Weld cuts check for Grossman, Berwick is a knight, and more

Playing in the Democratic field is not that new for Weld, since he joined Mintz Levin’s lobbying outfit, ML Strategies. Last year, he donated $500 to House Speaker Robert DeLeo and another $250 to state Senator Benjamin Downing of Pittsfield, who is now cochairman of the 2014 Democratic Coordinated Campaign Committee.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Don Berwick is a knight. (Yes, as in Camelot and the Knights of the Roundtable.)

Only, Berwick’s knighthood is honorary because he is an American and not a British citizen, which also means he doesn’t get the title that typically comes along with being knighted. So, there’s no calling him “Sir Don” — just Dr. Berwick.

It was for Berwick’s work in health care that Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II appointed him an honorary Knight Commander, Order of the British Empire in 2005.

Berwick, a pediatrician by training, helped improve Britain’s publicly funded health care system in his former role as head of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, a 34-year-old nonprofit dedicated to improving health care worldwide.

Knighthood, or damehood if you’re a woman, is no small thing. It is a centuries-old tradition considered one of the highest honors bestowed on someone in the United Kingdom. It can’t be bought and recognizes, according to the Official Website of the British Monarchy, “significant contributions to national life.”

For Berwick, 67, that was his contribution to improvements to Britain’s National Health Service.

Berwick has also run a multimillion-dollar, global health care nonprofit, was the head of the federal Medicare and Medicaid programs, and has been an ardent proponent of Massachusetts moving to a single-payer health care system.

Yes, there are altruistic reasons behind his push, but he said there are economic ones, too. With about 42 percent of the state’s budget dedicated to health care costs, Berwick said Massachusetts is “mortgaging the future.”

If you want to save money, he said, health care is where you do it.

“I’m vying for a job as an executive. I’m not doing this to be a politician. I’m doing this to be a CEO,” he said recently.

And among the honors listed on his bio to be governor is knighthood. Just don’t call him sir.

Press secretary Kate Norton took a lemon for Mayor Martin J. Walsh.

Literally.

Last weekend, Norton stood on the edge of a scrum of reporters on Boylston Street, minding her boss as he took questions. Walsh was there to accept an oversized check for the One Fund, the charity that helps victims of the Marathon bombings.

As Walsh spoke, someone hurled a lemon in the direction of the mayor. Norton gallantly stood her ground, putting her body in the path of the lemon and shielding her boss. Or maybe Norton happened to be standing in the right place, oblivious of the flying yellow fruit.

Either way, the lemon struck Norton in the upper back and fell harmlessly to the ground. Walsh was safe.

The incident raised a question. Norton’s predecessor, Dot Joyce, took a lot of flak for former mayor Thomas M. Menino. But did Joyce ever protect her guy from an errant piece of fruit?

“There was lots of things flying,” Joyce said. “I can’t recall if there was any fruit.”

The state’s AFL-CIO is pretty much sitting out the primary elections after none of the Democratic candidates for state treasurer could muster the two-thirds vote this week at the union’s political endorsement meeting.

When the union’s Committee on Political Education met Monday at Suffolk Downs race track, longtime Democratic activist and former Brookline selectwoman Deborah Goldberg came within several votes of getting the needed super-majority for an endorsement. She was held back by some labor leaders who wanted to give it to state Representative Thomas P. Conroy, who is the House cochairman of the Committee on Labor and Workforce. The third candidate, state Senator Barry R. Finegold of Andover, was never in the running after alienating labor over a number of legislative votes.

The union is not endorsing in the three-way gubernatorial race. To no one’s surprise former state senator Warren E. Tolman got the backing earlier in May for his campaign to become attorney general. He is in a tight primary fight with assistant Attorney General Maura Healey. His brother, Steve Tolman, who held his brother’s seat for years, is now the AFL-CIO president.

The question, with no other endorsements, is whether Steve Tolman can get the unions to cough up some big money for his brother, who is depending on a strong television ad blitz to win.

GOP activist Steve Duprey of Concord, N.H., has been named chairman of a newly formed Republican National Committee presidential primary debates committee for 2016. His goal: fewer, better events than in the past.

On Facebook, he described his mission like this: “spreading the debates out over many states at well-spaced intervals, but not so many as to overburden candidates, bore voters, or have vapid questioning like the ‘boxers or briefs’ questions that we saw in the past.”

It’s not every day that one gets noticed by the president of the United States. But that happened to former city councilor Michael P. Ross, when President Obama tapped him last month as a new member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council.

Ross, who campaigned unsuccessfully for mayor last year, is a longtime advocate for human rights, and his father, Stephan, is a Holocaust survivor.

“For me, it’s personal because my dad is a survivor,’’ Ross said this week about the appointment. “I lost cousins. I lost my grandparents in the Holocaust. For me, this [appointment] is a tremendous honor.”

Established by Congress in the 1980s, the council, which meets twice each year, is the governing board of trustees of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Its 63 members include 55 appointed by the president. Each presidential appointee serves a five-year term.

The Mayday PAC — organized by Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig and others to curtail the influence of big money in politics — has chosen a second New Hampshire candidate to support.

The PAC announced last month that it would back Jim Rubens, a US Senate candidate running in a Republican primary against Scott Brown. This week, the PAC announced its support of three more candidates, including the incumbent Democrat, Representative Carol Shea-Porter of New Hampshire’s First District.

Shea-Porter is in a tough reelection fight and — depending on the outcome of a GOP primary — could face her old foe, Republican Frank Guinta, for the third time.

Guinta beat Shea-Porter in 2010; she returned the favor in 2012.