Was it only yesterday that Sen. Dianne Wilkerson's campaign lackey stated they were looking for closure and resolution? The eight-term (16-year) lawmaker/lawbreaker still found lots of supporters who said the least she deserved was a recount in her 228-vote out of nearly 18,000 ballots loss to Sonia Chang-Díaz.According to Herald this evening, she got enough sigs in three wards — 8, 9 and 12 — to force recounts there. Those were among her strongest voter sets. She had hoped to have her five biggest wards in count, but apparently fell short in 10 and 11. That's more like what we'd expect.
Hearing Wilkerson would not accept the vote, Chang-Díaz scrambled to get her strongest ward, 19, in the recount and did so.
The four wards' ballots will get a recount Saturday in City Hall room 241, an Election Department space. As this was not a sticker campaign like the one two years ago, there's not much chance of reversing the victory. Wilkerson seems not to want closure, but more like a fantasy victory manifested.
The Herald also reports that Wilkerson will meet in Dorchester this evening with supporters to decide whether to go totally Don Quixote on Second Suffolk and try a November 4th write-in campaign.
She's nearly completed her descent into the pathetic. In confusing spirited fighting and obstinate stupidity, she continues to marginalize herself and hamper what I can only see as her brand.
As voters showed this time, even with the huge power of incumbency, all the endorsements she wangled near the end of the primary and the last-days spending and robo-calls, she lost. She overplayed her abuse of laws and regulations, overstayed her welcome with the public, and frayed the credibility of voters with unsupported claims of out-of-state funding, a small subset of voters in a few precincts being unable to find new polling places, and the repeated call that the district had to keep the sole black senator. The black v. Hispanic racism may simply have been too much.
I don't know whether she's had ill counsel or whether her obvious blunders are from her core (not as she loves to say in code, the district's core). I've contended repeatedly that with her enormous campaign advantages, publicly admitting her repeated errors and apologizing would still have delivered the election. She seems incapable of saying, "I'm sorry."
Meanwhile though, her surely diminishing set of supporters has to be dismayed. Fewer and fewer can claim she has any grace or realism about the campaign, her loss, and her behavior over the past several terms.
You'd like your candidate to show more than blind resoluteness.
Tags: massmarrier, Massachusetts, Senate, primary, recount, primary, Boston, Wilkerson, Chang-Diaz
2 comments:
I still think i should get the mug. ;)
It's so sad to see a well-liked public servant send themselves down in flame. She's been a friend to everyone but herself.
True enough. Had her outcome been more dire, she might fall into the tragedy/tragic flaw categories. Yet lest I fall into romanticism here, I recall the sobering analysis of Morse Peckham's Beyond the Tragic Vision. That puts me, and her, back to the mundane. Coulda, shoulda, woulda -- all part of human choices.
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