Posted on 09/15/2006 9:46:01 AM PDT by LurkedLongEnough
QUINCY - First it was a hairnet, now it’s a hard hat.
Lt. Gov. Kerry Healey is finding it a challenge to stay fashionable on the campaign trail.
For the second time in a month, the Healey campaign requested news coverage of an event yesterday and then refused to allow photos to be taken.
In New Bedford last month, Healey didn’t want to be seen wearing a hairnet at a fish processing plant.
This time it was a bright yellow hard hat she donned for a tour of the Twin Rivers Technologies plant in Quincy.
‘‘Sometimes on a campaign you just don’t want photos to be taken and this is one of those photos,’’ Healey press aide Amy Lambiaso told a Patriot Ledger photographer.
Massachusetts politicians have been sensitive to pictures of themselves in strange head gear since former Gov. Michael Dukakis squeezed into an undersized Army helmet and posed on a tank in 1988 while running for president. The image is remembered as a political gaffe of the first order.
Healey aides invited the media to accompany the Republican gubernatorial candidate during a campaign stop yesterday at the Twin Rivers plant on the Fore River. But when it was time for the tour, which for safety reasons required all involved to don hard hats and thick plastic goggles, campaign members asked Patriot Ledger photographer Gary Higgins to leave.
Lambiaso said no photos were allowed because the tour included proprietary information the manufacturer didn’t want made public.
Before Healey arrived, however, Twin Rivers president Paul Angelico told The Patriot Ledger that photographs could be taken along the tour except for select locations that executive assistant Michelle Anzivino would point out.
When Higgins explained this, Lambiaso replied the decision to bar photographs was a matter of image.
While touring a New Bedford fish processing plant Aug. 14, Healey was asked to wear a hairnet like those worn by workers. Lambiaso refused to allow a photographer for the New Bedford Standard-Times to accompany Healey in the plant, saying, as she did yesterday, that company officials were to blame.
But the Standard-Times, too, had been told by the company earlier that photos would be allowed. Lambiaso amended her explanation and acknowledged it was a ‘‘campaign decision.’’
‘‘It was not a photograph we were interested in,’’ she reportedly told the photographer.
Healey isn’t always adverse to photographs of herself with a hard hat on. In the wake of a ceiling collapse in one of the Big Dig tunnels that killed a person, there was TV and photo coverage of Healey and Gov. Mitt Romney walking through one of the tunnels with hard hats perched on their heads.
Healey launched a television campaign challenging Democratic hopeful Chris Gabrieli yesterday, but the mood at the plant was strictly business as company president Angelico explained his company’s role in fatty acid production and what he would like to see from Massachusetts leadership.
Twin Rivers Technology is the largest producer of fatty acids and oils in North America, used in products ranging from Tide detergent to Doritos chips. In recent years, the company’s Cincinnati plant has started producing biodiesel fuel, a clean-burning and renewable energy source that Angelico said could take off in Massachusetts.
‘‘We need to create an energy policy that will help stimulate the economy,’’ he told Healey. ‘‘If Massachusetts takes the lead in New England, other states will follow.’’
At the end of the tour, Healey expressed interest in taking a closer look at the issue, if elected.
‘‘I think it is very interesting,’’ she said. ‘‘There is no economic disadvantage for including biodiesel in our portfolio.’’
Howie Carr's first rule of politics: Never let yourself be photographed wearing a funny hat.
Kerry in his bunny suit 3...2...1...
Beat me to it!
Another example of the progressive socialist attack on the First Amendment - banning the free press.
Are you happy now, you jerkoffs mccain & feingold?
Sounds like the type who doesn't wear helmets when biking because she'll get "helmet hair". I can understand the hairnet thing, but not the hard hat. I don't find it unusual seeing people, including politicians, wearing hard hats when they're doing photo ops, for example at a groundbreaking ceremony.
From what I can tell a paper bag would be appropriate.
Hahahaha! Thanks, I laugh everytime I see Kerry in his dorky spacesuit!
Or is the spacesuit dorky because Kerry is wearing it?
It's a bad picture.
She's actually not bad looking.
They were on private property.
Thank you! That picture always puts a smile on my face.
Kudos to you!
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