Romney To The Rescue?

While we were on Martha's Vineyard last week, the other big story was the Boston tunnel collapse as part of the "Big Dig" federal highway construction project.

Massachusetts Attorney General Tom Reilly (a Democrat who happens to have his eye on the governor's job, by the way) has quite rightly made it clear that he intends to go after everyone involved in the project who may have been negligent in a manner that could have contributed to the collapse that killed Milena Delvalle and injured her newlywed husband Angel Delvalle, both of Costa Rica.

Since partisan blame is inevitable unfortunately, it should be pointed out that John Kerry objected to the appointment of Richard Capka as head of the Federal Highway Administration overseeing the project prior to Matthew Amorello's ownership of the project (Amorello is currently the head of the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority). And as noted from here, Jim Kerasiotes was appointed as head of the project prior to that time (more on him appears below).

I thought this paragraph from the Blue Mass Group link was interesting:

...Maybe it's unseemly to get partisan about this right now, but here goes. Since 1991 - which is when most of the Big Dig construction has occurred - Republicans have been running the show. Yes, there has been an overwhelmingly Democratic legislature in all that time. But the Governor appoints the Turnpike Authority board members and the Highway Commissioner, as well as the head of every other state agency. Legislators don't make appointments. Every decision made by the Turnpike Authority, the Public Works Commissioner, or whoever was running the Big Dig over the last 16 years, every state inspector who failed to do his or her job, every failure to supervise outside contractors, all of that stuff can be traced directly back to one of four people: Bill Weld, Paul Cellucci, Jane Swift, or Mitt Romney. The Republicans have been managing this project for 16 years, and they must be held accountable for that. If you needed a reminder, here's a Globe story about Jim Kerasiotes, brought in by Bill Weld to manage the Big Dig, who was eventually forced to resign in disgrace following revelations of cost overruns and management failures, after years of assuring everyone that the project was "on time and on budget," and intimidating anyone who dared question him into silence.

More appears on this story from Blue Mass Group here.

I'm not saying that the Democrats should be entirely let off the hook on this. After all, they have an oversight function in this too (to me, saying that they should be is like saying any Democrat who supported the Iraq War is innocent because the Democrats weren't the majority party of all branches of government at the time).

However, I think it's ridiculous for Romney to act like he's going to save the day (dutifully reported in that manner by the tabloid Boston Herald last week, which was perversely funny actually) when he has been as big a malefactor in this mess as anyone.

This should all be turned over to the NTSB, as one Blue Mass Group commenter noted, especially since the first thing Romney apparently did after he tried to wrest control of the project from Amorello was go on vacation in New Hampshire and make assistant Kerry Healey acting governor.

I can now see why Romney thinks he's qualified to make a run for president; a move like that is right out of Dubya's playbook.

Update 7/27: Yeah, Amorello is partly to blame, but so are others, including Romney, who's using him as a scapegoat.

Update 7/31: At least when W.C. Fields wanted to make a racist remark, he had the good sense to say “an Ethiopian in the fuel supply” instead, Mitt (can you just feel the air whizzing out of Romney’s presidential “trial balloon,” which is what this had turned into for him?).