By Caitlin Walsh, News Staff
With just a single email sent out to Attorney General Martha Coakley’s supporters this week, the 2014 Massachusetts gubernatorial election has heated up. The email had the subject line: “Charlie is just wrong.”
From there, Coakley’s attack on Republican candidate Charlie Baker continues, pointing out Baker’s polar-opposite stance on the issue of raising the state’s minimum wage.
“He not only said he doesn’t believe we should raise the minimum wage, but that he would actually slash the minimum for some workers,” the email said. “This is the difference between how Charlie and I would govern — I would stand up for working families and listen to them, he would side with big corporations and leave working families to go it alone.”
Baker spokesman Tim Buckley spoke with the Associated Press in response to Coakley’s email however, saying, “Charlie’s position remains clear: He is open to an increase in the minimum wage but thinks we may be able to do better for low-income workers by exploring increases in the earned income tax credit and enacting reforms that protect workers’ hours and create new jobs.”
Coakley’s gubernatorial run comes after a tough 2010 loss to Republican Scott Brown in the special election for Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat after Kennedy’s death in late 2009. That same year, however, she won reelection as the attorney general in the general election, and has held the seat since. Baker’s run comes after losing the gubernatorial election of 2010 to Governor Deval Patrick.
Juliette Kayyem, another Democratic candidate for the 2014 Massachusetts gubernatorial election, also had a stirring week after coming clean about her past with marijuana — and why it’s driving her position on criminal system reform now. Her hope is to lessen the punishments for nonviolent crimes.
In a recent interview with The Boston Globe, Kayyem admitted to smoking marijuana in her teenage years — as well as being punished for it by her parents. However, she has also said she believes that Massachusetts’ criminal system needs to be “more evidence based and less wasteful; more rehabilitative and less purely punitive,” according to her campaign website.
“Society has changed. And we need to make our corrections and prisons and criminal justice system change with it,” she told the Globe.
Aside from Kayyem and Coakley, the Democratic candidates include Donald Berwick, Steve Grossman, and Joseph C. Avellone. The only Republican candidate besides Baker is Mark J Fischer.
