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.

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.

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.