act in this capacity as AG. It’s about how the AG should act (i.e. should have got a stronger settlement).
Too tight to declare her really ahead, but I believe this is the first poll showing a Healey lead. David Bernstein, via Twitter.