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ADRIAN WALKER
The Mass. fear factor
By Adrian Walker, Globe Columnist | September 21, 2006

It will be a long general election season for immigrants, if the opening salvo from the Kerry Healey campaign is any indication.

Healey, the Republican nominee for governor, unveiled a list of 50 ideas yesterday for changing Massachusetts. The second item would require voters to present a valid ID at the polls to prove citizenship.

If that didn't get her views about illegal slackers across, there was number 16: ``Create a level playing field for all Massachusetts companies by penalizing firms that hire illegal aliens."

It isn't just illegal immigrants she's wary of. Healey would also like to (number 25): ``Require that driver's licenses issued to legal immigrants expire on the same day as their visa, to cut down immigration violations."

I would never have imagined that any of these rank among the most pressing problems facing the state, but there you have it.

The list is a true grab-bag: Lifetime parole for Level 2 sex offenders makes the cut, but so too do banning cellphones for teenage drivers and a weird demand to hold Proposition 2 1/2 overrides only on regularly scheduled election days. Welfare recipients, we are told, should all be working. Judges, a past target of Healey's ire, should be evaluated every seven years. In their 16 years in the governor's office, Republicans have appointed almost all of the judges now serving, but never mind that.

Even on a list built largely around simmering resentments, the menace posed by the groups she insists on referring to as ``illegal aliens" was striking.

None of this is a surprise. The furor over in-state tuition neatly crystallized the resentment over illegal immigration, and reference to illegal residents as ``aliens" is poll- and talk radio-tested, never mind that it makes immigrants sound as though they sneaked across the border from Neptune.

Healey's camp has made no secret that immigration ranks high among the issues on which their candidate's positions are far more popular than those of Deval Patrick, the Democratic nominee. Immigrants, they believe, are not a popular constituency, or at least not a voting one.

Healey's list actually did form a sharp contrast with the beginning of the Patrick general election campaign. Patrick lavished praise on his vanquished opponents and spoke about giving hope to everyone. Healey, by contrast, wants to make sure the pictures and addresses of Level 2 sex offenders get posted on the Internet, and the sooner the better.

Some of Healey's ideas have obvious merit. It would be hard to argue against reforming the state's pension system to eliminate abuse, even if one is skeptical about that reform returning $200 million to cities and towns. More merit pay for good teachers sounds good, too.

But clearly, this is a campaign that plans to mobilize voters mainly by promising to fight what they fear. Those welfare cheats, immigration cheats, and Proposition 2 1/2 spendthrifts would all be toast once the Healey-Hillman team takes the oath of office. That's the Healey pledge.

Given that Healey already holds high office, you may wonder, naively, why more of these obvious problems haven't already been tackled. The answer to that, of course, is the obstructionist Democratic Legislature, of which you will hear a great deal in the next 47 days.

Patrick suggested recently that this might be a high-minded, issues-based campaign. Well, maybe, if debating taking cellphones away from teenagers behind the wheel is your idea of a battle of ideas. Perhaps people should have to show ID at the voting booth, but that's hardly a vision for the future of the state.

Healey isn't the first candidate to conclude that she doesn't need a profound vision. She's built her strategy on cobbling together a coalition of the disaffected: enough immigrant-bashing, sex offender-fearing, tax-loathing voters to add up to 51 percent on Election Night.

Healey's handlers like to say that the contrast with Patrick couldn't be clearer. In less than one day, they proved it.

Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at walker@globe.com.



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