Pols (Not) Hedging Election Bets

Oh, now it becomes clear. Nothing, other than smart politicking, prevents our office holders from running for a higher office while simultaneously running for re-election.

I have been reading in the local rags that Boston City Councilors, for one example in the news, had to resign to run for the suddenly, shockingly available mayoralty. As is my wont, I headed to the City Charter and the Council rules to find, cite and link to the specifics. I pored through each with no results.

Then I ran across a piece in the J.P. Gazette that revealed reporter Peter Shanley's query to Mayor Tom Menino's office. It seems that it's savvy convention to show confidence by stepping down, but it's not required. In this case, a Councilor could run for both the mayoralty and re-election to Council. Then, assuming victory in both races, the double winner would choose which job to take.

Of course, at that level, it screams a lack of confidence to run for two offices. The perception is that voters would assume you presume loss before the first vote registers.

Yet we don't have to go very high up to see hedging bets for other offices. U.S. Senators John McCain,  Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, as other examples, held their seats while running for President (and Sen. Joe Biden as VP candidate). Likewise, both U.S. Reps. Steve Lynch and Ed Markey are running in the special election for U.S. Senate without resigning.

In a bit of humorous math, the risk level for Mayor is vastly higher than that for U.S. Senator this time and place. The field is wide and diverse. Some candidates are already well financed (as in $250,000 to $700,000 in the checkbook). At least four of the 13 Councilors are in and one or two more may make the leap in the next few days. The DA from Boston's Suffolk County is in, as were two early announcers (sill badly underfunded, but swearing money won't win this race). A state rep joined and so it goes.

There's no party affiliation in the preliminary in September, but nearly everyone is a Democrat by the bye. So far, we have no women running. It's also coincidentally the Middle Earth of Boston politics, with few candidates of color and nearly everyone Irish American. That's our history after the brahmans and before the ascendancy of those of Irish and Italian heritage.

The Council itself is a little more diverse. It only has one woman, one Latino, and three African Americans (including the woman).  Oh, and there's one Jew, and he's the most recently announced candidate for Mayor. The body certainly does not represent Boston's makeup ethnically or racially.

Now I wonder how many of those Councilors will or are even considering running for two offices in September and should they be in the top two finishers for Mayor, in the general in November.

Candidates who step away from secure spots and announce, "There is no plan B," as they run for higher office can seem heroic and confident. Yet, voters don't automatically reject those who hedge their bets.

Here, the Council could have the largest shakeup in memory if the candidates do not run for re-election as well as the mayoralty. Right now, that could mean openings for:

• Felix G. Arroyo, at-large
• John Connolly, at-large
• Rob Consalvo, district 5
• Mike Ross, district 8

Plus, maybe Steve Murphy, at-large, and the slim possibility of Charles Yancey, district 6.

There's no certainty that any one of them would win. They'd all take a huge flyer. The district Councilors are each and all from safe seats for them. Murphy is generally a big vote getter at-large, as are Arroyo and Connolly.

Murphy has held the Council presidency the past three times. That might well be at risk if four or more new Councilors come to office after November.  He's still thinking, he says.

The Boston Herald, our winger tabloid, has been flogging Suffolk DA Dan Conley. Their highly biased staff points fairly to his large checkbook at the beginning of the campaign. However, when he was a Councilor, he was neither particularly powerful nor memorable. He's had a much greater impact as a prosecutor. He hasn't had a chance to make his platform pitch. If it's law-and-order up top, that remains to be seen whether voters will weigh that heavily.

I'll be monitoring the stump speeches, tweets, FB postings and websites as these develop. Right now, the scrum to announce following Menino's decision not to run again has the runners still metaphorically tying their laces. As soon as enough of them put their platforms out, I'll comment on site contents and presentations.

A few quick thoughts though for the announced Councilors:

• Arroyo: Bright, confident, progressive, charming, he's also a good speaker. I've also been to numerous meetings where I overheard young female voters of various ethnic backgrounds commenting that he's very handsome and saying they know he has a wife who's even prettier. While that shouldn't make any difference, people have noted they like to look at him...and Jasmine. He's the first Latino to run for the office and has a large supporter base.
• Connolly: Wonderfully Boy-Scout level sincere, he has a deep passion for improving Boston schools...right now! He's run the Council's education committee for several terms, which is a royal pain on many levels, one that others run from. He was a teacher, his wife is, and they have two kids starting public school. He'll have other planks, but he is building his campaign first on the tough goal of high-quality schools in every single neighborhood. The question here is that if he's seen as the education guy, will voters who care more about jobs, housing and safety bypass him?
• Consalvo: He is turbo-charged. He's been among the most active idea guys (like shot-spotter), proposing regulations and programs incessantly. He has the constituent services role down pat and learned from his Hyde Park friend and neighbor Menino to show up at every event and meeting, to know voters and get known. Rob seems to figure that if Tom can do this, he can. (Disclosure: He's my district guy, has done constituent services for me, and I like him.)
• Ross: He's the Council smarty, which comes with mixed value. We saw in the last mayoral election that smart was not enough, as Sam Yoon came in third and out of the runoff. People tell me they find Ross cold. I don't; he and I have talked cycling and I thought he ran a ship-shape cruise when he was Council president. He is a more visionary sort with larger goals for the city. Will those ideas intrigue voters? Is the timing right for something demanding and different?

I love this stuff. I'm also glad I'm not running for anything. I do promise to pay attention to them though.

Reverse Engineering Dem Machinery

Those who enjoy the good fight in politics dismayed at GOP Chair Reince Priebus' recovery-by-committee announcement this week. Rather than taking the route of personal responsibility, he and what passes for party leaders kept up their delusions.

Forget the many tea-party types who claim that Mitt Romney would have won if only he had been more brutally right wing, a.k.a. more like what actually cost them the election, including Senate and House seats. The alleged brains of the GOP are the back end of the elephant.

Priebus inexplicably to those who live in the real world looks to retain his job after his abject failures. Now he claims that all the party has to do under his pathfinding leadership is copy what the Dems did right this time. All will be well.

I snort in his direction.

His newly acronym-ed GOP (Growth and Opportunity Project) applies RNC members plus Jeb Bush and Ari Fleischer. Let's call them the usual suspects, á la Casablanca. Their eight mission-impossibles are campaign finance issues, demographic changes, fund-raising, geting out the vote, messaging, outside groups, and presidential primaries — buzz words each and all. 

Together this abrogation of duty must also cause considerable amusement among Dems. The task before the GOP's alleged leadership is not to pretend they can emulate and maybe improve on lefty tactics and strategies. In fact, instead of thinking that adding more high-tech aids and PR ploys will reverse their fortunes, they should look beyond messaging and into message. 

(Click below to hear Dem campaign god Howard Dean on MSNBC giving real advice to the dumb.)

For the GOP to get its act together, it has to admit its essential platform and policy blew the election. They simultaneously managed to offend and turn off large portions of the middle class, women, Latinos, African Americans and far more. 

Priebus hinted at that to the WaPo, while making it plain he would not push for policy revisions. He told Jennifer Rubin, "I can’t tell you what policy recommendations, if any, will be made, but when you are doing a deep dive like this it is hard not to look at the message. Policy bleeds into a lot of things." Yet reading all of his recent statements, I figure it's plain he will get this little traveling circus to study everything and then try to nudge it to recommend (never demand) comprehensive immigration reform and similar planks that will bring in the millions disgusted with the GOP now.

In other words, as I and many could tell him right now, Dems won in a terrible economy because their message was superior, rational, compassionate, and little d democratic, a.k.a. American. Republicans don't need new tricks and toys. They need new hearts and minds.

Here in MA, we can recall when the Dems lost the U.S. Senate seat in the special election following Ted Kennedy's death...to a do-nothing state senator, Scott Brown. The extremely capable state party chair, John Walsh, did not play Let's Form a Committee. He first admitted the obvious failings of both their candidate and the campaign. He considered it a personal failure, the worst of his life. He dug right into the issues, after first setting them out for all in and beyond the party to see.

That's what having personal responsibility, courage and insight can do.

---

Immutable Voters

I've lamented here that voters can be illogically fixed. I think of 2012 elections for example, including the POTUS and our Warren/Brown Senate contests. I fully expect at least 40% to vote for what I consider definitely the wrong candidate; how can these races be at all close, I wonder?

No reasoning is revealed, but a solid piece in yesterday's Boston Globe, Wait, campaigns don't work?, does concur with my exasperated question. Citing proven political prognosticators, it reads that at least 80% of voters have fixed minds and hearts. All the campaigning possible in the time available won't alter their preset preferences. Ads, debates, conventions and such only reinforce their starting positions.

Instead, a very few factors, such as second quarter GDP and incumbent popularity in June, make the difference. The pros allegedly can use their formulae to pick the vote early and within 2%.

It's a little amusing to find such a clear, believable piece in the Globe. After all, more typical of its research articles is the weekly Uncommon Knowledge feature. It features short recaps of trendy, even sensationalist, findings largely by academicians. These are pop brights about your love life or how beer glass shape may affect your drinking rate or how coffee or red wine is good for you, no bad. Ho hum. These ephemera are often trivial and frequently destined to be refuted by future lightweight studies...and soon.

Lackaday. We can listen to the ghost of H.L. Mencken, who wrote, "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public." As much as we'd like to have faith that our electorate will generally get it right, we likely are deluding ourselves with such optimism.

Let us wonder now in the first major election after the Citizens United decision whether the sliver of perhaps 10% of the persuadable voters will fall and be fooled. This is the first go with SuperPACs weaving their distorted, dishonest and secretly financed lies in ad and advocacy forms.

It's quite possible that the hundreds of millions or several billion dollars spent won't determine the outcome of the POTUS race or control of either house of Congress. If nearly all voters were decided long before the campaigns really started, can those filthy bucks make the difference?

It's just as possible that the success in the disgraceful, un-American, anti-democracy efforts at voter disenfranchisement will make that difference. That is, in the many states where Republicans are actively trying to keep left-leaning voters from being able to cast ballots, if they fail, the democratic process perks along, quite likely favoring Democrats. If they succeed, historians will immediately start documenting the shame of it all.

Think too if the SuperPAC and winger billionaire money fails to tip the election, even with the shield of Citizens United. We're years away from overturning that though a Constitutional amendment. We can be positive that in the meanwhile the Dark Side would not slink away, admitting failure and discarding this weapon. Instead, they'd strategize how to make it work. Being called as anti-liberty and anti-democratic process won't deter them.

It's long been plain that we have many low-information voters. If the Globe piece is right, they have no intention of getting smart or risking having to think.