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.

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.