They took Carla away.
Massachusetts politics and public policy just won’t be the same without Carla Howell. She was fun, she was cranky, she was adventurous, and she was super-organized in an anal way that set her apart from almost every other political figure in creation.
And perhaps most important of all, Carla didn’t mind losing, as long as she made her point and, in some cases, scared her opponents half to death in the process.
Operating in a state that features an excruciating, elect-lots-of-Democrats, tax-and-spend political environment, Carla Howell offered up the entertaining slap in the face that every political system needs to keep itself sharp. You didn’t have to like her; you didn’t have to agree with her to recognize her value in saying and doing what so few were willing to say or do.
She has an MBA from Babson, in marketing and entrepreneurship – and she must have learned a lot. She was a consummate marketer of ideas and candidates (including herself) and her entrepreneurial spirit was apparent in her professional life (marketing and software development) and her politics.
Everybody needs a hobby – and Carla chose Libertarian politics, as in the official Libertarian Party. You know them: Small government, low taxes. Privatize almost every government service. Nationally, the Party has never been in danger of stealing the White House from the Democrats and Republicans. The Party occasionally sneaks someone into Congress with a Republican label (Ron Paul, for example).
At the state and local level, it occasionally snatches a few obscure offices. But its primary function is to communicate the notion that less is more, when it comes to government, and that nothing beats “liberty” and “freedom.” As a popular Libertarian bumper sticker puts it, “We’re pro-choice on everything.”
Good Times Roll
Carla, of course, was in Massachusetts, not a safe haven for advocates of less government and low taxes. And yet, she showed the boys and girls how to have a good time.
As the Libertarian Party candidate for U.S. Senate in 2000, against Ted Kennedy and a Republican, she shocked the state (and, truth be told, the Libertarians as well) by snaring 12 percent of the vote.
She made the powers-that-be perspire twice in a decade, with remarkably threatening statewide ballot initiatives to kill the Massachusetts income tax – campaigns that garnered about 1 million votes each time.
In 2010, the pest struck again, with a ballot initiative to roll back the state sales tax – which attracted 966,973 votes.
She was the chair of the state’s Libertarian Party for two terms, and garnered more than the usual amount of publicity – because she’s good at it.
But now, a great silence will fall across the Massachusetts political landscape. Carla has been plucked by the national Libertarian Party to be its executive director.
The timing isn’t bad. The Libertarians are having a good time this year, watching Ron Paul snare a respectable number of votes in the GOP Presidential primaries. Paul was the Party’s official candidate in 1988, but with the GOP label uneasily attached to his lapel, he’s enjoying himself. Even in Massachusetts, he received 10 percent of the primary vote – twice as much as Newt and almost as much as Rick Santorum.
If the sleepy national inspiration for the rest of the year will be Mitt and Barack, and Congress remains in some sort of mumbling deadlock, Carla just might be able to work her magic and stake out a position for Libertarian ideals in the same room with the adults.
To be sure, the Libertarian Party is not a political movement likely to take the nation by storm. This might be the year, however, with Carla Howell at the helm, when the ideology becomes more widely appealing – whether or not anyone bothers to vote for a Libertarian candidate.
In Massachusetts, Howell focused on lowering taxes, a more popular and less odd initiative than some of what the Libertarians offer up in the name of freedom and small government. The movement is not as one, but Carla Howell will make it lovable.
