Thursday, June 24, 2010

Polito Sets Off Wee IED

Plus and minus for MA treasurer candidate Karyn Polito. She tweeted today a teaser about the lousy state budget process. Then the link to her full piece on her website wasn't full at all.

On the plus side, she's willing to kick up some dust (even if there's only dust and no hard stuff). On the minus one, there's posturing and no content to her vague accusations. Today's bomb-ette looks like her flack wrote it and doesn't add to a LITE website. However, this is a key race with deep implications. If such shenanigans bring demands that she explain her vague, inflammatory rhetoric, maybe we'll get a debate going.

As it is, the two Dem candidates, the Steves Grossman and Murphy, and are too little known to voters. With one, Grossman, promising to remake the office into an activist one creating thousands of MA jobs, one, Murphy, saying he's the only one with adequate financial background to make key decisions, and one, Polito, saying she's the only fiscal conservative who can safeguard our billions, voters should know the candidates and office.

By the bye, you can hear the three say this and more on:

I'm sure Chris Lovett will get to Polito very soon and complete is treasurer book shelf from his side.

We really need these three on stage and also in a studio with cameras whirring. Their positions are distinctive. The treasurer slot doesn't open often. We have that chance to restructure the office a little...or a lot.

Meanwhile, on the stump and at his site, Grossman has maintained his rabbit position. He started first and has considerable content in platform and intent. In terms of newish media, Murphy somehow got screwed out of a web presence with a still bare and barely functioning site. He does, however, make a sincere and substantial pitch in person.

To Polito's spongy attack, read it. The entire one-paragraph thingummy is:

STATEMENT OF KARYN POLITO ON THE STATE BUDGET

"The budget is held together with baling wire and bubble gum. Instead of dealing honestly with our fiscal problems, this budget puts off the hard and necessary decisions that confront us until after the next election. The truth is the spending cuts aren't big enough and there's too many one-time gimmicks and accounting tricks. The majority party is obviously backing themselves into another major tax increase next year by not cutting far enough. We need deeper, across-the-board spending cuts, and we need them now or we risk a much larger debt burden, higher taxes and even bigger cuts down the road."
Again, I appreciate any effort to draw attention to this crucial race. There's no content here other than the winger wheeze that Dems never make enough cuts. In fact, I'm surprised that she didn't plug in wasteful spending somewhere. Perhaps she figures that is implicit when she mentioned the majority party.

There's nothing of substance, but at least it opens up the right to ask, "What exactly, what specifically do you mean?" That's a start.

Let the debates begin!

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