Christy Mihos: A Perot for Massachusetts?

Convenience store magnate Christy Mihos has jumped into the Massachusetts gubenatorial race as an independent, and I'm wondering if he's just the thing to break a 15 year stretch of increasingly annoying Republicans in office.

The first thing you have to wonder when reseraching this guy is what they were thinking with the campaign website. "Christy Mihos for Governor" appears across the top in a kind of script, with the letter i dotted with a star, twice. I suspect the designer may have been trying to echo the american flag faintly visible below the title, but instead it comes across as a teenaged-girl-doodling-in-a-notebook motif. Though maybe they're courting the gay & female block? Who knows.

Mihos appears to be running on a property tax reform platform. "Protecting the taxpayer!" appears at the top of every page,* and the sole campaign position is centered around the recently reported population decline in the state:

Last year, Massachusetts was one of only three states to lose people, and it was the second year in a row that we ended the year with fewer people than we started with. Massachusetts is the only state in the entire country that can make that claim.

So why would people leave?

I’ve traveled the state asking that question, and time and again, the answer is the same: skyrocketing property taxes. Most families I’ve chatted with have said they would move back to Massachusetts in a heartbeat – but only if they could afford it.

[emphasis added]

I have a hard time believing it's *just* the property taxes in play here. Did a single person mention the state income tax? Other miriad taxes? Maybe the high cost of property itself, aside from the taxes?

To be fair, it's good to have focus. A single-issue campaign is easy for people to get their heads around. But anyone who can succesfully navigate the minefield of issues facing Massachusetts voters is going to have a better chance turing out the vote, I would think.

So if Christy stays in the race, and he sure has the cash to do it, maybe he'll simply draw off enough votes from Kerry Healy to let a Democrat win for a change. Then it'll be back to single party corruption-as-usual in the Bay State.


* really, it needs 2-3 additional exclamation points to be consistent with the star-dotted-i in the banner.