Good column in yesterday's Globe by Eileen McNamara.
The Globe has been running one or two aricles a day featuring Republican
Healy "be afraid" issues. Their coverage has been very slanted against Patrick. Finally one of the more independant Globe columnists pushes back:
THIS STORY HAS BEEN FORMATTED FOR EASY PRINTING
EILEEN MCNAMARA
Scare tactics are a crime
By Eileen McNamara, Globe Columnist | October 8, 2006
For a would-be governor who promises to make us safer, Kerry Healey sure is scaring the pants off us.
Rapists. Cop-killers. All she needs now is some aging creep who stalks adolescent boys, and her ominous television ads will have every soccer mom in Massachusetts shaking in her sneakers. Alas, former Florida congressman Mark Foley is a Republican.
Fear is the Republican lieutenant governor's weapon of choice in her increasingly cynical campaign against Deval Patrick, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee. Last week, she flew the prosecutor in a decades-old Florida murder case to Boston to denounce Patrick's successful effort, 21 years ago, to have the death sentence of a man who killed a state trooper reduced to life imprisonment. (``Lawyers have the right to defend cop killers," intones the male voice-over in her television ad about the case. ``But do we really want one as our governor?")
She spent the rest of the week battering Patrick for his support of a convicted rapist and prolific letter-writer who snowed a lot of prominent local people, including such well-known ``liberals" as former Boston University president John Silber and Robert J. Cordy, the former legal counsel to Republican governor William F. Weld who was named by Republican governor Paul Cellucci to the Supreme Judicial Court. (Don't hold your breath for the Healey ad that declares: ``Lawyers have the right to defend rapists. But do we really want one on the state's highest court?")
Someone should tell the lieutenant governor that the '80s are over, that Lee Atwater is dead, and that voters now can see through the fear-mongering tactics used so successfully against Michael S . Dukakis in his 1988 presidential campaign against George H.W. Bush. Magnifying the importance of two long-resolved criminal cases to demonize a political rival is no substitute for a serious discussion of crime that, of constitutional necessity, must balance public safety and the rights of criminals.
That is a discussion Healey has every reason to want to avoid, because violent crime in the Commonwealth has been going up, not down, since she and Governor Mitt Romney moved into the State House nearly four years ago. Homicides hit a 10-year high of 75 in Boston last year and are on course to exceed that number this year. Guns are a scourge on city streets across the Commonwealth. Gang violence is on the rise everywhere from Lynn to Fall River, even as police presence on the streets is jeopardized by reductions in state aid to 351 cities and towns. Proven methods of crime prevention, from drug rehabilitation to job training, have been starved for funds under this administration.
Using her husband's fortune to flood the airwaves with a menacing mug shot of a man incarcerated more than 1,000 miles away in Florida is a desperate attempt to paint Patrick as soft on crime. Massachusetts voters know that murderers, even cop-killers, are entitled to appeal their sentences. Patrick will have to answer to voters for his stumbling, often contradictory, explanations of his role in the case of Benjamin LaGuer, but he need not apologize for wanting to ensure the integrity of the process that leads to the conviction of anyone of a serious crime.
At least 10 wrongful convictions for rape, murder, or other violent crimes have been reversed in Suffolk County alone in the last 10 years. Just last week, US District Court Judge Rya Zobel ruled that a Clinton man deserved more than $13 million for his 1987 conviction and incarceration for a rape he did not commit. It is as much in the public interest to make certain that the innocent are not imprisoned as it is to guarantee that the guilty are punished.
There are five weeks until Election Day and only three weeks until Halloween. Healey clearly intends to spend that time and a lot of her own money trying to portray Deval Patrick as the defender of the bogeyman. It is not only a losing political strategy; it's a real crime.
Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com.