Kerry Healey?! For Governor?!! Bostonist is Shocked!

OK, not really. In another one of those completely unsurprising developments that Bostonist feels obliged to mention, Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey has officially announced what everyone already knew: She will be running for Governor.

Although the Herald calls her an underdog, her speech yesterday made pretty clear that she is just the kind of moderate Republican this Commonwealth can't get enough of: Fiscally conservative and moderate on social issues. Her speech was long and, in our humble opinion, boring, but fairly well-crafted. The gist is that Healey will cut taxes, be business-friendly, and focus on education and social services - sort of like Romney Lite.

Healey warned in her speech of the dangers of a one-party system (i.e., having the Dems control both the legislature and the governorship), and trotted out a classic 1980s insult leveled at Democrats by Republicans: that they are "tax-and-spend" liberals. (Bostonist always found this perplexing when we heard Reagan say it back in the day because we had learned in grade school that taxing and spending are pretty much what legislatures are meant to do. When we would ask our communist father about this, he would just shake his head at the enormity of our youthful ignorance.) Healey also included what we think might be a little bit of a barb for Tom Reilly and his erstwhile running mate Marie St. Fleur:

My husband and I started our lives together in our early twenties, with a lot of student debt to pay off, but also a sense of confidence about our future. We believed we could accomplish good things together in our family life and in our careers. And we welcomed the work that it would take. We believed in the values of responsibility and integrity that we took from our parents.

Maybe that's just a way to burnish her middle-class credentials, but it made Bostonist think of St. Fleur's mountain of delinquent school loans an unpaid taxes. As bemused spectators who love all things snarky, we can only hope the whole campaign has a similarly tongue-in-cheek, backhanded tone.

We like this photo of Healey, posing last year with the very tough-looking president of the Beverly Rotary Club.