Spiritedly defending drastically different positions on taxes, bureaucratic reform and minority concerns, all five Massachusetts gubernatorial candidates took the same stage last night for the first time in a televised debate.
Republican and Democratic candidates Mitt Romney and Shannon O’Brien reiterated many of the points made in their last debate. However, at several points, Romney took the offensive — a different tactic than he has used — accusing O’Brien of taking undeserved credit for saving money as state treasurer. The real cause, he said, was falling interest rates on a national level.
Romney, who was called a “big-government, high-tax Republican” early in the evening by Libertarian candidate Carla Howell, stressed O’Brien’s record of raising taxes while a member of the state legislature and later described his plan for cutting $1 billion from the state budget.
“The numbers you put on the table weren’t real,” O’Brien responded, referring to the last debate, where Romney described his streamlining plan. “They were numbers you pulled out of the air.”
Howell took every opportunity to emphasize her own tax plan: the elimination of all income taxes.
“My ballot Question One to end the income tax will give back an average of $3,000 each to three million taxpayers across Massachusetts every year,” she said, a statistic challenged later in the debate by Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who came prepared with a graph to illustrate her plan for “fair taxes.”
Ending the income tax entirely would cut approximately $9 billion from the state budget, taking money away from important state services like education and care for the elderly, O’Brien and Romney agreed.
Barbara Johnson, an independent candidate, criticized the vague nature of the other candidates’ proposals.
“Not one of these people has said what they would cut, what they would merge,” she said, gesturing to the others on stage. “I want specificity,” she demanded.
She called on O’Brien to give her opinion on allowing towns to run their own casinos in order to raise money for specific communities.
“I don’t know if I know what you mean,” O’Brien said initially. She then elaborated on a study commissioned by Acting Governor Jane Swift to “look into the issue of expanded gaming.”
“Would you yourself like it or are you going to pass it on to someone else?” Johnson pushed.
Stein preferred to discuss solutions for problems such as education, healthcare and housing, which she said are more important than “being a better bureaucrat.”
“The issues before the voters of Massachusetts go far beyond financial management skills. There’s a crisis in healthcare, there’s a crisis in housing, workers cannot keep their families out of poverty,” she said. “We have urgent issues and the problem, in my mind, isn’t the Republicans, it isn’t the Democrats — it’s the stranglehold of big money on our legislature, which has made it impossible for our government to respond to these critical issues.”
Repeatedly stating her campaign’s slogan, “Small government is beautiful,” Howell added her rollback of the income tax would create between 300,000 and 500,000 jobs in the state.
A bilingual education program of complete English immersion would solve education and unemployment problems, Romney said, promoting a position none of his fellow candidates supported.
“Education is the core of a productive workforce. The problem with the Unz amendment [of English immersion] is that it proposes to make a political issue out of bilingual education,” Stein pointed out.
Children have varied learning styles that would not be well served by the unilateral English immersion, she said, citing her experience as a medical doctor and teacher. She cautioned against a “one size fits all” mentality when dealing with education.
In this case, “the one size that fits all is English,” Romney countered.
O’Brien mentioned her recent endorsements by several black and Latino legislative and community leaders and said as governor, she would work “not only on creating prosperity but broadening that.”
While she said she doesn’t support hard quotas in terms of college admission or job hiring standards, her “administration is making sure we do everything we can,” she said.
Howell called any kind of admission or hiring standards a type of racial profiling.
“Color is meaningless in this issue,” Johnson said, referring to joblessness and welfare.
“These people are in la-la land,” she continued later. “What you have to do is immediately create jobs.”
Stein took the opportunity during a discussion of inadequate unemployment wages to state her support for the Boston janitors who are currently on strike.
“There are so many workers in Massachusetts who, even when they are working, aren’t receiving adequate wages,” she said, urging her fellow candidates also to give their formal support for the janitors’ cause.
Stein, whose campaign is run almost entirely by volunteers, seemed to falter slightly when asked about her charitable donations in the past.
“My work over the past eight or nine years has largely been a donation to charitable causes of a whole variety,” she said, citing her work as a “doctor on call” for several communities and organizations. She was unable to name any specific monetary donations.
Romney, rattled off a list of such donations. His entire compensation for three years of work at the Salt Lake City Olympics went to charity, he said. Over the past five years, he said, 13 percent of his gross income went to charitable organizations, while he also served on the boards of several non-profit charity groups.
“I made a commitment a long time ago, when I was 19, that I would not pass a person on the street with their hand out without putting something in it,” he said.
Last night’s debate, broadcast live by WB-56 from their studio, was the first to include all five gubernatorial candidates. The first two televised debates, which Howell, Johnson and Stein protested, were between Romney and O’Brien. Following the second debate on Oct. 1, both Romney and O’Brien stated their support for inclusion of the third-party candidates.
“Voters have heard a very interesting discussion tonight. People have heard a much broader diversity of opinion,” Stein said as the debate wrapped up. Following the debate, she said she wished there was more time for longer and more in-depth discussion of certain issues.