Healey shifts to the left
Look who's a nanny-state liberal now.
For all of Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey's fear - mongering about Big Government Democrats picking your wallet and usurping your personal and parental prerogatives, the Republican gubernatorial candidate's campaign proposals read as though they were written by Big Mommy.
Never taught your teenager to drive responsibly? Not to worry. Healey would outlaw the use of cellphones by any driver under 18 (exempting, I guess, those chattering suburban moms in sport utility vehicles who nearly take me out whenever I walk the dog.)
Never taught your child to save her baby-sitting money or balance his checkbook? No problem. Healey would require every public high school in Massachusetts to teach courses in financial literacy. (First assignment? Calculate the cost of the property tax hike needed to pay for those courses.)
Never taught your child to stay away from strangers or to stay in school? Relax. Healey would mandate lifetime parole for sex offenders and raise from 16 to 18 the mandatory age for school attendance. (Resources to pay for additional parole officers and teachers yet to be determined.)
Tired of paying for parking and waiting in the terminal for your sister's delayed flight to land? Wait for free in your car (maybe with the heater running if she is coming for Christmas) courtesy of the Commonwealth. Healey is going to create a free ``cellphone parking lot" near the airport so Sis can call after she's located her luggage and you can drive over and pick her at the curb.
Some of this stuff is silly -- a Massachusetts Sales Force Team? What happened to the Executive Office of Economic Development? -- but most of it is just disingenuous. The woman who promised on Friday to keep a running tally of the additional costs to taxpayers if Deval Patrick, the Democratic nominee, is elected governor has required no such accounting of herself in her 50 ``tough, smart solutions to change Massachusetts."
How is she going to pay for the state-issued identification cards she wants voters to present at the polls? Just last Thursday, a survey by the National Governor's Association and the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators warned that new federal security rules for issuing tamper-proof driver's licenses could cost the states $11 billion to implement. How does the tax-cutting Healey plan to cope with that expense?
How will she pay for her misguided ``cops in the halls" proposal to prevent school violence? And where are her specially trained police officers going to be dispatched ``to prevent the bad actors from engaging in behavior that undermines the learning process?" Lawrence? Weston? Every high school? Every middle school? The worst school shooting in US history, after all, was in suburban Littleton, Colo.
Many of Healey's proposals run counter to the record she and Governor Mitt Romney have built in the past four years. If, as she writes in No. 17 of her laundry list of ideas to improve life in the Commonwealth, ``it is essential for legal immigrants to learn English in order to become self-sufficient and succeed in Massachusetts," why has the state failed to adequately fund adult literacy programs and the English immersion classes mandated for non-English-speaking public school students four years ago?
Her proposal to ``create a recruitment program for retired engineers to teach and mentor high school students" has echoes of former acting governor Jane M. Swift's plan to find college students to mentor every child who failed the 10th-grade MCAS test. Swift didn't find the college students and Healey won't find the engineers because volunteerism is no substitute for a genuine education policy.
Healey is not without good ideas -- no child should drop out of school at 16, and all could use some lessons in personal finance -- but the best ideas take time and money to implement. Pretending that they don't is pandering, not leading.
Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com. 
