Gov. Maura Healey is a lot like New England running back Rhamondre Stevenson.
She fumbles a lot like he does but is still effective enough to occasionally score and keep on playing.
Besides, there is no one around good enough to take the job away from Stevenson. So, he stays, plays and keeps his job.
Ditto Healey.
The only difference is that Stevenson, after fumbling a couple of times against the Bills last Sunday in frigid Buffalo, admits his mistakes. “I fumbled it,” he said.
Healey, like most politicians, never does.
Which means that if she decides to run for a second term — which appears most likely — she will be reelected because, like Stevenson, there is no one around, Republican or Democrat, strong enough to take the job away from her.
Given the sad state to which the GOP has fallen in Massachusetts, there is hardly a Republican around with enough stature (or brains) to take Healey on. You would have to find one first.
All of the statewide constitutional offices, for instance, are held by Democrats, as are the nine U.S. House seats as well as the two U.S. Senate seats. The Democrats control the Legislature by a huge margin.
So, the only threat Healey would face would have to come from a Democrat. Since there is no Democrat challenger in sight who is more to the left of Healey in progressive Massachusetts, that Democrat would by necessity be a conservative.
And on the face of it that challenger would have no chance unless of course, President Donald Trump, who has a score to settle with Healey, decides to back a Democrat (if he can find one) just to primary her in 2026.
But by then Trump just might be too busy buying Greenland (Make Greenland Green Again) from Denmark, annexing Canada and taking back the Panama Canal, that President Jimmy Carter gave away, to bother with small fry Massachusetts.
All of this comes to mind in the wake of the traditional year-end interviews that Healey conducted last week with various news outlets.
In practically all of them she insisted that she has not made up her mind about running for a second four-year term.
She generally applauded herself for doing a good job on the climate and economic fronts, on housing, gun reform, veterans’ issues, and so on.
In one of her fumbles, however, Healey even declared that Massachusetts was not a sanctuary state when it came to immigration, which comes as a surprise to the thousands of illegal immigrants (let alone the taxpayers) who have been granted sanctuary and welfare.
She appeared to have recovered one of her fumbles when in a weekend WBZ-TV interview she said she was hopeful that Trump would secure the border, even though she sued him many times over his border initiatives when he was president, and she was attorney general.
It was at that same interview where Healey fumbled big time by lashing out at critics who have accused her of lax judgement, or worse, when it came to the long history of Steward Health Care and CEO Ralph de la Torre running the state’s health care system into the ground, while reaping millions, when she was attorney general.
The Boston Globe has suggested that Healey, as attorney general and governor, and other state officials, failed to act when Steward, gobbling up Massachusetts hospitals, was facing financial difficulties.
Healey, in an uncharacteristic outburst accused the paper and its Spotlight team, which investigated the matter, of “an unfair hit job.”
“It was outrageous,” she said. “Beyond my apprehension.”
Steward gave money to a lot of politicians. What did not come up in the interview was the part about Healey accepting more than $63,000 in campaign contributions from Steward executives, board members and their spouses.
Healey, instead of excuses, should return the money, or give it to a charity, and say, Rhamondre Stevenson-like: “I fumbled it.”
Peter Lucas is a veteran political reporter. Email him at: peter.lucas@bostonhearld.com
