No doubt there were folks besides Goldberg and her family
and friends who saw her victory coming this past Tuesday in the race for the
Democratic nomination for treasurer, but I was not among them. Even after she received the most votes for
the nomination at the party’s June 14 convention, Godlberg’s
candidacy never much figured in my thoughts -- yet another illustration of my
nearly fatal lack of perspicacity. Oh, well.
At 7:00 p.m. on June 14, as the Democrat convention limped to a
close, the party decided not to
bestow its endorsement for Treasurer on Goldberg because she was one of three
candidates who had received at least 15% of the convention votes, the threshold
for getting on the primary election ballot.
Goldberg won 38.9% of the delegates' votes that day, while Wayland State
Representative Tom Conroy and Andover State Senator Barry Fine gold took 33.9%
and 27.1%, respectively.
The last poll I saw, on Friday, September 5, in the Boston
Globe’s nifty, new “Capital” section, had Finegold leading, with the support
of 21% of survey respondents, followed by Goldberg at 15% and Conroy at
14%. Four days before the election, in other words, the region’s
premier news organ put Goldberg one percentage point ahead of the person who
ended up last in that particular race.
Here are the primary vote totals:
Goldberg, 202,077 (42.7%); Finegold, 149,188 (31.5%); Conroy, 121,802 (25.7%).
Goldberg, who is 60 years old, is nothing if not a portrait
of the power of persistence. After leaving the select board in 2004, she ran in 2006 for the Democratic nomination
for lieutenant governor and finished second in a three-way contest behind
then-Worcester Mayor Tim Murray. She waited
almost eight years to emerge from political hibernation on February 27 of this
year and announce for treasurer. It’s
fair to say that, at that point, her profile was noticeably lower than that of
Senator Finegold, who’d been kind of a big deal in the Merrimack Valley for at
least a decade, and of Representative Conroy, who’d attracted statewide attention in 2012 during an unsuccessful-and-ultimately-aborted campaign
for the Democrat nomination for U.S. Senate, a prize ultimately taken by
Elizabeth Warren, the bane of Scott Brown’s existence.
Goldberg’s treasureship is an almost-but-not-quite-accomplished
fact. She faces a Republican opponent in
November: Michael Heffernan, a financial services professional from Wellesley,
one of the few places in the world with real estate prices in the Brookline
range. But just by being a Democrat on
the ballot in Massachusetts, Goldberg has to be rated a prohibitive favorite.
Goldberg’s background suggests she won't have much trouble
with the duties of chief state financial officer: she has a bachelor’s from
Boston University, a law degree from Boston College, and a master’s in business
from Harvard. More tellingly, she’s from
the immigrant family that launched Stop and Shop, the largest chain of grocery
stores in New England; the Goldbergs
are an accomplished lot.
One day, we should expect to see Treasurer Goldberg running
for governor. That is what treasurers in
Massachusetts do. (Apparently, there’s plenty of
time on that job for dreaming and scheming.)
Goldberg will be bucking the odds if/when she goes for governor. The last four treasurers -- Steve Grossman,
Tim Cahill, Shannon O’Brien and Joe Malone – have all run for governor, and
each, in his or her turn, has suffered defeat.
Yet Goldberg now has a credible chance of becoming governor. If that happens in 2018, she will have made the jump from selectman to governor in less than 15 years. She deserves more than one ovation for putting herself in such a neat position.
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