Hot Button Issues, Part II

Back in the 1930s there was a dandy movie made called The Invisible Man, and if I’m not mistaken it starred Claude Rains and it was a spy thriller. We are witnessing a remake of The Invisible Man unfolding before our very eyes here in Massa­chusetts. In the title role is Republican gubernatorial candidate Charley Baker and he is playing the role to a T. Quick now, tell me one thing the Invisible Candidate has said or done that you can recall. The answer is probably noth­ing. This lad must have majored in flying below the radar in school, because there is no trace of him; there is nothing show­ing to know him by. Now let’s review for a second. In the contest for governor we have the incumbent, Deval Patrick, a bland, clueless sort whose main accomplishment seems to be getting tossed off the Board of Directors of Coca Cola Corporation. This is quite an accom­plishment,

as many of these corporate boards have members who are comatose, senile, and who gargle liberally with Jack Daniels ten or twenty times a day. Way to go, Gov!

The second candidate is an amorphous sort of fellow, Demo­crat by party affiliation, Republican in philosophy, and the most aggressive and abrasive of the threesome, and that would be the current State Treasurer, Tim Cahill. Mr. Cahill, his path blocked by Patrick, probably made overtures to the Republican leader­ship

through back door channels with this proposition: How about I jump ship to the G.O.P. and I will run for governor and trounce Deval Patrick? The G.O.P. obviously turned this offer down and anointed Charley Baker instead. So Cahill, blocked by the Democrats and snubbed by the Republicans, has launched a bid for the governorship as an independent, a genuinely stupid move. Instead of this “spoiler role” he has embarked upon, he could have sat tight and got reelected as treasurer, staying in a position to ladle out lots of favors for the well-connected, piling up plenty of chits for future favors four years downstream, and solidifying his future. But no, he’s going to get drubbed in this 3-way minuet and will be out as treasurer, come January. His power base gone, his political career will wither and die. Dumb, really dumb. And now, as the nursery rhyme goes, “the cheese stands alone”: we have Charley Baker, supposedly running for gover­nor but not saying or doing one whole heck of a lot. I’ve seen the embalmed with more life than this lad. He may be one smart guy, a real firecracker in the brains department, and I’ll bet he’s a heck of a good guy too, a good family man, a good neighbor and all the rest of that baloney, but ….. if he can’t sell himself, if he can’t project himself as the agent of change required to get these messes resolved, if he can’t articulate new ideas, and if he can’t project an energy, a combativeness, a can-do persona, then he will have blown a great chance to dump a sitting Demo­cratic governor, and that’s going to be a shame. It is now fearless prediction time so here’s the call: On the one hand we have an inept, indecisive, non-achiever who is standing for reelection, opposed by the sitting Treasurer, a product of Quincy politics, and whose political advisors must include the three stooges, and the third leg on the stool is the G.O.P. candidate who is running a very low-key campaign and who is personally as exciting as a well-starched dress shirt hang­ing on a hanger. Yikes, what a Hobson’s choice; but I’m afraid the tea leaves say another four years of ineffectual leadership in the form of Deval Patrick. Cahill has no chance and Baker shows no signs of life, and the shame of this is that it’s his to lose. A weak candi­date and a maverick is all that stands between him and victory but the invisible man has no vital signs. The economy remains dreadful, and today two more articles point to the long-term effects of the high unemployment rate. First this from mutual fund giant, Fidelity: More people are tapping into their 401k retirement savings accounts, as they re­port

loans from these accounts are at a ten-year high. Simply put, this means that families and individuals are mortgaging their futures to stay afloattoday. That is a tragic turn of events. Now as if this were not bad enough, a report in Monday’s Wall Street Journal that more people are going without the pro­tection of life insurance. Nearly a third of U.S. households have no life-insurance coverage. Currently 70% of households have life insurance as opposed to 82% back in 1960. This reflectstight household budgets and the fact that many families are strapped and living paycheck to paycheck. In the latest Limra (an insurance industry research organization) survey, half the folks polled responded that they knew they needed more life in­surance but, they haven’t purchased it because of other financial priorities, including paying down debt. Just one more fact to throw into the equation: the number of mortgage holders who are more than sixty days behind in their monthly payments is now 6.67%. This is for the 2nd quar­ter of 2010. For the 2nd quarter of 2009 the number was 5.81%, so you can see things are not getting better. Finally, we have one more hot button issue left to deal with for this week. This is a troubling problem I’ve wrestled with through the years. Suppose you make a ham and swiss cheese sandwich on Nissen’s Canadian brown bread. What do you put on it, mayonnaise or Gulden’s spicy brown mustard? After much tussling I’ve decided I prefer the sandwich with mayon­naise. Now that’s a load off my mind.