Is Steve Lynch the Scott Brown of the Democratic primary for US Senate?
The South Boston congressman is clearly the more centrist candidate in the race, but it’s not just a lean toward the middle that Lynch shares with the former Republican senator. He also may be the candidate everyone wrote off who makes fools of the pundits and political wiseguys who planted that narrative.
That line of thinking got run out in yesterday’s Globe by columnist Tom Keane, who suggested that while Lynch may be the clear Democratic primary underdog against fellow congressman Ed Markey, he’s a guy who has defied expectations in the past. Never was that more true than in Lynch’s 1996 match-up against William Bulger Jr., the heir apparent to the seat long held by his father and namesake. Lynch gave Bulger an electoral whomping, and with it he showed that he wasn’t inclined to sit back and defer to a preordained order of succession.
All of which helps explain why Lynch is now trying to bollix up Markey’s plan to cruise unimpeded to the nomination. That may make Lynch the Scott Brown of the Senate race. But the real question is whether Markey steps into the role of Martha Coakley and let’s Lynch sneak up and catch fire as the candidate not taking anyone’s vote for granted.
The race has barely gotten off the ground, but Markey shows some early signs of not necessarily appreciating the lessons of the Coakley debacle, in which the Democratic attorney general was caught sleeping by Brown in their 2010 special election tilt. Early online chatter is full of snarky asides about Markey’s barebones campaign website. While Lynch has been putting out his daily schedule of campaign appearances, Markey still seems to be getting his campaign into gear. If Markey’s a little rusty on the stump, it may be because he hasn’t been in a competitive contest in more than 30 years. And while Lynch’s camp announced early last week that it eagerly accepted multiple debate invitations from various media outlets, it took Markey’s campaign all week to finally say it wanted to negotiate the terms of candidate debates. The Markey statement came late Friday, when attention was a little distracted by a certain weather situation, making it the news dump of all news dumps.
This morning’s Herald reports that, according to a Lynch campaign memo the paper somehow “obtained,” the Southie congressman plans to call for as many as 15 debates in his continuing effort to flush out the reluctant dean of the state’s House delegation.
Some have pointed out that Lynch had the shoe on the other foot and did all he could to avoid debates with Democratic challengers in recent primary challenges. But the point here isn’t that Lynch occupies some high moral ground. Campaigns generally are driven far more by cold calculation than by any call to the highest aspirations of democratic governance.
Markey has a lot more money, the support of the party’s liberal activist base, and the backing of Democratic major domos across the board. With all those fundamentals in his favor, if he can ride the frontrunner status to victory and engage Lynch as little as possible no one will second guess his approach to the race. But if that Rose Garden strategy starts to falter, and Lynch catches on with voters who largely don’t know Markey or anything about his three decades in Congress, not only does Lynch start to resemble Brown’s upstart 2010 effort, Markey starts to seem like he’s taking a page out of the Martha Coakley playbook. And we know how that turned out.
–MICHAEL JONAS
BLIZZARD OF 2013
MEMA is concentrating its recovery efforts on the South Coast and the Cape, and Gov. Deval Patrick will visit Marshfield and Scituate, two of the hardest hit areas.
More than 100,000 customers remained without power as of 8 am today, the Globe reported. The Patriot Ledger puts the number at 108,000 on the South Shore. The T is back in business, but questions are being raised about why it took the system so long to get back on line.
In an editorial, the Gloucester Times says the governor’s travel ban and Mayor Carolyn Kirk’s towing directive may seem heavy-handed but were very effective.
MUNICIPAL MATTERS
A federal agency extends the life of a grant, allowing Lawrence to retain 31 firefighters for now, the Eagle-Tribune reports.
RELIGION
Pope Benedict XVI says he is resigning later this month because of poor health, the first pope to resign in six centuries.
NATIONAL POLITICS/WASHINGTON
New Mexico moves to close its gun show loophole.
Florida Sen. Mario Rubio will deliver the rebuttal to President Obama’s State of the Union address.
ELECTIONS
In the National Review, Charles C. W. Cooke ridicules US Rep. Ed Markey’s “peculiar obsession” — seeking federal oversight of amusement park rides.
The candidates for the US Senate seat may find it hard to gin up any enthusiasm from voters.
BUSINESS/ECONOMY
The Federal Housing Administration handed out mortgages in 2008 and 2009, when no one else would; the agency’s reward is a looming bailout request.
Critics have claimed the Justice Department sued Standard & Poor’s over the agency’s dead-wrong housing bond ratings, but not Moody’s, out of revenge for last year’s US credit downgrade; it turns out that Moody’s employees were just better at following the advice of Martin Lomasney, and keeping their terrible-sounding thoughts off paper.
EDUCATION
Beverly cites overcrowding in its bid to have the state help pick up the cost of a new middle school, the Salem News reports.
Brandeis’s Eileen McNamara says college deans are out of their depth in dealing with sexual assault issues on college campuses.
A retiring Maryland high school teacher writes an open letter to college professors and explains why their new students are unprepared to do college-level work.
ENERGY/ENVIRONMENT
The Republican and The Berkshire Eagle applaud the lower RGGI greenhouse gas emissions mark.
The New England Fisheries Council is cutting back on cod quotas; The Cape Cod Times suggests fish populations need time to rebuild.
CRIMINAL JUSTICE
Howie Carr gets a look inside the new Whitey Bulger biography by Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill. The former Globe reporters claim the neighbor who handed Bulger to the FBI recognized the mobster as the Obama-hating racist next door.
Boston police unions and an association of minority officers are decrying what they say are uneven discipline practices by Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis. CommonWealth has a related story on how an early intervention system for Boston cops was allowed to lapse, possibly explaining why legal claims against the city are rising.
MEDIA
Mumford & Sons wins album of the year at the Grammys, the Los Angeles Times reports.
