A serious case of trivializing
There is a lesson in this morning's election returns for Lieutenant Governor Kerry M. Healey: It does not matter what you have to say if the power brokers and the opinion makers do not take you seriously.
Even before her gubernatorial campaign begins -- any announcement must await the curtain call on Governor Mitt Romney's extended run as Hamlet -- Healey is already facing the trivialization that helped doom Maura A. Hennigan's candidacy for mayor of Boston.
Healey put her foot in her mouth talking about the children of illegal immigrants the other day, and what she said immediately meant a lot less than how she said it. The Republican lieutenant governor might be dead wrong that it would be unwise to grant in-state tuition rates at public colleges to the children of undocumented workers living in Massachusetts. If her contention that such a policy would make the Commonwealth a magnet for bargain-hunting undocumented immigrants is hyperbolic -- and I think it is -- that argument hardly originated with Healey.
Tune in to talk radio and you will get an earful of taxpayer vitriol and resentment on this topic that makes Healey's absurd suggestion that undocumented immigrants denied in-state tuition rates should just attend private school instead sound downright sensitive.
But the point of the outrage and the criticism was not that Healey had staked out some rogue position on illegal immigration, because the Republican Party officially opposes pending legislation on Beacon Hill that would make the children of illegal aliens eligible for the lower in-state tuition rates. The firestorm was all about a rich woman from Beverly Farms sounding dismissive of the poor, a constituency that most of those self-righteous Massachusetts Democrats abandoned the day Governor Michael S. Dukakis left the State House.
When Romney, the even more fabulously wealthy governor, stood beside Healey at a press conference a few hours after her radio comments and said essentially the same thing, no one compared him to Marie Antoinette or castigated him for his pampered insulation from the lives of the less fortunate. Instead, my colleague Scot Lehigh wrote of Healey: ''The impression was of someone who had run home to get her big brother to fight her battles for her."
Healey has much more money in her war chest and many more powerful allies in her party than Hennigan had in hers, but the lieutenant governor is being belittled in the same ways that helped defeat the veteran councilor. Healey was attempting, however inartfully, to initiate a policy debate on illegal immigration. She got the treatment Hennigan got when she was branded as insensitive for trying to discuss the role of police training in the death of Victoria Snelgrove.
Neither the lieutenant governor's office nor the Boston City Council lends itself to headline-grabbing accomplishments. The lieutenant governor's role is vaguely defined, but Healey has used it to forge strong bipartisan ties with municipal officials across the state. The Boston City Council is singularly powerless in a city with a strong mayoralty, but Hennigan was well known for providing constituent services and challenging conventional wisdom in City Hall.
The low profile of the work did not stop John F. Kerry from launching a winning campaign for US Senate from the lieutenant governor's office or Mayor Thomas M. Menino from rising to his present position from the council chamber. Had he not defeated Hennigan by one vote in 1993 for City Council president, Menino would not have become acting mayor when Raymond L. Flynn resigned the office to become the US ambassador to the Vatican. Who knows if Menino could have won on the strength of his council record alone?
It is a moot question now, as the mayor prepares for an unprecedented fourth term, but there is a lesson this morning for Healey. If she has any hope of being taken seriously, she needs the man in the corner office to turn over the keys.
Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com. 
