Marty Walsh urged to run for 5M-plus reasons

Have you ever noticed that the more money a politician has in his bank account, the more “urged” he or she will be to run for any open elective office?

Urge is a trending word these last 48 hours since Charlie Baker announced that he was retiring due to ill health — the voters got sick of him.

But nature abhors a vacuum, and today plenty of vacuums are being urged to step up to fill the void left behind by that legend in his own mind, Charlie Parker, as the president calls him.

Exhibit A today in the urging sweepstakes is former Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, or as his new boss Dementia Joe Biden calls him, “Walsh Marty.”

According to the Office of Campaign and Political Finance (OCPF), Walsh Marty currently has  “cash on hand” in his war chest of $5,125,489.11.

Like seagulls to an open dump, like moths to a klieg light, that kind of dough attracts a lot of urgings to Walsh Marty from the political “consultant” class. Doesn’t matter if they haven’t won a fight since Tim Cahill, they’ll be circling the Secretary of Labor, looking for their next payday.

Think Doug Rubin.

Another one who’s being urged to run, as you might expect, is Maura “Hold It” Healey, the state attorney general.

There are 3,273,448 reasons Healey is being urged to run, and they all have George Washington’s portrait on them.

Of course, her problem is that she is the state attorney general, and no AG has moved “up,” as opposed to “out,” since Ed Brooke way back in 1966. In fact, state AGs have posted fewer wins over the last half-century than the UMass football team did under fired coach Walt Bell (and his record was a glittering 2-23).

You know what they say about Maura Healey — if you want to hide something real good, just stick it in one of her law books.

She’s had a lot of time on her hands since January, now that she can’t be suing Donald J. Trump every other week.

Like most Massachusetts AGs, Maura’s theory of law enforcement seems to mirror that of the sheriff in Jim Thompson’s famous novel, “Pop. 1280.”

“I had it made, and it looked like I could go on having it made, as long as I minded my own business and didn’t arrest no one unless I just couldn’t get out of it and they didn’t amount to nothin’.”

That m.o. always works great — Maura just sued some company in Illinois for allegedly selling fake hand sanitizers, which we can all agree is a major law-enforcement priority. But eventually you have to run for higher office, and voters notice that the feds are the ones always lugging the real bad guys around here.

Think Troop E of the Mass. State Police. Imagine Hold It in a gubernatorial debate next year against the former U.S. attorney, Andrew Leilling, who went after those sticky-fingered crooked troopers a lot more diligently than Healey.

On the GOP side, the hack consultants who’ve been living large these last eight years are weeping the buckets today. They’d all been urging Lt. Gov. Karyn “Pay to Play” Polito to run, for 2,318,255 reasons.

But what, ultimately, would have been the purpose? Polito had no chance to win, zero. Pay to Play makes even Jane Swift look like Margaret Thatcher.

You might call Karyn a Republican version of Marsha Coakley. Even by the dismal standards of Worcester, she came across as more than a little dodgy.

Plus, it takes a lot of money to run for governor even in a mid-sized state like Massachusetts. Four years ago, when you added up everything, including all the money from outside PAC’s, about $18 million was spent to propel Baker to victory over Jay What’s His Name.

So $2.3 million really isn’t that much if you’re running, but if you’re not — well, that’s a lot of free cash, and you can spend it down to the last dime, as long as you claim you’re using it to advance your own political interests wink wink nudge nudge.

Look at the aforementioned Jane Swift. She left office in January 2003, with a million bucks in the bank, and her campaign committee wasn’t deactivated until July 2009.

The John Cook types around Baker-Polito of course would have preferred one final payday, I mean campaign. But it was not to be.

This is how it usually ends in politics, as Edmund O’Brien wrote of the old mayor’s final loss in the Boston novel, “The Last Hurrah,” and the election-night reaction of his coatholders to the defeat.

“They came back to themselves and the frantic considerations of what mattered most: how would the defeat affect them?

“This was really the heart of the matter. As they explored it, they had a frightening vision of a future filled with pain, uncushioned toil, economy, a future bereft of sinecure, privilege, protection; a future, in short, without City Hall.”

No wonder the hacks are urging every politician with a pulse to run. They never expect it to end this way. Charlie Parker certainly did. He thought he was a wartime governor, the Bay State equivalent of Winston Churchill in World War II.

I guess Tall Deval forgot what happened to Churchill in the first post-war election. He was crushed.

COVID-19 has just claimed another victim. His name is Charlie Parker.