GOP tricks in the mail
Presidential candidates do not have a monopoly on distortion and scare tactics this election season. Those strategies are poisoning state political campaigns, as well.
Consider recent mass mailings in the Senate district targeting state Representative Karen Spilka, the Democratic candidate for the seat being vacated in January by David P. Magnani of Framingham.
It is not easy to paint a former Parent Teacher Organization president and School Committee chairwoman as an ally of child molesters, but the Massachusetts Republican Party seems to think that all it will take is one twist of one vote on one half-baked amendment to discredit Spilka.
In the last two weeks, 300,000 voters in Framingham, Natick, Ashland, Holliston, Medway, Hopkinton, and Franklin have received four different post cards from the state GOP accusing Spilka of voting to protect sexual predators in the schools. It would be a shocking revelation about any public official. It would be especially alarming news about a lawyer and a mother of three who began her professional life as a social worker investigating child abuse and neglect cases, about a lawmaker honored last spring with a "Friend of Children" award by the state Department of Social Services.
It would be, if it were true. It is not.
The mailings, featuring disturbing black-and-white photographs of menacing men and crying children, are as dishonest as they are cynical. The GOP accuses Spilka of "typical Beacon Hill double speak."
"It's an election year so Karen Spilka says she wants every person who enters a school to have a background check," according to the mailing. "And yet on June 4, 2003, she joined a small group of out-of-touch politicians who voted against allowing police to share criminal records with school and town officials."
What the mailings do not say is that the vote in question had nothing to do with the merits of criminal background checks for current and prospective school employees. Spilka voted for them. They are still in effect. It was a minor, procedural House vote about who should conduct the background checks, local police departments or the Criminal History Systems Board, the state agency authorized to keep track of the records of criminal offenders and to provide that information to school officials. The issue was so marginal that it was not even raised in the Senate or by Republican Governor Mitt Romney.
It is the worst kind of demagoguery to wrest a minor vote out of context to imply that an opponent will endanger the welfare of children, but Spilka's adversary, Jim Coffey, takes no responsibility for the mailings by the political party that recruited him to oppose her.
Challenged at recent debates in the district to defend the mailings, Coffey has sounded like the lawyer that he is. He didn't mail them, the Hopkinton resident says, so he doesn't have to defend them.
What he should do is denounce them. There are differences enough between the two candidates on the issues facing Massachusetts to sustain a substantive campaign in the next two weeks. Coffey would vote in favor of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage; Spilka voted against it. Coffey would make rolling the state income tax back from 5.3 percent to 5 percent a priority. Spilka would concentrate on overhauling the education funding formula to equalize opportunity across the state. Those are the sort of concrete debates that Romney said he was aiming for when he recruited Coffey to enter the political arena.
Instead, we have distortion and scare tactics. Are these the "new" methods that Romney intends to endorse to reinvigorate the moribund Republican Party in Massachusetts? If not, he needs to rein in this type of campaigning or risk having that charge of "typical Beacon Hill double speak" rebound on him.
To quote the GOP campaign "literature" targeting Spilka: "It's the oldest political trick in the book!"
Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com.
