On Tuesday, Howard Kurtz wrote a column at Daily Beast titled “Desperate Dems Attack”
If the Republicans have their way, the election will turn on whether Democrats are the party of runaway government. Now, with time running out, the Democratic Party is fighting back—and not just by trying to brand many GOP candidates as extremists. The new line is that they’re sleazebags. We’re talking ugly stuff here, accusing one opponent of threatening his wife, another of indifference to employee deaths, a third of trying to evict a child.
Kurtz mentioned a lot of different campaigns without ever getting to the 10th congressional district here in Mass.
I made the mistake yesterday of engaging with Blue Mass Group, mostly mocking them for their sudden interest in the moral compass of politicians. Well, I should say politicians who are not Democrats. They selectively published a few tweets, and ignored others. In other words, they did what they do. Lesson learned.
I enjoyed Dan Kennedy’s take on this at Media Nation. Kennedy, a classic old school liberal, makes two key points.
If there is a congressional district in Massachusetts ripe for a Republican takeover, it is surely the 10th, a conservative part of the state that stretches from Quincy to Provincetown.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee understands this and they are spending heavily on negative ads against Perry. The playbook outlined by Kurtz is well underway in the 10th.
I also agree with how Dan Kennedy closed his piece,
What happened to Lisa Allen may have taken place a long time ago. But the questions she raises about Perry’s empathy and judgment are just as valid today as they were in 1991.
Absolutely legitimate point. There are a lot of questions that have been raised, and voters need to weigh them.
There is also the matter of the nineteen years since, specifically, Perry’s time in the Legislature. After all, that is the job Perry is applying for right now, legislator. There, his record is very strong. He’s been good on the issues people are most concerned with today, spending, taxes and the proper role of government. He was one of only two state reps smart enough to vote against Romneycare and he authorized a common sense amendment to deny public assistance to illegal immigrants. No wonder Bill Keating and his supporters want to talk about anything else.
Unlike so many, I am not willing to convict Jeff Perry for something his was not charged with. What I am willing to do is to question his judgement and actions from that evening and weigh that against the totality of his career, both as an officer and a legislator.
Certainly we can afford Jeff Perry the same standard that his critics set for Ted Kennedy for decades?
This is politics. It’s ugly sometimes. Like right now.