Tuesday Will Be Huge: Endorsements

Smearing the ovals is always important and even more so November 5, 2013. Obviously for Bostonians, choosing a new Mayor will likely set the new tone and agenda for 12, maybe even 20, years.

The City Council composition will change more than it has in memory. Going beyond the strong-Mayor/weak-Council cliché, we need only look at how much the Council has done beyond its statutory budget-approval power. We expect and demand much more than replacing toppled stop signs from the crew of 13.

This time, with four Councilors not running for reelection because they ran exclusively for Mayor, the change will be dramatic. I confess that I regret that Arroyo, Consalvo, Ross, and Connolly will be gone. Each has been active and brought his own visions and schemes.

I sometimes make light of their grandiloquent claims of being legislators. The archaic MA Home Rule system means that all municipalities here, even the biggest one, have to beg the commonwealth for any changes in governance and any plan to raise revenue. Yet if you look through the résumés on the Councilor pages at cityofboston.gov, you can see what each has accomplished. It's impressive and a good reason to consider Councilor votes carefully.

Only one district Councilor (Frank Baker in D3) is unopposed. The other incumbents should win reelection easily...except for do-nothing Bill Linehan (D2). There, Suzanne Lee, who almost unseated him two years ago and lost by only 97 votes, has a great chance of winning.

I'm not in that district and maybe shouldn't comment. She's a great progressive with a solid platform. Were I in D2, I'd vote for her.

Where I can vote is in my D5, for at-large Councilors and for Mayor.

• District 5 Council. My preferred candidate, Mimi Turchinetz, just missed the runoff. Neither remaining, Tim McCarthy or Jean-Claude Sanon, excites me. Rob Consalvo was great on both constituent services and implementing improvements. I can't see either of the two coming to his level. However, McCarthy at least has done the services job for the Mayor for years. So he has the slight edge here. 
• At-Large Council. You can pick up to four out of eight running. Two existing ones definitely need to return. Steve Murphy is the one all Councilors turn to with the can-we-afford-that questions. He knows money. Plus, he's been a worthy Council President for the past three years, keeping everyone on track and making sure the key discussions and votes happen. Ayanna Pressley is a strong social activist, particularly on issues for women and girls, including violence. Then I urge turning to, if you pardon that overworked term, new blood. Michell Wu has specific planks for jobs, education and safety and good credentials already. and Jeff Ross is a youngish lawyer with big social visions, oh, and he's comfortable saying he'd be the first openly gay Councilor. He'd be a good addition to help keep the Council acting for the right reasons as well as toward the right goals. We can't have too much of that. 

The Big One

Mayor. I wish I had the perfect candidate, someone I could get as excited about as Elizabeth Warren for US Senate. At least along with my research, stump-speech visits, and forum and debate attending and watching, I had the benefit of talking with both Marty Walsh and John Connolly at Left Ahead. In fact, I held off until the recent chats to make a final decision. Both are liberal-to-progressive sorts with good positions on nearly everything. Either should be a good Mayor.

Neither is a great orator (although Connolly has an edge in public speaking) nor a charismatic presence. Of course, our beloved Mayor Thomas Michael Menino was not and is not, not when running for D5 Council nor for Mayor. He both won again and again and again, and has done a fine job.

I ended up deciding to go with John Connolly for several key factors. Emotionally, I have been appalled at the calumnies against him, even at lefty joints I frequent, like BlueMassGroup. Five or six folk who post diaries or comments there have pounded him for months, with often false and even paranoid slanders. For example, he has long said and written that he was a former teacher for serving as such two years at a Jesuit middle school in NYC and the one year at a charter school back here. The anti-Connolly types repeated the lies that he claimed to be a career teacher and was thus a fraud. Instead, he said that those three years made such an impression that he has worked to improve schools for all and eagerly took on the arduous duties of the Council's education committee for four years. They, and amusingly enough those who comment on the Boston Herald site, also love the loony rap about his surely, absolutely (but without any evidence) brief career at Ropes & Gray as proof of something nefarious and terrible. In fact, his two-plus years there had him as a junior, a newbie, who really didn't get connected to big shots and others the slanderers irrationally hold that somehow must have happened. They have him as a 15-year "corporate lawyer," as a mark of shame. Both the time and duties are false. Also, his irresponsible accusers take him to task for "privilege," as in attending private prep school in Boston (even though Walsh did too), having graduated from Harvard and getting a BC law degree. By any local standards, all those things are traditionally virtues and suggest competence and smarts. Trying to twist them into insults is beyond silly.

Finally for Walsh, I really only have one serious problem with him and he hasn't been at all helpful here. He's had a life as a union leader, getting into it as naturally via his father as Connolly did via his Secretary of the Commonwealth dad. He's made many hundreds of thousands from union pol positions. I have been a union member and support unions strongly. However, Walsh's trust-me attitude sucks. He has tried repeatedly to get Beacon Hill to pass legislation that would mandate arbitration rulings on municipalities, as in taking away budget approval power from the Boston City Council. His response to questions about this, as in the recent Boston Police Patrolmen's award was to trust him. Trust him that the contracts would never get to an arbiter. Trust him that he'd be so on top of union issues that he'd work out a deal before a crisis. I can't do that. I've seen and known far too many politicians for far too long to accept just trust me. (I think of the POTUS an his spying and drones crap. I don't trust him on either.)

It is not a begrudging endorsement of Connolly. I ate their platforms repeatedly in the many ways they served them to me. Connolly has the edge on vision and path to his goals.

The Picks

• Mayor — John R. Connolly
• At-Large — Stephen J. Murphy, Ayanna S. Pressley, Michelle Wu, Jeffrey Michael Ross
• D5 Council — Timothy P. McCarthy

No Hyde Park Home Run

 My fantasy and hope for last evening was that one of the eight candidates would totally outshine the others. There were a few who disqualified themselves to my thinking, but none that won it all.

The event was a forum for the Fairmount Hill Neighborhood Association's monthly meeting. Regular readers here know I disdain these 45-second-answers joke. Yet, I held hope.

I sat next to UniversalHub's Adam Gaffin. While I was out doing necessaries this morning, he managed to push out a recap, which is here. He captured the drift of the drifting responses, without being judgmental. I'll do for him. Check his for key topic comments by the candidates.

Where I could find a website or at least a Facebook page, I linked the first mention of the candidate's name to it. I included some mugs, more as graphic devices than anything of real value. The shot for Callendar, who was absent due to a conflict, is a partial cap from her campaign site.

Arbitrarily, I comment in first-name order.

Andrew Cousino.	Sincere, concerned about the poor and homeless, but not ready for prime time. He has slowly, steadily advanced himself, now to an special officer for Longwood Security Services. He didn't offer much and nothing inspiring or new. Off my list.
Granddaughter of former State Rep. Willie Mae Allen, the 25-year-old law student was raised as an activist. She's chipper, eager and says she can relate to the youth voters. Maybe, but I didn't hear any substance when the moderator read the answers she prepared. She too needs seasoning.	Ava Callendar.
Jean-Claude Sanon.	He radiated quiet competence and confidence. He was first to mention and stress constituent service, odd as typical voters see that as key for the office. He certainly wouldn't be in line with existing Councilor Rob Consalvo's innovation-of-the-week legislation, something D5 folk have come to accept and expect. He was OK but not a powerhouse.
A realtor with the requisite bubbly personality, she has the view of the three D5 neighborhoods tied to the likes of housing stock, jobs, and shopping area vitality. She'd aim to bolster the shortcomings per neighborhood. She supports more voc-ed HS, and called linking Madison Park and Roxbury Community College a union of two underperforming institutions. Where she did have positions, they were fair to good.	Margherita Ciampa-Coyne.
Michael Wells.	A peculiar guy, he lost me by demanding (twice) a revisit of the Casey overpass replacement. That's been settled at all levels after much discussion, it's in JP as well, and would be a total waste for all. He also didn't know anything about Mattapan,which seemed OK to him. No thanks.
A real disappointment last evening, because we'd met most recently at the ribbon cutting for the Fairmount Grill. She told me with a smile she considers herself an activist and troublemaker. Her website is also coy and does not provide those progressive planks she claims to have. She's one of several running on résumé. She presented very well but suffered largely from my expectations unmet.	Mimi Turchinetz.
Patrice Gatozzi.	We all know her from running HP Main Streets very well for years. Am amusing note from last night is that her son was the official timekeeper and he was fair enough to cut her off several times. She's very nice and enthusiastic. I don't see her as having Consalvo's organizational skills, passion and anal-retentive detail mind. He can be demanding enough to make things happen, as he did for me as my Councilor. I have no sense she can.
He surely will be in the run-off. He's been a career Boston operative, what the Herald snarky types would be quick to call a hack, but his credentials put him in the macher class of folk who make things happen. He waffled on charter school cap (more study he said), he wants the whole city to vote on an East Boston casino, he'd talk to big-box stores, he would pour money into the HP community center and to revitalize Cleary Square along the lines of Roslindale's center. He sounds too much like Scott Brown, trying to please all and be the fulcrum. A+ for confidence.	Tim McCarthy.

Friends and neighbors who know of my political interest as well as blogging and podcasts ask the hard and obvious questions about whom to vote for. I'd like to give definitive answers — not yet. Granted this is a complex municipal election, for mayor, for at-large City Council and for a few of the open district seats, including this one.

Last night settled little for me. I'll have to keep reading, attending speeches and fora, and for the November final, the debates leading to it.

For D5, I think I'd like to see Mimi and Tim in a final, replete with meaningful debates. Rob has spoiled us for simultaneous top-gear services and zap-pow ideas/implementation plans spurting like soft-serve ice cream. This is no election for so-so candidates.

Better Safe...AND Sorry?

Cue continued outrage from left and right on American phone and internet transactions being spook monitored. This hoo-ha is disingenuous and decades late. The mice that are Americans long ago gave it up.

As a baby boomer, I was wee when Sen. Joseph McCarthy terrified my parents' generation. He ran the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, as well as inspiring similar lunacy at the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the Subversive Activities Control Board, and even linked to the Hollywood (really all entertainment industry) blacklisting. He couldn't have destroyed so many lives, lied so many lies and instituted the mechanisms without lots of help, such as Ronald Reagan, then head of the Screen Actor's Guild, and a McCarthy's good buddy and fellow Senator Richard Nixon.

Art note: The period Soviet poster exhorts young builders of communism to educate and convert.

Until 9/11, the craziness of that era seemed far away and unreproducible. Lists of covert communists insinuated in the State Department? Actors living to subvert us with their performances? Professors converting innocent students to Soviet control? Clear crap, we might have thought...until recently.

Now our irrational nation fear is not of Russians nor their contemporary Yellow Peril as the WWII generation dubbed the rising Chinese. Rather, terrorists in the form of the various al-Qaeda incarnations, the Taliban, and any person or group who kill Americans, particularly in the United States are, well, terrorizing us.

---

Granny Says

---

Maybe your grandmother used the folksy, "Better safe than sorry," as mine did. That was an analog of the Boy Scouts' "Be prepared." Sure, there irrefutable simple-mindedness there, but little else.

I eventually learned that such verbal tics are merely I-told-you-so placeholders. It's like hearing either, "It's only commonsense," or "Let's not reinvent the wheel." The message behind those wheezes is, "I have nothing, not reasoning or proof. I'm about to make bald assertions that I don't want challenged."

Back in the post-WWII Red-Scare times and now again in post-9/11, those with little or no regard for this nation's famous, hard-won, clearly defined freedoms do their worst. Yes, it was McCarthy, Nixon and Reagan before and after their presidencies, the Bushes both spook and the lesser, and now President Obama.

---

Time to Reverse

---

There is cause for outrage, for extreme wariness, for remedies.

Again, as a boomer, I grew up with the idea and ideals that we were exceptional as a nation. It wasn't the unjustifiable manifest-destiny thing. Rather, from  the Colonial era, through our revolution, into our states' and federal constitution and its add-ons, we set the world tone for liberty. We guaranteed a free press, free church, and even forbade the English occupation evils such as no-due-process for searches, trials or punishments.

Wow, we goofed up big time again and for the past 12 years in particular.

We've sent uncharged vaguely defined enemies off for torture and almost certainly did the same here. We run a concentration camp in Cuba where hundreds of uncharged suspects despair. We allow civilian-on-civilian gun murder on the skimpiest of excuses of feeling our lives or even property just might be somehow, someway threatened.

Now again we find that covertly and with or without Fourth Amendment safeguards, our very words and movements are captured, stored and analyzed. The oppressive policies we decry in China, Indonesia and elsewhere seem to too many to be OK here, as in better safe than sorry.

The pathetic corollary to such unjustifiable intrusion is a pattern of individual brutality. In the Red-Scare era, people (as in Americans) were denied their livelihoods, accused of and brought to trial for treason, hounded from their homes and professions, and beaten down even into suicide.

Let's forget the slippery-slope argument. Instead, this should be binary. What if one of more security agencies or some level of cop decide your internet activities or phone calls "prove" you are a terrorist or otherwise threat to the nation or one its politicians? Our legal system's background aside, that seems more like Gitmo than innocent until proven guilty.

If it's, "See right here. This known terrorist's number called yours four times." Ta da!

Sorry, guys. This reeks and cannot stand.

For once, I have to agree with the squawking class. We've backslid during stressful times, but as a nation, we've given up too much and worked too hard for freedoms unimaginable in the rest of the world. We can't join them in cowed acceptance in the name of better safe than sorry.

Tell your President. Tell your members of Congress.