Dan Winslow, former counsel to Governor Mitt Romney, former district court judge, and current state rep from Norfolk, is running for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate.
As soon as I heard he was forming an exploratory committee today to help him assess the race, I knew he was in.
No one explores a candidacy, at least in a public way, without having first made up his mind to run. Otherwise, we would have observed someone sometime concluding his explorations by announcing he didn’t have the stuff and wasn’t going to do it.
Have you ever seen that? Have you ever heard a candidacy-explorer or a listening-tour-taker say he found out that the public had zero desire to see him in office, and therefore he was unable to mount a credible campaign?
Of course not.
The only reasons to form an exploratory committee are to force the media to provide you with free publicity, and to generate suspense around your decision and when you are going to decide.
Will Winslow be the one to take on Ed Markey or Steve Lynch? Gee, I don’t know, but a race like that could be interesting. Better keep watching for Winslow in the news.
“Today, I’m taking the necessary steps to form an exploratory committee to test the waters for the U.S. Senate,” Winslow stated in a press release. “We need to fix a broken Washington where progress is being hampered by partisan gridlock. If we continue to elect the same Washington politicians, we cannot expect different results.”
The release continued with this quotation from Winslow, “The people of Massachusetts and all Americans deserve solutions from their elected officials. Washington needs to focus on problem solving and implement ideas that will create jobs and grow our economy,” before concluding: To follow the progress of this testing the waters effort, sign up for Dan Winslow’s mobile messaging by texting DAN to 68398.
Who are the members of Winslow’s exploratory committee? The release doesn’t say. They must feel they can do their work better under cover.
I like Dan Winslow and I’m glad he’s in the race to succeed John Kerry. He’s smart, good-hearted, and filled with ideas on how to improve government. His candidacy will serve the public interest.
Winslow knows that two of the most successful candidates of 2012, Elizabeth Warren and Joseph P. Kennedy, III, burst on the scene with exploratory committees and listening tours. If it worked for them, he’s thinking, maybe it will work for me.
This being politics, there’s always someone in the opposition party ready to stop an explorer and a listener in his tracks. Thus, we had John Walsh, state Democrat Party chair, blasting Winslow right away for being “a member of Mitt Romney’s inner circle who spent last year as one of the former governor’s apologists and political attack dogs. Winslow will work just as hard to stop President Obama’s agenda in the Senate as he did to deny him a second term and send Mitt Romney to the White House.
“During his time on Beacon Hill, Republican Winslow has shown that he is more interested in grabbing headlines than getting work done for the people of the Commonwealth. Even if Winslow has a long list of excuses for why he has been ineffective, it’s hard to imagine that he will get anything done in the U.S. Senate with such a lackluster record in the Massachusetts legislature.”
I think this means Winslow will not be exploring a better professional relationship with Walsh any time soon.
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