State Senate candidate Burr embracing the role of a challenger

After more than two months of largely door-to-door campaigning, Canton selectman and state Senate hopeful Bob Burr remains very much aware of the challenges inherent in his bid to topple seven-time incumbent Brian Joyce — not the least of which begins with a capital R, as in Republican.

Bob Burr

Burr, who is new to the party, is among several dozen Republican candidates, along with his primary opponent Richard Livingston of Milton, who are vying for a House or Senate seat in the upcoming statewide elections; however, other than a handful of incumbents, most are on the outside looking in, with Democrats currently holding a super majority in both houses of the legislature, including all but five of the 40 state Senate seats.

But according to Burr, that is precisely the reason he has decided to run — in his words, to restore balance and sanity to Massachusetts politics — and it is a message that seems to be resonating with voters all throughout the ten towns of the Norfolk, Bristol & Plymouth district.

“I’m upbeat about what I’m hearing — voters, they want a change,” said Burr in a telephone interview last week.

While there is no question that the former U.S. Senate candidate has run a low-profile campaign thus far — his campaign website, www.voteburr.com, has yet to be updated since it went online in early May — Burr said he has been hard at work over the past two months crisscrossing the ten communities and introducing himself to voters. He added that he has placed a greater emphasis on the towns outside of Canton where he is less well known.

Burr said the people he has spoken to on the campaign trail seem to want what he wants: the return of a two-party system in Massachusetts, a reduction in the “size and scope of government,” and more power in the hands of local communities.

“What I’m hearing is that people want tax relief, and they want relief in order to create jobs in the private sector,” said Burr, who is also hearing a lot about the state’s handling of illegal immigration, which he said is “very unpopular” with voters.

He has also heard a number of complaints about Chapter 40B, the state’s affordable housing law, which allows developers to circumvent local zoning rules in cities and towns with less than 10 percent affordable housing.

From a selectman’s vantage point, Burr said 40B is yet another example of burdensome micromanagement by state lawmakers. Instead, he favors a system that allows communities to control their own growth, albeit “in a good way, not in a discriminating way.”

Overall, Burr characterized the mood of the voters as “interested, engaged, and scared.” They are scared, he said, about losing their jobs and their homes, and there is “great concern” over the health care bill recently passed at the federal level, which used as its template the current health care system in Massachusetts.

“Overall, the concern for the economy and for the future of this country resonate right into these ten communities verbatim,” Burr said, noting that there is a “general dissatisfaction” among voters yet there is “still optimism that we live in a great state.”

“The good news,” he said, “is that every two years or every four years we have the opportunity to elect a whole new group of people.”

Burr said he has even come around on the idea of term limits as an “additional check and balance” for state elected officials, which he believes would help to ensure continued “fairness and rationality in state government.”

Until that happens, however, candidates like Burr and his Republican challenger Livingston will have to prove the old-fashioned way that they are a better alternative to the established incumbent — by letting their message speak for itself at the polls.

Of course, Burr must first distance himself from Livingston in the Republican primary on September 14, and he is hoping to do so using his emphasis on private sector job creation and his six years of experience as a Canton selectman.

If successful in the primary — which he acknowledged will be no easy task — then Burr believes the real question for voters becomes a simple one: “Do you want to trust that putting the same group of people back there [on Beacon Hill] is going to produce different results?”

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Posted by Jay Turner on Jul 15 2010. Filed under Features, News. Both comments and pings are currently closed.