There was good news and bad news for both Maura Healey and Mike Minogue when they met for their first debate at WBZ last week.
The good news for Minogue was a disciplined message of dissatisfaction with the status quo delivered emphatically but not offensively. He put the incumbent on the defensive at times, but also sprinkled the occasional grace note into his stream of Healey indictments: “I respect that the governor works hard. I know her intentions are good,” he said at one point. Minogue has been hammered by his party’s red meat addicts for not jumping uglier with Healey. But because he passed on opportunities to introduce himself to TV audiences during his blowout primary win, Minogue had to make sure his first impression wasn’t too harsh.
Minogue wisely did not try to market the clunky “AAOK” acronym of his early ad wave (for the record: “Accountability, Affordability, Opportunity, Keeping Communities Safe”), or his wafer-thin “Blueprint For A Better Future” (BFABF?), which failed to explain how he’d pay for his tax cuts or get any of his “reforms” through the Legislature. Instead, he zeroed in on Healey’s failures while branding himself as a “solver” of problems that have proven relatively intractable for past governors of both parties. While he should have but never did ask viewers directly if they are better off now than they were four years ago, that was the core of his pitch, as it should have been.
The good news for Healey — Donald Trump is president.
She name-checked the most reviled political figure in Massachusetts 37 times by our count, more than enough to make it into any of the TikTok-sized clips which are the way most voters consume debates these days. (By the next morning, this encounter had generated a million social-media impressions.)
And Healey didn’t just reference Trump. She tied him around Minogue tighter than those ultra-snug white jeans he insisted on wearing in his campaign videos all summer. One memorable example: “The best thing that Mike Minogue could do to lower costs in this state is to call his friend Donald Trump or J.D. Vance, who he supported, who he helped elect, who he gave a million dollars to, and say, end this war. Cut it out with the tariffs. These things are raising our prices.”
Healey’s tsunami of Trump drops triggered howls of protest from the snowflakes in the right-wing chattering classes, but only because they know it’s a disaster for Minogue, motivating the Democratic base and reminding independents of their well-documented distaste for the president.
Now, the bad news.
For Healey, the less voters associate her with the widely distrusted Legislature the better. But Minogue brought them up repeatedly, noting correctly that she has declined to aggressively confront them over the DiZoglio audit controversy and that they have “ignored” her on key issues. And Healey’s heavy reliance on the Trump card may for some undecided voters buttress Minogue’s claim that her addiction to “blaming others” is hardly a profile in leadership.
Meanwhile, Minogue’s claim of superior management skills buckled under the weight of his chronic inability to distill complicated talking points into clean takedowns.
He kept harping on the Trump administration’s bureaucracy-laden “federal scholarship tax credit” scheme without ever clearly explaining how it works and who it really benefits, thus failing to show how Healey’s wariness of it is negligent. He portrayed the controversial plan to build a long-needed new Springfield courthouse as a case study in Healey’s lack of “integrity.” But Healey pointed to a judicial finding that, while not the final word in the case, suggested the contract was on the level. And when she chastised Minogue for questioning her ethics, his laughable reply — “I’m not questioning your integrity, I’m doing math” — conveyed weakness.
And while it didn’t quite match the volume of Healey’s Trump mentions, Minogue kept singling out “stretch codes” as a barrier to more housing construction. What are stretch codes? He never bothered to explain.
Minogue is counting on dissatisfaction with the Healey years to snare available independents. He could have started the process of establishing some degree of trust and credibility with them months ago with a couple of televised debates against GOP primary opponent Brian Shortsleeve but inexplicably declined to do so. So voters experiencing Minogue for the first time were treated to the weird optics of a big-time Republican donor bragging about being a longtime independent and whining that Healey was “name-calling” him amid his name-calling of her as unethical and incompetent.
For a candidate desperate to differentiate himself from Trump, there’s something awfully Trumpy about Minogue’s pitch. The allegedly superior value of his business background. The indifference to easily-provable facts. (“You’ve never balanced the budget in your life,” he told Healey, who is constitutionally required to balance the budget each year.) The repeated, DOGE-style reliance on the magic wand of eliminating “waste and fraud” to clear up fiscal woes. The lame attempts to establish a cult of personality by name-dropping Market Basket and chewing gum while wearing a hoodie in online videos.
Healey kept the fact-checkers busy with some of her claims. But Minogue dropped the whopper of the night as the debate wound down.
“It really doesn't matter who the president is,” he said.
Really? Here’s a fresh acronym for you: FAFO.
