ieutenant Governor Jane Swift becomes the state's ''education czarina'' today. Let the fact-finding missions begin.
Seriously, there's redundancy here. The state already has an ''education czar'' - the chairman of the Board of Education, a position created in 1995 for John Silber and now held by James Peyser. Besides, Governor Paul Cellucci has always had an education adviser on his staff.
But if there's a czar, maybe there should also be a czarina, reviving a tandem not seen since the eviction of the Romanovs from the Winter Palace on short notice in 1917.
Obviously, Swift, with Cellucci's help, is undertaking an image makeover of epic proportions. If Richard Nixon could re-create himself continuously, perhaps Swift can do it once.
It won't be easy.
In politics, as in life, first impressions can be lasting. This is bad news for the lieutenant governor/education czarina. Impressions one through nine ranged from unseemly to hideous. Not since Queen Elizabeth's ''annus horribilis'' of the early 1990s, when scandal wrecked the marriages of two of her sons and fire devastated Windsor Castle, has a public official had so many setbacks in such a short time.
After Swift took office last year, the incoming news missiles began exploding around her. Staffers were minding her baby daughter. They were helping her move. She took a State Police helicopter home to North Adams at Thanksgiving.
At first, Swift was smugly defiant but finally admitted she had made a mistake. She asked the State Ethics Commission to investigate. This month, the commission, which speaks softly and carries a twig, cleared her of all but one minor conflict-of-interest charge - aides baby-sitting at Swift's home. The panel gave her a slap on the wrist.
Then there were stories about trade missions and other junkets. At one point, she reportedly wanted a bulletproof car for a trade mission to Buenos Aires, offending Argentine officials who resented the implication that their capital city was the Mogadishu of South America. In this hail of bad press, she called off the trip.
There was also a story about a politically wired lobbyist making a call to help her get a good deal on an apartment on Boston's waterfront, and one about a lawyer at another lobbying firm interceding when she obtained a sweetheart $25,000-a-year part-time teaching job for a sparsely attended class at Suffolk University.
Swift is probably fortunate the Ethics Commission did not delve into those matters, which, on the surface, seem gamier than the baby-sitting dustup.
What we have here is a pattern of disquieting behavior. At least Swift, cudgeled to her senses by the press, now seems to recognize this. She is like a new enrollee in a 12-step program. The public apologies have been profuse. So have acknowledgements that she must change her ways to win public confidence. Of course, combined with her new role in government, it's a transparent attempt to repair her image.
But, hey, it's a start.
And let's give Swift and Cellucci a little credit for at least selecting an important issue on which she can focus, redundancy and all.
Certainly, her overtures to the state's educational professionals can't hurt, even if most of them consider Cellucci and Swift to be pedagogical Philistines.
And the news yesterday sounded good: Swift wants volunteer tutors to help 30,000 students who are expected to flunk the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System exams. That won't solve the problems created by the state's test-crazed educational bureaucracy, however.
In remedial summer programs across the state, dedicated and highly motivated teachers, who know the MCAS drill and its rigors, have worked to elevate the performance of failing students. For a good teacher, it's a difficult task. For a college student or other well-meaning volunteers without expertise, it will be frustrating, and, in most cases, futile.
Looming above all this is the prospect that Cellucci could be off to a federal posting if Republican George W. Bush is elected president in November. Swift would become acting governor.
Unless she raises public trust in her ability, Swift will face a bleak two years if she finishes Cellucci's term at the Winter Palace, er, State House.
