Healey Profiled In ‘Boston’ Magazine

Hitting the newsstands tomorrow, Boston magazine’s July Issue features a profile of Lt. Governor and Republican gubernatorial candidate Kerry Healey. Here are some excerpts.

From 1986 to 1997, Healey worked for the Cambridge think thank Abt Associates, where she was termed a ‘quick read-in,’ someone who always got it fast, no matter how complex the matter, according to her boss, Joan Mullen. That quality has become a potent political asset. She’s been to Lawrence 23 times by Mayor Mike Sullivan’s count, and when he told her his big problem was all the vacant lots in the city, she summoned the state’s land-court justices to meet with him regularly to figure out how the city can legally acquire the plots and shift them to productive use. And so it goes with other officials, from Democratic Senator Steven Tolman of Brighton, with whom she’s worked to bring down the state’s nation-leading rate of illegal drug use (and whose fundraiser she dropped in on), to New Bedford’s Representative Steve Canessa, to whom she lent ideas about safeguarding witnesses in order to better prosecute gang violence. She has also, to use her term, ‘quarterbacked’ Melanie’s Law, drumming up support for the tough-on-drunk-drivers legislation after the House tried to gut it; taken the Ally Foundation’s campaign against sex offenders national through the Lieutenant Governors’ Association; and is aiding the Pine Street Inn in building housing for the homeless.

“I thought she was just a rich girl from Beverly,” says South Boston Representative Brian Wallace. ‘We used to make fun of her every St. Patrick’s Day.’ Then he went with her on a tour of the Cushing House drug treatment center, where Healey helped launch a new girls’ wing. As she likes to do, she talked drug policy with him—at length, and in copious detail. ‘I figured she would never get it,’ says Wallace, ‘but she really understands this stuff. Crystal meth, heroin, OxyContin—she knew all the issues, the numbers. She’d been all over Roxbury, Chinatown, Eastie, knew all about the gang violence, about the jails. I was amazed, shocked. She blew me away, she really did.”

Massachusetts, famously, has not been kind to female candidates for higher office, having never elected one either to the U.S. Senate or to the governorship. Healey hadn’t touched that fact in the campaign. During our first get-together, chatting in the back seat of her state-issued Crown Victoria while her driver whisked her up I-93 to a Chamber of Commerce event in Haverhill, I asked her if she was deliberately avoiding the issue. “I don’t avoid it,” she said, a cool tone coming into her voice. “It’s fairly obvious I’m a woman, and I’m a candidate. But the reason that people are going to vote for me has nothing to do with that.” I persisted, bringing up what is sometimes referred to as the Three H’s—the media’s preoccupation with hair, hemlines, and husbands. She tossed that one to her press secretary, who was riding in the front seat, saying with a laugh, “First I heard of that.” Then she turned back to me and said, evenly: “I don’t think I’ve had too much attention in that regard.”

She resists most personal questions, sometimes squirming in her chair while shooting her ever present press secretary an anxious look. When I ask why, she shrugs: “I don’t know.” But she adds that her mother was the same way. “Not everyone finds themselves very interesting.”

Healey’s friends insist her chilly public image is a wild misimpression. “Oh my God,” says Regan Healey-Asnes, her sister-in-law, who has known her for more than 20 years, when I ask her about it. “If people could meet her, they’d fall in love with her. She’s tremendously fun. If you’re at a party, and you want to be around someone who’s always got something insightful and funny to say, she’s the one. She’s terrific. Incredibly loving and loyal and helpful. The minute I’m in her house, there’s such warmth with her!”

Aaron Margolis is a life long resident of the Bay State, and works at an architectural firm north of Boston. Aaron has a Master of Architecture Degree from Boston Architectural College and is currently in the process of becoming of a Registered Architect.