Goo-goo Watch: Kevin McCrea

I've generally been of the opinion that good-government progressives should never be allowed in public without adult supervision, and this reinforces my point.:

When my campaign for Mayor was over, many people suggested I apply for the school committee and Mayor Menino had told me that he was interested in working with me, in particular in regards to our trade school in Boston.

The Boston School Committee is an appointed body for the specific purpose of  eliminating public scrutiny and input into local education (since education is secondary to the care and feeding of bureaucrats and teachers - in that order).  Nevertheless our brave reformer takes the Mayor at his word, and applies for one of two vacancies:

The applications were to be emailed to a Nancy Lo, who works for the City of Boston...

...I made a few calls and left messages to other members of the committee to try and find out if I had made the cut or not. During the course of the work day I heard back from a number of the people on the committee. They were all extremely nice, freely answered my questions and clearly were just citizens who were volunteering and doing their civic duty who had no idea what the rules laid out by the State Law were. They had all been on the committee for years, some up to 10 years. They all referred me back to Nancy Lo who clearly was the organizing and directing force of the committee...

One committee member told me that it is "not a fair process" and that committee members "dare not say anything" because if they disagree with Menino that they will soon be gone. I also took the time to look up Nancy Lo and found out that she has been with Menino for years, previously running the elections department and named by Boston Magazine as one of the most powerful women in Boston. She currently works for the Inspectional Services Department and makes more than $100,000 a year...

That evening I talked to my wife Clara who is infinitely smarter than I about what I should do about these types of things. I clearly could file an Open Meeting Lawsuit which if filed within 21 days of the December 10, 2009 non-public meeting would rescind the action the group took. But what was clear in speaking to the members of the committee is that there was no knowledge that anything they were doing was anything other than their civic duty, unlike the Boston City Council which was willfully trying to exclude the public from their decision making process. I didn't want to drag good, decent citizens into something not of their making. It seemed to make sense that since the Mayor hadn't made his final decision yet to just ask the committee to hold the process in accordance with the State Law.


The next morning, Friday, I called Dot Joyce again and let her know that I was now convinced that the Open Meeting Law had been violated, probably for at least a decade, but that I'd like to work with the administration to rectify the situation without wasting valuable time and resources. I asked her if she knew the person in charge of this: Nancy Lo. She said she had heard of her, but didn't think she had met her. I told her that I hadn't been able to get in touch with her, but perhaps she or the Mayor could get in touch with her, and let her know that the State Law had not been followed. I let her know I'd been working with the District Attorney on this matter as well.


I spoke with the District Attorney's office again and they agreed that a "do over" that followed the law was probably a reasonable thing to do since no final decision had been taken. They said they would confer and get in touch with the City.

Nancy Lo is one of the Mayor's enforcers, notorious for her contempt for legal and procedural niceties; but that's not the issue here.

The point is that Kevin McCrea, who ran for Mayor, and before that, City Councillor-at-Large could be so ignorant of the power dynamics of his own city government.

McCrea's concern about the lack of transparency and the Mayor's contempt for the Massachusetts Open Meeting Law ignores the fact that neither is a secret in Boston politics.   In fact there are no secrets in Boston politics.  Yes, the fix is in but anyone who cares to know can find out the specifics of the fix.  Given sufficient time and reasonable organizing skills, a fix can be upended.   Mayor Menino's organization is close to nonexistent; it depends upon two things: the political vacuum in the City and the disconnect between activists and the community.   What McCrea displayed in his search for political sainthood does nothing to advance anything beyond  his ego.  In and of itself insignificant, except that he actually has the resources to successfully advance his causes, given less narcissism on his part.

Until activists relearn the arts of political intelligence and precinct organizing, they will be no more than political suppression mechanisms, working on behalf of their opponents.  First and foremost of the preconditions for both is knowing what the hell is going on both in government and on the street.

How Massachusetts Became a No-Party State

In order to understand Massachusetts politics, one must come to terms with the State’s myths. Left and Right, Democrat and Republican, within and without Massachusetts, the misconceptions exist: Massachusetts as a liberal State; and Massachusetts as a one-party State.


Both are false.

Measured by the political attitudes of its citizens, Massachusetts is a center-right State. It is, however the center-right State with the highest percentage of liberals.

At the same time the organizational structure of statewide politics became so degraded as to be nonexistent. Despite the number of elected officials with parenthetical “D”s after their names, the Commonwealth is actually a no-party State.

Here’s how it happened.

Until the early Seventies, Massachusetts was competitive at the statewide level between the two Parties, with liberal Democrats contending with progressive Republicans.

A point of nomenclature: “Progressive” is not the same as “liberal”, political jargon notwithstanding. Liberal in the American sense of the term denotes a system based upon government insuring equal opportunity to insure upward social and economic mobility. “Progressive” in the same sense assumed public administration by an educated elite, based upon rational principles of management. The corruption of these terms (among others; neither the market fundamentalism nor the right-wing populism predominant in today’s Republican Party could be considered to be “conservative”) is one of the reasons for the ongoing collapse of the Commonwealth.

The political history of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, in particular the Yankee versus Irish political wars of the nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries added ethnic components to the class conflicts between the two Parties; nevertheless both were firmly anchored in the civic cultures of their respective adherents.

Then came the Sixties.

In hindsight, most of the damage was done, not by the New Left or the Counterculture, but by the New Politics wing of the Democratic Party. Combining the elitism of the Progressives with the class bigotry of traditional conservatives, and a tendency to condescending racism. New Democrats sought to dispense with grassroots politics altogether, preferring to concentrate on media campaigns, targeting educated suburban voters. Urban labor-liberals, though more numerous on the ground (and in the Legislature) soon lost control of the Massachusetts Democratic Party. Many, while remaining Democrats, became swing voters, casting their ballots for Republicans in national elections. Hence the strength of George Wallace in 1976; and Reagan winning Massachusetts in 1980 and 1984.

On the Republican side, old-style progressives fell victim to a “New Right” alliance of social conservatives, market fundamentalists, and libertarians; doing as much damage to the social culture of Massachusetts as their portside cousins.

Long story short: there were rebellions within both parties, middle-class good-government types (hereinafter “goo-goos) took over the Democrats; larval Reaganites took over the Republicans. A corruption of progressives in the original sense, goo-goos are too class bigoted to form lasting alliances with culturally working class voters. The Republicans (allied with the Libertarian Party) were victimized by their own success. A twenty-year process of successful grassroots organizing collapsed under the weight of narcissism at the top.

In the period from 1974 to 1978, both parties had collapsed as principled political mechanisms. The following three decades saw the collapse of grassroots politics. The result was a loose feudal system, centered upon state representative districts and strong mayors in cities like Boston and Worcester. Rather than the governor, power in such a system naturally accrues to legislative leadership, usually the Speaker of the House.

Hence, the operating premises of Massachusetts state politics, both ideological and structural are false. What exists is loosely corporatized feudalism in a collapsing polity, overwhelmed by its costs, and whose elites are too decadent to care.

Field Watch: Visibility Done Right

From Crooks and Liars:



Hundreds of clergy and congregants at a candlelight vigil at Senator Lieberman's home in Stanford, Connecticut.

This is public field visibility done right:

From the Danbury News Times.

STAMFORD -- Quietly holding candles, hundreds of clergymen, congregants and reform advocates lined the sidewalks outside Independent U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman's Stamford home Sunday night in a show of support for universal health care.

"When we heard not only would he vote against it, but he'd use his power, his position as a swing vote ... to block it from coming to a vote, we had to send a message so he knows people who vote overwhelmingly favor the public option," said Rabbi Stephen Fuchs, of Congregation Beth Israel in West Hartford.
...
The vigil began at Stamford High School, Lieberman's alma mater, and ended at the senator's home, the Hayes House, across the street.

"In some sense, it's poetic," said Stamford Mayor Dannel Malloy, who attended the vigil. "The place where Sen. Joseph Lieberman received his high school education, the place he visited upon his announcement to seek the vice presidency, a place where his run for the presidency began -- and it just so happens, a place across the street from where he lives."

Yet another example of the Great Realignment. Civilization is returning to America, precinct by precinct.  

The Dog salutes you.

Palin stiffs fans in Indiana

What goes around, comes around...

The Great Realignment: Taking back the grassroots

There was an interesting op-ed  in the New York Times yesterday, pointing out that Senate support or opposition to the Obama healthcare package has little to do with the merits (or lack thereof) of the plan.  The correlation is to Obama's personal popularity in the State a given Senator represents.

Consider, for instance, the 39 Democrats who voted against the bill in the House, which approved the health care bill by a margin of 220 to 215. According to data compiled by The New York Times, 31 of the 39 Democratic naysayers hail from districts that John McCain won last November. Although the upper chamber has a reputation for being less rigidly constrained by near-term political considerations, odds are that the same calculus will prevail in the Senate.

Thus the opinions of the electorate on health care are trumped by their feelings about Obama:

The authors sum up the dynamic:

Nowadays, President Obama enjoys higher approval ratings — in the low to mid-50s, according to most polls — than do the Democrats’ health care reform plans, which are mired in the mid-40s in most surveys. Conditions being what they are, Democrats would rather have a referendum on the president than one on the health care bill itself.

Still, what these numbers seem to reflect is a series of missed connections. On the one hand, there is a disconnect between Mr. Obama and the electorate: the president — who had popularity ratings in the 60s when the health care debate began — has generally stayed in the background during health care negotiations, leaving the unpopular Congress to be the public face of the bill.

On the other hand, there is a disconnect between the electorate and the 535 members of Congress, who seem to be so fixated on Mr. Obama’s standing in their states that they’ve paid little attention to what their constituents might want — or need.

This actually makes the problem solvable. Not so much by Obama, but by the national Democratic Party - in particular by its Blue Dog and Labor-liberal components.   Much if not most of what passes for conservatism in this country is populist anti-leftism.

Based upon cultural and geographical commonality the outreach would have to be done by an ideologically balanced organization anchored in civic culture and working on the basis of civic responsibility.

The effort would also have to be independent of Obama.

Quite frankly the various progressive activist groups (MoveOn, et al) and Obama's Organizing for America would be detrimental in such an effort. In the absence of campaign discipline, Obama's current volunteer operation is Howard Dean, redux, precisely the kind of dysfunctional operation recognized as counterproductive in 2008.

Deval Patrick the Slime Mold That Walks Like a Man

There are few people in public life I despise more than Deval Patrick, the Governor of Massachusetts.  For that reason, there is always the danger of cheap shots while blogging.

I'll let this and this speak for themselves.

The purpose is supposedly to deal with the ongoing State budget crisis; however consider the payroll costs for patronage employees in just two agencies:

Seems like the Governor has...different priorities than rape victims or (state subsidized) gambling addiction.

Requiem for Floon

Another Boston election cycle is over and both the media and activist community do what they do best: misunderstand the obvious.

Given the abysmally low turnout, the race was Flaherty's to lose. And he lost.

As I predicted, here, here, here, and here, the alliance between Michael Flaherty and Sam Yoon was doomed to fail because the alliance was much less than the sum of its parts. This is unfortunate in a perverse sort of way because Boston needs a viable alternative to the current Administration. The Dog is not averse to tilting at the occasional windmill, and if either Flaherty or Yoon had shown any indication of being principled reformers, he would have been the first to hold their signs during rush hour.

On the plus sign, if I hadn't been so annoyed by the sheer incompetence of both the challengers and the media coverage thereof, I probably wouldn't have started blogging. (That's plus for me, dear reader, not you.)

At any rate this municipal election cycle was a textbook case study of political incompetence and journalistic misfeasance.  The media coverage of the race was so crappy that to call it incompetent would be a complement.  The Boston Globe in particular went through a consistent period of self-deluded Duh moments masquerading as political coverage. Menino has a short temper? Menino likes to micro-manage? Menino runs a closed Administration?  Spare me. He's been that way before he was even a District City Councillor.

And everybody with an IQ above single digits knows it.

What the media never covered is the fact that the Mayor's lack of articulation disguises arguably the best field brain of his generation of Democrats.  The rise of the "accidental Mayor" was never accidental; he had a comprehensive City-wide organization (put together, I might add, in plain sight) a good year before the 1993 election.  The only problem was and is the fact that the Mayor's electoral virtues are administrative vices.

The opinions of good-government progressives notwithstanding, campaigns aren't democracies, nor are they organized to further the common good.  Campaigns are about obtaining power.  Thus, a wining campaign manager is always aware of the shifting correlations of power.  The demands of the business thus present the danger that the inherent dispassion necessary to win can morph into cynicism.

In a functioning civic culture this danger is checked by informed and active citizens (and their elected representatives) at the local level.  But Boston's civic culture's been dysfunctional for decades, aided and abetted by an equally dysfunctional media.  There were (and are) no checks and balances in the system, and only a few at the neighborhood level, conspicuously the Dominican community and the West Roxbury neighborhood of the city.  Both communities are organized as civic units across class and ideological boundaries; hence Menino is always attentive to their needs. 

The City Council's power to limit Mayoral abuse by cutting the city budget is unexercised. Flaherty's accusations during the campaign were if anything understated.

The problem was that Flaherty never did squat to address those issues in nine years on the Council.

Yoon not only did nothing of substance on the Council; his reluctance to dirty his hands with constituent service work made him less than popular with his constituents.  Yoon's alliance with progressives ignored the fact that progressives are not seen as assets in black, Latino, and working-class white communities.  In the case of Boston's Dominican community, cited above, there has been a decade-long fight against white Jamaica Plain activists over developmental issues.  In Boston's black communities there are similar battles are fought. (The difference being that the better-organized Dominicans win their fights.)  Coupled with the profoundly incompetent advice he got from his consultatant, Yoon actively repelled those the media thought were his core supporters (Menino won Chinatown with twice Flaherty's vote.)

Hence, from where the Dog sits, there was never any doubt about the outcome.

The problem is that principled candidates, running competent campaigns could have easily won.

We don't need no stinking spots...

Interesting piece by Alex Beam in today's Globe. He went (among other places) to a Floon event:

I complained to Yoon that while waiting, I had to suffer through three Steve Pagliuca “just an ordinary millionaire’’ ads and two Tom Menino friend-to-all-the-animals commercials. Where’s your stuff, I asked? “We’re not going to be on the air,’’ he lamented. “We’re going to do mail. The strategic advice we got said don’t compete in a medium that you can’t dominate, and we can’t dominate Menino on TV.’’

Few things are more annoying to the Dog than when he's so startled that coffee is forced up his sinuses.  Here for all you folks out there are rules for (comparatively) underfunded campaigns:

• If you don't have as much media money as your opponent, but you have enough to run TV spots, be creative: go for cable placement, use the sheer creativity of the spots to earn free media (e.g. the Tim for Treasurer spots that Cahill used in '06), make your relative poverty part of your message. If you're slick enough, use it as part of your fundraising message.
• Use your field operation as a means of getting free media: endorsements are nice; endorsements in front of huge cheering crowds are better. The purpose of field is to supply and place the crowd.
• Go to radio. Get booked on whatever talk show will tolerate your presence (making sure to do debate prep for those hosts less than well-disposed to your candidacy).  This does not include shows hosted by implacable enemies; however a candidate that holds his own in debating a radio host will tend to get respect in the Boston media market. Get your folks to slice and dice the Boston radio market. Place radio spots.
• Mix and match all the above with print ads in neighborhood newspapers.  They're more cost-effective than the dailies and your cheering crowds (see above) look better in a half-page ad than in a palm card insert.
• Use direct mail (targeted whenever possible) to reinforce the above. Vary the mix and repeat as necesary, as conditions allow; and remember:

Mail don't do shit in a vacuum.  (Repeat)

Most mail pieces are circular-filed unread by their recipients.  The purpose of mail is to reinforce a dynamic. In a post-literate society it will not change a preexisting political condition.

Regarding that last point:  Republicans traditionally do well with direct mail, but this is because (thanks to years of refining their lists), Repubs are preaching to the converted, and reinforcing their targets' pre-existing biases.

All pure mail does is kill trees, and that looses you the greenie component of the goo-goo vote.

The Globe and the Bay State Banner Complement Each Other

One reasons that reporters for the dailies should read the neighborhood and community papers is that the latter often catch nuances that bigfoot reporters miss.

There was nothing inaccurate about the Globe's coverage of Monday's endorsement of Floon by forty black clergy, but the endorsement, was put in better context by the Bay State Banner:

Last week, black pastors active in the Black Ministerial Alliance and Ten Point Coalition endorsed Menino.

Menino has enjoyed high favorability in Boston’s black community, securing more than 60 percent of the vote in predominantly black wards and precincts in this year’s preliminary election.

Having said that, I give the Globe credit for covering the anti-Menino no-confidence vote given by Massachusetts Association of Minority Law Enforcement Officers as a separate article, and by noting that the unanimous no-confidence vote of sixty members did not necessarily reflect the feelings of 300+ members. Nevertheless, the Banner Article caught the political nuance involved:

While the officers did not endorse Menino’s rival in the mayoral race, City Councilor Michael Flaherty, their announcement Monday morning followed a press conference where a group of black ministers joined community activists from the Latino, Asian and Cape Verdean communities to publicly endorse the Flaherty-Yoon campaign Monday.

Note the absence of "community activists from the black community" in the Banner's reporting of the Floon endorsement. What happened, and what the Banner reported, was an incidence of clergy and activists speaking their personal and institutional preferences, not speaking for any geographic or demographic community.

What would be good local political reporting is an analysis of the differing agendae among clergy, activists, and the grassroots as reflected by differing political choices and the reasons thereof...

Floon: Float Like a Butterfly, Sink Like a Rock, Redux

The Floon collapse moves apace. As I originally said here, and explained here, the Flaherty-Yoon aliance was never more than a joint venture between two vanity candidates who had no chance of winning.

Now the Globe has released a poll showing the Mayor with a 52% - 32% lead over Flaherty, with the following crosstabs by ethnicity:

                              Menino   Flaherty    Other   Undecided
City of Boston LV      52%       32%           3%       13%
White                       47%       38%           2%       14%
African American      63%       23%           6%         9%
Hispanic                   70%       14%           3%       12%
Other                       40%        40%           0%       21%

If we compare apples-to-apples using May 10 data from the same pollster, we get:

Apples-to-Apples            Menino  Flaherty     Other     Undecided

City of Boston LV May      61%      23%          3%           14%
                       October   52%      32%          3%           13%

Apples-to-Apples
White                   May     56%      29%          1%           14%
                       October    47%      38%          2%           14%

Apples-to-Apples
AfricanAmerican May        69%      15%          3%           13%
                     October       63%      23%          6%             9%

Apples-to-Apples
Hispanic              May         74%     13%          2%           11%
                      October        70%     14%          3%           12%

Apples-to-Apples
Other                  May         59%        3%        22%          16%
                     October         40%       40%         0%           21%

The Mayors demographic support base remains within black and Latino communities; despite the pounding Menino has taken from the media, Latino and black slippage was minimal in the context of the primary-to-general dynamic to date.

The slippage consists almost entirely of lost white and Asian support; and forty percent of a total citywide population totalling less than 9% (lumping all nonwhites, nonblacks, and non-Latinos together as "other") is nowhere near a winning margin. Within the poll's margin of error, this indicates little change fron September 22.

Considering the numbers from the Preliminary, where the Menino, Flaherty, and Yoon percentages were 50.52%, 23.95%, and 21.16%  (and considering the 4.2% McCrea vote), an effective anti-Menino coalition would have resulted in a dead heat, reflecting the 49.23% non-Menino preliminary vote. That didn't happen.

The 4.4% margin of the UNH/Globe poll shows no real change in Menino's support since the preliminary, which leads me to conclude that most of the electoral damage to the Mayor occurred in the summer phase of the election cycle; was media-driven; and was not exploited by the Flaherty campaign at the neighborhood level.  There was, in fact, an anti-Menino undercurrent that a competent field operation could have used to boost Flaherty's support, but addressing this was sacrificed in favor of a totally symbolic Floon effort, whose whole was less than the sum of its parts.

Relative to the money spent collectively by the Flaherty and Yoon campaigns, the result was a half-assed media campaign, not a municipal insurgency; and as such, a cautionary example of the self-inflicted limits such campaigns  face against operatives on the ground.

Unfortunately, the UNH sampling model does not correspond with neighborhood cultures, but I think that an informed prediction remains that (even with Yoon) Flaherty is walled into South Boston and Neponset, with insufficient Floon-derived Back Bay and Jamaica Plain numbers to materially affect Menino's current base.

The Dog is currently indulging himself in an "I told you so" that approaches an unseemly level of gloating

Boston Political Reporting: Oxymoron or Urban Legend?

In order to thumbnail Boston's political reporting (more accurately the competent lack thereof), we need to look at the media business as a whole.


So please bear with me as the Dog goes didactic on y'all:

A continuing source of frustration to me is the structural disconnect between the media and day-to-day politics. It's nothing new; in fact, journalists and commentators such as William Greider, E.J. Dionne, and Kevin Phillips analysed the dynamic years ago.

American politics (and the journalists that report on it entered a period of structural cognitive dissonance forty years ago, from which they have yet to leave. It's inaccurate to look at this in terms of Left versus Right politics, since the New Left was neither new, nor a Left, and Reagan was not a conservative.

American elite culture became so disconnected from the broad base of society that politics, public policy, and civic culture, that many Americans presumed malicious intent to explain what was in fact structural collapse. This accrued to the benefit of the Republican Party; in its most sophisticated form, it accrued to the benefit of Richard Nixon, who realized that:

(a) the Left was useful as an outreach mechanism;

(b) that the Left as constituted had no politically significant constituency (there was no "Youth Movement", the biggest college organization in 1967 was the College Republicans, and white baby boomers have been a primarily Republican constituency since 1968);

(c) the New Politics movement within the Democratic Party, as symbolized by Eugene McCarthy was a Tory-Right dynamic, with its social culture derived primarily from the class bigotry of the 1950s Adlai Stevenson campaigns. The perfect metaphor for the period was McCarthy's 1980 endorsement of Ronald Reagan. What occurred (and is still occurring) is the triumph and commercial exploitation of class bigotry in American life.

While this approach was invented and refined by the Right, it's been an integral political tactic across the political spectrum, because small turnouts make for less heavy lifting by campaigns; and disengaged electorates are revenue enhancement mechanisms for the media side of the business.  Democrats have traditionally depended more on media than field (just as Democrats depend more on big contributions than Republicans), so it would be hypocritical to cast stones at elephants.

The decline in reporting paralleled the civic collapse, as print reporting became a profession, rather than a trade. Preconceived opinions became the basis of newsgathering in the absence of structural connections to the community. The myth of Watergate became the foundation for media amour propre, despite the fact that the Washington Post reporting had nothing to do with Nixon's resignation.

Television news became so consultant driven that infotainment and marketing (to be redundant) replaced journalistic values; and the same dynamic infected the print media, accelerating as competent reporters aged out of the business.

Corporate concentration within the media accelerated the process, but did not cause it; the problem is more the structural corruption of journalistic culture than the ownership thereof.

Put simply, the Sixties never ended.

In the modern world of politics, journalists exist primarily as conduits, so separate from reality that they do not know what questions to ask, much less whom to ask them. If pointed in the right direction, the media has sufficient resources to cover an issue in depth; but real-time political reporting at the local and State level is practically nonexistent.

Thus political players - and the term covers more than political professionals - have an inbred contempt for the media, and folks at the grassroots misconstrue arrogance and ignorance for conspiratorial malfeasance. The "corporate media'" and "liberal media" accusations from Left and Right are simply misinformed dogma resulting from the same thing.

A classic case in point is how the Boston Globe's coverage of Senator Dianne Wilkerson's tax problems in 1998 saved her seat. When the news first broke, community sentiment in Boston's black community was overwhelmingly negative until the Globe printed an op-ed by the Reverend Eugene Rivers condemning the Senator and calling for her resignation.

This ignored two dynamics hard-wired into Boston's black civic culture: most people hate Gene Rivers; and most people hate the Globe. In particular, the more prominent black Christian ministers and the Nation of Islam hated Rivers more than they hated each other. The result was a packed rally at the Charles Street AME Church, in support of a martyr of white racism, as symbolised by the genocidal cultural imperialists of Morrissey Boulevard.

Wilkerson was overwhelmingly re-elected.

Wilkerson's eventual defeat in 2008 actually reinforces the point.  Wilkerson was the Vice-Chair of the Senate Committee on Redistricting.  In that capacity, she redistricted more than forty per cent of the black population out of her District, while absorbing hostile populations in Back Bay and Jamaica Plain.  Her excuse that she was creating a "second District of Color" was demographically fraudulent, based as it was on raw numbers, not voting-age populations.  There was no media research of Wilkerson's premise, despite the fact that the data was easily available by Voter Tabulation District from the Census Bureau.

(In a related instance, the purjury conviction of then House Speaker Thomas Finneran was due, not to racism, but to his arrogance in protecting the electoral bases of incumbent representatives.  Had he been open about his motives, he would still be in office.)

Nothing has changed since then; hostility to the Globe is still a mainstay of black community politics. This is reinforced by the fact that there is no evidence of political literacy on the part of either of the Globe's black political columnists.

In a city such as Boston, where most of the politically germaine information exists in hardcopy minila files, Globe reporters are notorious for their belief that if it's not online, it doesn't exist. Their condescending behavior to low-level governmental staffers robs them of access to the only sources who really know what's going on. Their absence at neighborhood meetings makes them ignorant of neighborhood issues. Most importantly, their gullibility makes Globe reporters easy to spin.

The Boston Herald is by far the better of the two daily papers in terms of its political coverage, making up in sweat equity what it lacks in resources. The problems are that the comparitive poverty of the paper makes it subject to spin, and the vacuum in competent political reporting from the Herald's competators creates a culture of self-indulgence among some of its staff, particularly Howie Carr whose sources are the broadest in local journalism, but whose work too often slides into infantile ax-grinding.

The "alternative weekly" Boston Phoenix is essentially a corporate bohemian paper, with good media coverage, but nothing beyond recycled conventional wisdom and bad spin in its news.

The best journalism comes from the community and neighborhood newspapers, which, despite a tendency to boosterism, provide visibility to local political issues. As a rule of thumb: if you're working a local campaign in Boston, go to the Newspaper room of the Boston Public Library and read the local papers while ignoring the Globe. Let your campaign flacks work the dailies.

Full crosstabs here. This poll is updated every Friday morning, and you can see trendline graphs here.

Daily Kos Weekly State of the Nation Poll

Research 2000, MoE 2%, Oct 12, 2009 - Oct 15, 2009

Previous

BARACK OBAMA

	FAV	UNFAV	NO OPINION
ALL	55	37	8
Men	45	47	8
Women	65	27	8
Dem	89	5	6
Rep	5	93	2
Ind	54	34	12
Other	50	36	14
Non Vote	60	28	12
White	46	46	8
Black	88	4	8
Latino	67	26	7
Oth/Ref	67	25	8
18-29	79	14	7
30-44	43	47	10
45-59	63	29	8
60+	41	53	6
NE	82	7	11
South	27	68	5
MW	62	30	8
West	59	32	9
Rest of USA	67	24	9

NANCY PELOSI

	FAV	UNFAV	NO OPINION
ALL	37	55	8
Men	23	68	9
Women	51	42	7
Dem	79	11	10
Rep	4	94	2
Ind	24	70	6
Other	22	73	5
Non Vote	27	57	16
White	35	63	2
Black	51	24	25
Latino	33	47	20
Oth/Ref	34	46	20
18-29	47	45	8
30-44	26	59	15
45-59	44	54	2
60+	36	59	5
NE	56	36	8
South	21	74	5
MW	40	51	9
West	37	52	11

HARRY REID

	FAV	UNFAV	NO OPINION
ALL	33	57	10
Men	26	67	7
Women	40	47	13
Dem	65	24	11
Rep	4	92	4
Ind	27	66	6
Other	19	67	14
Non Vote	26	54	20
White	31	64	5
Black	42	34	24
Latino	34	46	20
Oth/Ref	35	44	21
18-29	40	45	15
30-44	31	62	7
45-59	33	57	10
60+	30	60	10
NE	45	41	14
South	26	68	6
MW	34	57	9
West	30	57	13

MITCH MCCONNELL

	FAV	UNFAV	NO OPINION
ALL	17	64	19
Men	26	54	20
Women	8	74	18
Dem	4	93	3
Rep	54	9	37
Ind	8	73	19
Other	16	57	27
Non Vote	7	71	22
White	23	61	16
Black	2	77	21
Latino	4	66	30
Oth/Ref	4	68	28
18-29	7	78	15
30-44	25	56	19
45-59	13	70	17
60+	19	56	25
NE	6	82	12
South	37	37	26
MW	9	73	18
West	11	72	17

JOHN BOEHNER

	FAV	UNFAV	NO OPINION
ALL	13	62	25
Men	19	54	27
Women	7	70	23
Dem	4	92	4
Rep	43	10	47
Ind	5	69	26
Other	6	56	38
Non Vote	4	66	30
White	17	56	27
Black	3	84	13
Latino	5	69	26
Oth/Ref	3	71	26
18-29	5	75	20
30-44	20	53	27
45-59	7	68	25
60+	17	56	27
NE	5	81	14
South	26	34	40
MW	8	72	20
West	9	70	21

CONGRESSIONAL DEMOCRATS

	FAV	UNFAV	NO OPINION

CONGRESSIONAL REPUBLICANS

	FAV	UNFAV	NO OPINION

DEMOCRATIC PARTY

	FAV	UNFAV	NO OPINION
ALL	41	51	8
Men	32	60	8
Women	50	42	8
Dem	71	22	7
Rep	5	93	2
Ind	37	55	8
Other	33	58	9
Non Vote	41	42	17
White	32	62	6
Black	74	15	11
Latino	52	33	15
Oth/Ref	53	31	16
18-29	57	34	9
30-44	27	62	11
45-59	48	47	5
60+	39	54	7
NE	62	26	12
South	21	72	7
MW	44	48	8
West	44	50	6

REPUBLICAN PARTY

	FAV	UNFAV	NO OPINION
ALL	21	67	12
Men	30	61	9
Women	12	73	15
Dem	3	92	5
Rep	73	9	18
Ind	10	77	13
Other	11	74	15
Non Vote	7	78	15
White	28	59	13
Black	3	92	5
Latino	4	81	15
Oth/Ref	4	83	13
18-29	6	87	7
30-44	35	51	14
45-59	17	72	11
60+	17	68	15
NE	6	87	7
South	48	37	15
MW	10	78	12
West	12	75	13

Direction

QUESTION: Do you feel the country overall is heading in the right direction or wrong direction?

	RIGHT	WRONG	NOT SURE
All	40	56	4
Men	36	60	4
Women	44	52	4
Dem	61	34	5
Rep	5	93	2
Ind	42	53	5
Other	36	55	9
Non Vote	44	53	3
White	39	58	3
Black	44	49	7
Latino	41	54	5
Oth/Ref	42	49	9
18-29	46	51	3
30-44	32	60	8
45-59	45	53	2
60+	40	59	1
NE	47	47	6
South	31	65	4
MW	44	53	3
West	41	56	3

Generic Congressional Ballot

QUESTION: Would you like to see more Democrats or Republicans elected to Congress in 2010?

	DEMOCRATS	REPUBLICANS	NOT SURE
All	35	29	36
Men	28	39	33
Women	42	19	39
Dem	79	4	17
Rep	4	89	7
Ind	19	17	64
Other	18	27	55
Non Vote	24	15	61
White	26	35	39
Black	65	5	30
Latino	49	23	28
Oth/Ref	51	23	26
18-29	52	7	41
30-44	25	41	34
45-59	39	25	36
60+	30	35	35
NE	51	8	41
South	21	47	32
MW	37	26	37
West	36	28	36

Demographics

Men	1152	48%
Women	1248	52%
Dem	744	31%
Rep	527	22%
Ind	600	25%
Other	119	5%
Non Vote	410	17%
White	1703	71%
Black	337	14%
Latino	286	12%
Oth/Ref	74	3%
18-29	433	18%
30-44	791	33%
45-59	695	29%
60+	481	20%
NE	505	21%
South	718	30%
MW	647	27%
West	530	22%

Methodology

A total of 2400 adults nationally were interviewed by telephone. A cross-section of calls was made into each state in the country in order to reflect the adult population nationally.
The margin for error, according to standards customarily used by statisticians, is no more than plus or minus 2% percentage points. This means that there is a 95 percent probability that the “true” figure would fall within that range if the entire adult population were sampled. The margin for error is higher for any demographic subgroup, such as gender, race, or region.
GEOGRAPHIC BREAKDOWN:
Northeast:
DC, ME, VT, NY, MD, PA, CT, DE, MA, NH, RI, WV, NJ
South:
FL, NC, SC, AL, MS, GA, VA, TN, KY, LA, AR, TX
Midwest:
IL, MN, MI, OH, WI, IA, MO, KS, IN, ND, SD, OK, NE
West:
NM, CA, OR, WA, AK, HI, MT, ID, UT, NV, AZ, WY, CO
SCRIPT:
For favor

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The Floon Saga, Pt. 3: Float Like a Butterfly, Sink Like a Rock

Ray Flynn and Mel King just endorsed Floon, to the sounds of chirping crickets. What we have here is a serious case of cognitive dissonance on the part of two figures from the political past, who (however well-intended) totally misread the present. Given all the fatuous rhetoric and media masterbation, presuming a "New Boston" alliance against the Mayor this presents a level of political humor that I haven't experienced in years.

Of course, as a totally uncivilized human being, The Dog loves watching the political masochism involved in folks who totally misunderstand the obvious.

What seems probable at this point are two things: that the various black, Latino, white, and Asian communities in the City will be Mayor Menino's insurance in getting an unprecedented fifth term; and that the Yoon-Flaherty partnership augments the Mayor's outreach mechanism.

Enclosed are links to spreadsheets cross-referencing the Preliminary results with the VTD Census Information, listing every precinct by black, white, Latino, and Asian residents. The sort is in decreasing order, with the highest percentages at the top.

What becomes evident is that, from a field perspective, the Yoon campaign was a vanity candidacy that, repelled the very people it presumed to attract. In the context of the final election, it tightens the noose around Flaherty.

Barring an indictment of the Mayor or a high-level staffer it's pretty much over.

Hence, given all the other activity around the Special Senate Primary, and the early prep work around the 2010 Governor's race, this is a perfect case study on how the operating premises of Democratic activists often croak their candidates. It is also a good example of how two well-funded Astroturf campaigns seal themselves into limited bases, and combine to isolate themselves through sheer ineptitude. The biggest irony is that the Floon effort could have won.

From a field perspective, the Menino operation reached its high-water mark in 1996 during the Boston School Committee Referendum, since then any credible opponent could have put an effective political opposition together, given the resources and one-to-two year time frame.

The simple fact is that Boston is collapsing, has been for years, and hasn't touched botton yet.  Case in point: the collapse of Downtown Crossing and the empty storeforonts in Back Bay.

Anti-Menino message could have been summed up under the working - and accurate - premise that Menino's operation was so self-absorbed, ruthless, petty, and authoritarian that the Mayor turned a first-class small city into a fifth-rate suburb.  Field organizing could have been based upon the tangible interests of those communities disrupted and displaced by the corporate triumphalism of the past sixteen years.

Unfortunately, what the electorate got as an alternative was two vanity candidates with delusions of adequacy.

What happened instead was a replay of the 1983 Mayors race with Flaherty and Yoon playing the roles of Ray Flynn and Mel King respectively.  It's true that neither of the Floon components has a work ethic, but that's not germaine to the analysis. The flaws in the Floon premise are:

The activist community is totally separate from and unaccountable to, the grassroots in black and Latino communities.

White working-class neighborhoods in Boston no longer exist as cohesive political forces.  West Roxbury is an exception as a culturally blue-collar neighborhood*, but being politically astute, Ward 20 makes its own analyses and backs winners.

The organized Left is in the Mayor's pocket, either through its organizations (e.g. SEIU, UNITE-HERE), or its corporate funders (e.g. The Boston Foundation).  The organized left in Boston is actually a subset of the corporate Right, but that's grist for another post.

Furthermore, the O'Neill Rule remains in effect: all politics are still local. Flaherty, as the original heir apparent to the Mayor spent most of his pre-insurgency career residing in Menino's colon; and Yoon would never be caught dead doing constituent service.

So, a demographic analysis shows a Flaherty base limited to Charlestown and Greater Southie (Wards 6,7, and the Neponset section of Ward 16), and he lost one of the three Neponset precincts. (Neponset consists of Ward 16, precincts 5, 7, and 10. Flaherty took precincts 7 and 10; Menino took precinct 5.)

In the same sense, the Yoon base was limited to the twinkie sections of Jamaica Plain, and three black-majority within Ward 11. He took no majority-Latino precincts, and no precinct with any discernible Asian population.  Jamaica Plain really deserves a case study of its own, give the histories of the Dominican community's successful (and ongoing) battles against the various white-run community development organizations that infest the neighborhood.

Finally the "New Boston" premise simply doesn't hold together. There is little enough shared political interest between and among the various black, Latino, and Asian communities; to presume a working alliance with out-of-town Yuppies and students is pure fantasy, with no demographic, political, or historic basis in fact (to put it less obscenely than I'd normally prefer).

Floon's death predates the Preliminary, but the corpse has finally stopped quivering.   To the sound of chirping crickets.
 
 
* Yes, I know West Roxbury (Ward 20 to all you players out there) is affluent, with a large professional population.  I'm defining class by civic culture and civic values. If you don't get my point, Google Max Weber.