Healey found, ideals lost
There's this woman being interviewed on the television news the other night, and I'm thinking, Wait a minute, I've seen her.Somewhere. I just couldn't figure it out. She had that vaguely familiar look that's maddeningly hard to place, like a country singer or a defendant in an over-covered court case. Maybe she was one of those nameless barflies on ''Cheers."
All I knew was that I was supposed to know, and it was bugging the bejesus out of me that I didn't. A relative? Too prosperous looking. An old source? Too smart looking. A one-time friend? Too refined looking.
And then the newscast flashed her name at the bottom of the screen: ''Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey."
Needless to say, I was breathless, nearly in tears, screaming for joy by the time I got the editors of the Globe on the phone to alert them to this miraculous news. Kerry Healey is alive! Stop the presses! Read all about it: Lieutenant governor, missing since Election Day 2002, is found!
There'd be a tickertape parade down Boylston Street. Mitt Romney would be cleared of suspicion. This great Commonwealth would finally be itself again with Kerry Healey near the helm.
''Um, she's never gone anywhere," the editors told me. ''She just doesn't really do anything."
Of course. I knew that.
Which is when I started catching little snippets of what she was saying on TV: ''Not doing his job ..." ''People of Massachusetts are underrepresented ..." ''Should resign."
My God, she's attacking her own boss, our poor governor. Then she mentioned ''Kerry" and I realized she was engaged in self-flagellation. Poor thing doesn't cut herself a break. That's when the reporter said she was calling for the resignation of John Kerry from his Senate seat.
And on display right there, in one news cycle on a slow Tuesday in June, was everything that is wrong with the Republican leadership that we've instilled with power in Massachusetts.
This was the politically cynical ploy of a cynical administration. When the citizenry elected Romney a year-and-a-half ago, I believed -- and wrote -- that the state was about to get a mature, creative manager who would set Beacon Hill on an important new course.
He would be intolerant of political bickering. He would operate free of the constraints of ego. He would eschew shallow showmanship. His would be a tenure marked by a no-nonsense leadership in constant pursuit of palpable results.
Instead, what we got is a playbook Republican, a paint-by-numbers partisan whose major issues are tax cuts, the death penalty, and opposition to gay marriage. He picks unseemly fights purely for political points. All the while, the state lags the rest of the country in job creation and the numbers of uninsured keep going up.
Remember when, amid great fanfare, Romney appointed Bob Pozen, the successful businessman, and Doug Foy, the acclaimed environmentalist, to the top posts in his administration? Pozen made for the exits as soon as he could find the door, and Foy is seen on Beacon Hill these days about as much as Leonid Brezhnev was spotted in Moscow in the year before he died. Irrelevant is too kind a word.
I want to like Republicans. I really do, under the belief that neither political party has all the answers to society's ills, and without strong Republicans, Democrats such as Tom Finneran will run even more amok. I want to believe that Romney can and will learn how to be governor over the next 30 months.
But inconsequential people like Kerry Healey pulling inconsequential pranks on behalf of her superiors make it harder to believe this with every passing day.
Right now, the state is doing just fine with John Kerry running for president. It's the governorship that's a bigger problem. Massachusetts needs an independent executive who puts the people's concerns above his own and, at the moment, that doesn't seem to be the case.
Brian McGrory is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at mcgrory@globe.com.
