Gabrieli's stump speech: a preview
Just caught Chris Gabrieli on FOX-25. I was bottle-feeding a baby at the time, so my concentration wasn't 100 percent, but I thought Gabrieli's performance was impressive.
To begin with, Gabrieli offered an interesting gloss on the relationship between the governor and the legislature. He panned the idea (zealously advanced by Republican nominee-in-waiting Kerry Healey) that the governor's main responsibility is holding the Democrat-dominated legislature in check. But he did so in a very clever way--namely, by invoking Republican darling Bill Weld and Weld's success working with the state House and Senate on education reform back in the early 1990s.
Furthermore, Gabrieli chose not to use the standard Democratic red-meat script about Republican governors losing interest in Massachusetts. Instead, he said the state's politicians need to be "a little more pragmatic and a lot less ideological." Not a great bumper sticker, maybe, but a valid point nonetheless. Put it all together, and Gabrieli seems well on his way to crafting a message capable of appealing to Republicans and independents as well as Democrats.
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