Is the race of a governor finally on the verge of fun? Hurry up

Is the race of a governor finally on the verge of fun?

After months of relative dormancy, the race between Governor Charlie Baker and his Democratic opponent Jay Gonzalez could finally begin to take shape.

The two men met Tuesday in a debate. Two more clashes are expected by polling day.

The silent campaign – finally, deadly – seems so strange for a state as profoundly political as ours, unprecedented lately. There have been tight races and sometimes not so close races, but there has rarely been a governor's race that seems barely going on.

Baker's supporters would attribute this to the stellar ranking of the governor, who is the envy of his peers. Yet, we are talking about a governor who received only 40,000 votes in 2014, the narrowest margin in decades.

Gonzalez has certainly made an effort to turn this into a real campaign. He challenged relentlessly the idea that Baker was an excellent manager of state government. He tried to tie Baker to President Trump. He appealed to party loyalty, posing as a democrat so often that it seems to be his new name.

More importantly, Gonzalez has come up with great ideas for improving Massachusetts. A former health executive, he is a proponent of the shift to single payer health care. The brightest proposal was his proposal to tax the funds of the state's richest universities and colleges to fund his proposals on transportation and early childhood education.

But none of this seems to fit the popular Charlie.

If Gonzalez claims his Democratic pedigree, Baker countered effectively by selling himself as a bipartisan politician at a partisan time. During the debates, he will certainly have a lot of credit for working to control the opioid crisis and for disrupting the state's finances. This may be the first ever governor's race ever contested by two former heads of the state budget; expect to hear about the reserves and whether the rainy day fund of the state is sufficient or non-existent.

But in the short time that remains, I hope these two candidates will have a vigorous debate on how the government should handle this critical moment in the history of the state. Massachusetts is booming, which means it should be the right time to think big. I hope that these two candidates – so deeply immersed in the minutiae of a state government – will be able to overcome this challenge and begin to discuss how we can make progress that does not feel so gradual, so modest.

In his quest for a second term, I hope Baker can explain how his administration will handle serious quality of life issues, such as traffic problems that strangle us. A generation ago, this state has made considerable efforts to fund schools to address long-standing inequities. Why did we abandon that?

Obviously, Gonzalez has a much steeper hill to climb in the next few weeks. Besides the challenge of making a deeper impression on voters, I hope that he can explain how he will pay for his proposals. (Since the staffing tax is not likely to be applied.) I'm eager to know why he considers the single payer a burning issue in a state where the percentage of people with health insurance is already higher than the mostly. I look forward to hearing his vision of a better managed state government and why I should be excited about it.

There is no doubt that these elections will attract more voters than four years ago. People are excited. They want to be heard.

But the race of this governor did not give much passion to work. Some debates will they change that?

Adrian Walker is a columnist for the Globe. You can contact him at [email protected].