It’s a rare day when the local dailies crisscross, but count today as one of them: A liberal Boston Globe columnist puts on the pompoms for Bay State Republicans, while a conservative Herald thumbsucker goes all frowny-faced on them.
Start with Scot Lehigh’s piece in the stately local broadsheet.
Finally, Mass. GOP has some likely candidates
KUDOS TO Dan Winslow and Gabriel Gomez, the two Republicans in this state willing to join the race for US Senate.
Apparently willing, anyway.
On Tuesday, Winslow declared himself “about 99 percent” ready to run, while Gomez, a former Navy SEAL and pilot, is making the Republican rounds, telling people he’s very likely to as well. Although GOP panjandrums speak well of him, Gomez, a Cohasset businessman, remains largely unknown.
Not so Winslow. A former district court judge and chief legal counsel for Mitt Romney and now a state representative from Norfolk, he is a familiar face in political circles. Speaking to reporters outside the State House, Winslow took pains to stress that as a Massachusetts Republican — “a different kind of breed from the national Republicans” — he puts a premium on reaching across the aisle in search of commonsensical compromise.
There! Didn’t take long to kick the national GOP to the curb, did it?
But wait – Lehigh’s not done saying nice things about the could-be Republican candidates:
Make no mistake here. In their willingness to step forward, both Winslow and Gomez aren’t just helping the GOP. They are doing the entire state a favor. Massachusetts needs the clash of ideas that a competitive two-party system brings.
Before the celebrating starts, though, there’s Herald columnist Michael Graham’s entirely dyspeptic op-ed to consider.
GOP can’t win from the top down
Party usuals have made Senate race a long-shot
So the Massachusetts Republican party establishment may have finally found a candidate it can whole-heartedly support in the upcoming U.S. Senate race — and he supported Barack Obama in 2008.
Gabriel Gomez, a former Navy SEAL, was reportedly being promenaded around to the GOP bigwigs in Washington by local party boss Ron Kaufman. Kaufman is one of the political geniuses responsible for the Massachusetts GOP’s tremendous record of “success” the past 15 years.
Just a reminder of the GOP establishment’s record. Since 2000, they’ve lost every single statewide general election except one — the fluke-election of Mitt Romney in 2002.
And Scott Brown too, Graham says, but no thanks to the party establishment.In fact, he calls the state GOP bosses “the Washington Admirals of American politics” (the headscratching staff thinks he means the Washington Generals, but we could be wrong). Regardless, Graham insists “there is no Massachusetts GOP.”
Not for lack of Graham’s trying, though. The most intriguing sentence in his piece is this:
Right now, more than half the Republicans in the state House of Representatives are graduates of the free, all-volunteer campaign schools my Herald colleague Holly Robichaud and I have hosted the past few years.
Really? Is that what newspaper columnists do these days? Graham and Robichaud aren’t Herald staffers, but if they’re going to be regular columnists, shouldn’t they be held to the same standard? Oh, wait – this is the Herald, which has no problem with staff columnists headlining political fundraisers (See Media Nation and the Googletron).
So . . . never mind.
Posted by Campaign Outsider 
