Harvard prof announces run for governor
Danielle Allen makes history with bid
Danielle Allen, a Harvard professor, nonprofit leader and political adviser, announced in front of the State House Tuesday morning that she is running for governor of Massachusetts in 2022.
She is the first Black woman to run for governor in a major political party, the Democratic party, in state history.
“Imagine one commonwealth where those who are in power recognize their responsibility for the greater good, and for those who feel powerless are reconnected to their own agency for communal action. That’s what democracy is about,” she said in her campaign speech. She drew on the “imagine” theme throughout her speech, and her campaign’s signs are emblazoned with the word “ReiMAgine.”
So far, only one other candidate has announced a 2022 run, former state Sen. Ben Downing, who’s running as a Democrat. Jim Conroy, a political adviser for Republican Gov. Charlie Baker, said Baker is focused on leading the state in the wake of the pandemic and hasn’t announced whether he’s running again.
Other possible candidates in the field include Attorney General Maura Healey and state Sen. Sonia Chang-Diaz, both Democrats, and Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito.
Healey has over $3 million in cash on hand and has already conducted polling to compare her public image to Baker’s. She has also crisscrossed the state in a series of visits, including stops in Springfield and Brockton. Chang-Diaz, meanwhile, has already said publicly she is “seriously considering” a gubernatorial run in 2022.
Although Allen, 49, has never held public office, she was chair of the Mellon Foundation’s board, was the youngest ever Dean of Humanities at the University of Chicago, and also chaired the coalition that developed the Biden/Harris administration’s Coronavirus Response Plan.
She currently runs the Edmund J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard.
Former Gov. Deval Patrick and U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren had also never held office before they were elected.
Supporting Allen’s candidacy Tuesday were Cambridge Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui and founder of The Mighty Project Tammy Darling,
who focused in their remarks on Allen’s ability to draw from her communities to enact change.
Siddiqui spoke of Allen’s leadership in helping reopen Cambridge Public Schools during the pandemic this spring, with “a focus on infection control and ongoing testing, tracing, and supported isolation programs for disease control,” she said.
Allen said her family members, some of whom have struggled with addiction, incarceration and homelessness, have been “abandoned” by the government.
To combat this, she said she would focus on creating affordable housing, green and efficient transportation, and “healthy and supportive” schools.
She added that she would re-examine the role of the criminal justice system in the state, including the use of school resource officers.
Mayoral candidate Michelle Wu’s plan to deal with the rough situation at Methadone Mile would include creating a regional task force and immediately conducting an audit of all the city’s properties to see where Boston could quickly add supportive housing.
Wu’s campaign said her plan would include moving ahead with “a comprehensive audit of all City-owned property to identify opportunities to develop supportive housing through our City’s capital budget.”
The idea, she told the Herald, would be to be able to turn around some of the city’s myriad lots or existing buildings for supportive housing. Her campaign said the focus would be on on creating single-room units with support services, which she said have had good results but are lacking in Boston.
“To get a good job, to be healthy, to access services, you need a stable home as a starting point,” Wu told the Herald, saying the solution needs to focus on housing, mental health services, addiction services, transportation and more.
That’s one of the shortterm changes that would look to ameliorate the current state of the area around the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Melnea Cass Boulevard — an area that’s become a haven for open-air drug use and violence. It’s known as “Methadone Mile” or, by people looking to move to a less negative moniker, “Mass and Cass.”
Like many of the other candidates, she said the city needs to decentralize services from that area, scattering the methadone clinics, homeless shelters and addiction treatment centers across the city rather than clustering them all together in one place. Wu said she’d look to create a regional task force.
“This is the epicenter of a citywide and regional set of crises,” Wu said of Mass and Cass.
Wu also said that the police department and prosecutors should work “to scale up efforts to support regional anti-trafficking enforcement” aimed at major drug dealers on the mile.
She also said that the city needs to beef up funding for services across the board, including hiring more people to coordinate street outreach times.
The various candidates for mayor have rolled out plans in some form or another around what to do about Methadone Mile. City Council Andrea Campbell, who released the first one back in February, called the situation at Mass and Cass a top issue facing the city.
Wu’s plan, like Campbell’s and state Rep. Jon Santiago’s, calls for the creation of a point person in the mayor’s office designated to dealing with Mass and Cass.
“We must work as a region to plan for and invest in recovery infrastructure that operates at the regional level, including advocating for a new recovery campus, such as at the Arborway Yards or another publiclyowned parcel,” Wu’s campaign wrote in a press release detailing their plan. That specific Arborway parcel she mentioned is near the Forest Hills station in Jamaica Plain.
Last week when lawmakers advanced an amendment to the state Constitution to raise taxes on millionaires, the light next to House Speaker Ronald Mariano’s name on the voting board lit up green for “yea.”
The same thing happened the next day, Thursday, when the House passed redistricting legislation and a spending bill that included a permanent expansion of voting options, including mail-in balloting in all state elections and early voting before biennial primaries.
While a speaker voting in support of bills without appearing on the House floor may not be unusual, what few lawmakers knew at the time was that Mariano cast those votes from Florida, where the 74-year-old Quincy Democrat had been hospitalized for an issue with his heart.
Mariano’s office confirmed Tuesday that the speaker voted remotely during last week’s Constitutional Convention on Wednesday and during a Thursday formal session, utilizing COVID-19 emergency rules that allow legislators to participate in House business remotely without being in the State House.
Mariano returned to Massachusetts on Monday after being fitted for a pacemaker and remaining in a Florida hospital for a period of time while doctors monitored his condition and adjusted the device.
He said he planned to see his own doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital upon returning to Boston, but on Tuesday he was also back to work taking part in a Democratic caucus call at 10 a.m. and voting in the afternoon on a bill to restore pandemic policies that expired at midnight when the state of emergency in Massachusetts lifted.
While his office said the speaker worked remotely while in Florida, aides declined to disclose when he initially traveled to the state, where he had been hospitalized and for how long. Unlike when the governor leaves Massachusetts, it is not standard for the speaker or the Senate president to publicly disclose their travel plans for the purpose of continuity of government.
Ways and Means Chairman Aaron Michlewitz, a Boston Democrat, said he spoke with the speaker on Tuesday morning, reporting that he “sounded good.”
“He’s obviously aware of what we were doing, things we were working on, and we said we would talk throughout the day as we go through the process of this bill, but first and foremost I’m just happy that he’s doing better,” Michlewitz said.
While Mariano is just six months into his tenure as speaker, the veteran lawmaker has said he has no plans to rival his predecessor’s 12 years in the office and this latest episode has already accelerated chatter about his future and succession planning among those who work on Beacon Hill.
The top Democrat said his experience in Florida reinforced for him the importance of his and the Legislature’s
work on health care policy.
“In my time in the legislature I have spent a lot of it on health care policy. After this first hand look it has hit home for me how important this work is and will continue to be. Everyone everywhere deserves this same level of care,” Mariano said.
The rules utilized by Mariano to vote remotely while recuperating out of state were put in place roughly a year ago to enable the House to safely conduct business during the COVID-19 pandemic without requiring legislators to be in the same room.