Keep an eye on Dan Koh
It’s not Marty Walsh who’s looking to move up a step
Forget Marty Walsh. He’s had his run.
It’s Dan Koh, his sidekick, that Democrats should keep their eye on.
Koh, 36, of Andover is Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh’s chief of staff. Before that he served as chief of staff to Walsh when Walsh was mayor of Boston.
While speculation right now has it that Walsh could be a possible candidate for the Democrat nomination for governor, now that Republican Charlie Baker is not seeking a third term in 2022, it is unlikely that Walsh will make the run.
For one thing, he has a cabinet position in the Biden administration that politicians dream of getting after they have been a governor, not before.
Also, he might not have the will or the support to take on Attorney General Maura Healey should Healey decide to run. Boston mayors do not become governors anyway.
Dan Koh is a different story. He is not a candidate for governor, but he could be running for lieutenant governor in a field that is attracting the attention of a lot of potential candidates.
It would have been interesting if Walsh were to run governor and Koh for lieutenant governor in the Democrat primary, but that is not likely to happen.
But Walsh is a big Koh supporter. Walsh not only gave the young, smart and articulate Harvard Business School graduate the key job in his Boston administration, but when Koh ran for Congress in 2018, the thenMayor Walsh pulled out all stops to get him elected.
Koh was nosed out by Lori Trahan of Westford in the Lowell-centered 3rd Congressional District after Trahan came up with a controversial boat load of cash in the last days of the camAlso, paign. It was a crowded contest to succeed retiring U.S. Rep. Niki Tsongas.
In the end Trahan defeated Koh by a mere 145 votes. And while Trahan promised to render independent judgment on the issues, she quickly became a House Speaker Nancy Pelosi stooge.
Koh, meanwhile, became an Andover selectman and then was appointed chief of staff in Marty Walsh’s Department of Labor.
The list of Democrat candidates for lieutenant governor — as well as for governor — has yet to fill out. Baker’s announcement that neither he nor Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito would seek reelection, and the fact that Polito is not seeking the governor’s office, has opened up the political landscape in a major way.
Right now, with Healey still on the sidelines, there are three relatively unknown Democrats running for governor. They are former Pittsfield state Sen. Ben Dowling, state Sen. Sonia Chang-Diaz of Boston and Harvard Professor Danielle Allen.
The field of gubernatorial candidates is expected to grow, as is the number of candidates running for lieutenant governor.
The first candidates to announce for lieutenant governor was state Rep. Tami Gouveia of Acton, a strong public health care advocate. She was joined by businessman Bret Bero, a Babson College lecturer.
However, there are a score of Democrats in the Massachusetts Legislature who are considering a run for lieutenant governor. the name of former U.S. Rep. Joe Kennedy, defeated by U.S. Sen. Ed. Markey in the last election is also being bandied about.
But talking about it and doing it are two different things.
Should Koh make the run, he will bring to the table his experience gathered in running Boston, his experience in Washington, and the accomplishment of running a solid — if defeated — Congressional campaign.
His political trajectory is a reminder of what happened to John Kerry, President Biden’s climate czar, who is jetting around the world saving the planet.
Kerry’s first run for public office in 1972 came to an embarrassing defeat at the hands of Republican state Rep. Paul Cronin in the heavily Democrat Lowellcentered
Congressional district.
Licking his wounds, Kerry
became a lawyer, worked in the Middlesex District Attorney’s Office and in 1982 won a four-candidate primary for lieutenant governor.
Elected with Gov. Michael Dukakis as a team, Kerry served for less than two years before he was elected to the U.S. Senate. He never looked back and in 2004 he was the Democrat candidate for president.
Critics for years have dumped on the lieutenant governor’s job as a path to nowhere. But Kerry showed what an ambitious politician, with luck, can do with it.