| An open letter to the Southern Baptists that Mitt Romney is currently courting |
[Nov. 16th, 2006|09:17 pm] |
Hey guys. This is Massachusetts.
I know you don't want to hear this from us -- it's not like we agree on much. But I wanted to warn you guys.
Look -- I know he was fooling around with you while he was our governor, and I know what he's like then -- he's so adorable, he's so cute. That's what he's like when he's first after you. And he spent all that time badmouthing us -- "Oh, Massachusetts doesn't understand me, you're so much more in tune with me than they are . . . "
But here's the thing -- he did it to us, he'll do it to you. You KNOW that people like that are always like that. We kicked him out, so now he's free, he's casting around for the next cute thing to come around, and you Southern conservative voters? Yeah, he's been knocking around your door.
Fine. I mean, we KNEW he was sleeping with you guys even when he was OUR governor. But, you know what? You can have him. He's not worth it to us.
But here's the thing -- and I'm not saying this out of spite, I'm mad at him for betraying us, not you just because you happened to be the people he was betraying us with. If it wasn't you he wast screwing around with behind our backs, it would have been some other political movement. But here's the thing -- don't trust him. He's saying that, with you, it's different. THIS time, he'll be true to you. He's not going to go jumping after the next cute political demographic that catches his eye.
You know he's lying to you. He lied to us, he screwed us over. And he'll do the same thing to you. |
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| Kind of related to my last "Mitt Romney" post |
[Nov. 16th, 2006|10:52 pm] |
I feel kind of bad for Kerry Healy. Not bad enough to make me regret voting against her or anything -- I didn't want her to be governor, and, in fact, the guy I voted for won.
But still, Healy had a raw deal from the beginning.
For those of y'all not in Massachusetts:
Our current governor, until Deval Patrick is sworn in, is Mitt Romney. His first public-sector job was taking over the whole 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics mess. If you remember, Salt Lake City got the honor of holding the 2002 Olympics, and promptly got mired down in corruption, bad management, and all sorts of other crap. They eventually kicked out the people who got them into that mess, and brought Mitt in -- and he did brilliantly. Absolutely amazingly. Turned the whole thing around, got the mess out of debt, turned in a fine Olympics.
From there, he decided to run for governor of Massachusetts. I'm still not entirely clear on why he wanted to do that, and I'm even less clear on why he won. His running mate was a local politician named Kerry Healy.
After a very short period of time, Mitt started to realize the same thing that I realized -- that he had no clue why he wanted to be governor of Massachusetts. So he stopped.
He didn't leave office or anything -- he just stopped doing anything at all relevant to Massachusetts governance. Except to go around to Republican fundraisers and talk about how stupid Massachusetts is. And every once in a while, veto a bill, which the legislature would then override and pass. He very quickly made himself entirely irrelevant in Massachusetts politics.
Kerry Healy, however, was still in town, and was dealing with all the day-to-day crap that a governor deals with.
Whenever she managed to actually accomplish something, Mitt would come in and grab the credit. Whenever something blew up horrifically, well, nobody attached that to Healy, either, because nobody noticed her.
Mitt did his best to grind Massachusetts into the ground. Healy kept us going as well as she could. And, during the campaign, she could point to nothing she'd accomplished, because Mitt had grabbed all the glory for himself on the things she'd done, and everyone could point to all the things that had gone wrong under the Romney administration -- things which, in fairness, Healy had tried to mitigate.
Now, I didn't vote for Healy because I disagree with her on her platform -- she had a forty-point platform, and at least 35 of the points were things which I personally think are either bad ideas, or ones which are on a low-enough level that I can't see the State House being directly involved in them.
But most people didn't vote for Healy because they hate Mitt.
That put Healy in an untenable position from the start. If she wanted most voters to even THINK about voting for her, she would have had to distance herself from Romney. And Romney had been spending his entire governorship cozying up to the national Republican party, at the expense of his gubernatorial duties. So, dissing Mitt would be dissing the GOP. Diss the GOP, get no support from them.
So, her options were to be totally screwed over by her association with Mitt Romney, or to be totally screwed over by having no national support whatsoever. So she did her best without throwing Mitt to the wolves.
I feel bad for her. Like I said, not so bad that I'd have wanted her to beat Patrick, but she is a better person than her own campaign made her out to be. |
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