The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog.

For Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey, her high spirits and steely dedication are a year-round demeanor. The former co-captain of Harvard University’s women’s basketball team and a starter on a professional team in Austria applies the competitive drive and shrewd strategic sense to everything she does in government.

We saw those qualities when, as Attorney General, she was a leader among state attorneys general in challenging moves by the first Trump administration. Now she is simultaneously moving forward on her own policy agenda (especially on housing and transportation) and planning defensive responses to the hellscape that Trump is painting for the people of this country.

I’ve always liked Maura Healey since the first day I met her over coffee at the late-lamented Peet’s in Newton Centre as she was gearing up for her first run for Attorney General more than a decade ago. Since then, she has only grown in her focus and competency across a full range of issues.

Speaking to a packed crowd Monday at the Charles River Regional Chamber of Commerce, Healey is ever the coach, praising her team and citing recent Massachusetts “firsts” among states: in education, child care, public safety, clean drinking water. She added to the scoreboard how she lowered certain taxes (including estate and capital gains) and increased child care tax credits, invested in primary care and mental health, and has already made strives on improving transportation, upgrading the T, bringing South Coast rail on line and investing a projected $8 billion over the next 10 years.

But Healey made clear that a truly winning strategy must include significant momentum in housing creation. When I was active in Newton Fair Housing in the late sixties, there was already a reported deficit of some 25,000 units. Despite all the initiatives in the last half century, today Massachusetts lacks more than 200,000 units.

At the end of the last legislative session, Healey signed the Massachusetts Housing Act providing $5.2 billion for 65,000 housing units over five years, along with dozens of policy initiatives. Some 119 cities and towns have passed the MBTA communities act, reshaping zoning to ease multi-unit housing, with, she reports, some 4000 new units already coming on line. These are major moves, and, as important as they are, they are not enough. So her team is now doing an inventory of under-utilized state properties for siting opportunities for more housing.

Housing and transit go hand in hand, both keys to recruiting, retaining and growing workforce to strengthen our economy. She has put points on the board and seems adept at moving the ball, but a winning score has yet to be achieved. She artfully dodged a question on expanding tolls to highways not currently paying their fair share. Nor did she mention the difficulties presented by the huge cost for dealing with recent migrants.

All this is against the backdrop of the slash-and-burn predations of the Trump team – cuts in Medicaid (affecting 2 million Bay Staters), NIH initiatives (battering the state’s nation-leading per capita medical research funding), threatening grants for higher education, – all portending serious harm to the state’s major sectors. Healey says her team is developing strategic responses. There are few, if any, surprises, to these and other upcoming crises, she observes, having seen the other team’s game plan,–the radical recommendations in Project 2025. Defense is paramount for the erstwhile point guard, but, she notes, the minute you allow defense to distract you from your overriding objectives, you’re losing.

Tuesday was a promising day for democracy defenders, with Susan Crawford’s 10-point victory in Wisconsin despite Elon Musk’s $25-million investment in her state supreme court opponent and New Jersey Senator Cory Booker’s awesome, record-breaking 25+ hour passionate speech attacking Trump’s ongoing destruction of democratic norms and Constitutional order. It’s also reassuring that state officials are getting things done, working to solve problems on the home court. Still, to paraphrase Aristotle, “a swallow does not a summer make,” despite one fine spring day.