Mayor for a New America (7 page)

Left unsaid, as we waited for Ray to return from his run, was that her anxiety then was a preview of her anxiety now. If I lost the mayor's race, I'd be out of a job. And this time I was fifty.

At 4:20 a phone rang in the outer office. We all stopped talking at once. A moment later a staffer opened the door. “That was the clerk's office,” he said. “He signed the letter. It's down there.”

I led our little band into the cement slab corridor (“like a racquetball court,” I'd later describe my office walls) and through a parting of reporters and cameramen to the mayor's office. Ray was there, having his picture taken with the last of a long line of well-wishers.

In a 2009 interview with Joe Keohane of
Boston
Magazine
, Ray gave his version of what happened next: “The day I was in my office leaving, I was asked by his staff . . . if I would say something very positive about Tommy before all the press. I said, ‘Look, I know [mayoral candidates] Jimmy Brett and Mickey Roache. Those guys were friends of mine and I don't want to be dictating who the next mayor is going to be. . . .' ‘Well, can you say something like, the city is in good hands?' So I said, ‘Sure, I can say that.' Of course that's the front page headline, with a picture of Tommy Menino. They asked me if I could hug him [for the photo]. So I did.”

The ask to say something positive—I knew about that. But nobody cleared the hug with me.

 

I often wish God had given me the silver tongue of Mario Cuomo, the looks of Bill Clinton, and the golf swing of Jack Nicklaus. But he didn't. He did give me a big heart, a gift for numbers, and a love for the city of Boston.

 

—speaking at a candidates' forum in 1993

 

The first poll appeared on my second day in office. It killed the joy. With eight weeks to go before the September preliminary, I trailed the front-runner by 10 points. She was my council colleague Rosaria Salerno, a former Benedictine nun and a staunch progressive channeling “Year of the Woman” energy with her campaign slogan, “Not One of the Boys.”

In what was now a seven-candidate race, she had a big lead. But the votes weren't there to elect her in a two-person race. In city elections, held in off years, half those who vote in presidential election years don't show up. The missing were Rosaria's voters—young, single, well educated, progressive, gay—living in the low-voting wards of Allston, Mission Hill, the Fenway, the Back Bay, and the South End. In city elections the votes were in South Boston, West Roxbury, Dorchester, and Hyde Park. The candidate opposing her in the final would clean up in those neighborhoods, which don't vote on ideology—“progressive” or “conservative”—but on the delivery of city services like police, fire, trash collection, and the like. Those were my issues. I wanted to be that candidate.

The acting mayor needed to start acting like a mayor. Days after taking over, I reprogrammed $500,000 from the city's reserve fund to put kids to work in summer jobs. “It gets you up early in the morning,” I told them, “and when you get home at night you're too tired to get into trouble on the streets.” It was the beginning of something big.

Every year, starting in January, I'd appeal to the civic spirit of executives from the banks, the tech firms, the hospitals, and the insurance companies. With your help, I'd say, we can make this a safe summer in Boston. Hire as many kids as you can. Give them a break . . . We started with one hundred businesses and institutions, and ended with three hundred, including major employers like John Hancock, State Street Bank, and Brigham and Women's Hospital.

The city did its part, too. Every year I'd set aside several million dollars to pay kids $8 an hour to clean up parks and tourist sites like the Freedom Trail. Ten thousand kids every summer—that was the goal. In tight years, budget watchdogs complained that the city couldn't afford to hire several thousand kids, and I'd respond, “This isn't about today. This is about tomorrow,” and the city hired the kids. Over twenty years I pulled together $150 million in city, state, and federal money to fund more than 200,000 summer jobs.

All the kids got experience earning—and managing—their own money. Those who showed up and did the work got a good reference from their supervisors. Some kids learned the lesson I took away from my summer job at Bird & Sons. I shared it with Shirley Leung, a business columnist at the
Globe
, for a piece she wrote about the Mayor's Summer Jobs program: “You have to work hard to make . . . money. You have to get dirty.” A lucky few were offered full-time jobs after they graduated from high school. Leung interviewed a young woman named Icandace Woods, who turned a city-arranged summer internship at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute into a career as a clinical team leader. “These [summer] jobs are amazing,” she told Leung. “It [gives] us hope and shows that someone cares.”

And people ask me why I got into politics.

So, bringing Hyde Park values to City Hall, I said yes on summer jobs. Yes on putting police cadets in station houses to free up more cops for the streets. Yes on redeploying officers to a new Youth Violence Strike Force. But to show I was tough enough to be mayor, I also had to say no.

My pollster, Irwin “Tubby” Harrison, discovered a potential breakout issue from focus group interviews with Boston residents. Some were angry about unsafe streets and others about failing schools, parking, or trash pickup. But all of them were furious over their water bills.

To pay for the decade-long cleanup of Boston Harbor, home owners had seen their water bills rise overnight from a nominal yearly sum to hundreds of dollars a quarter with no end in sight. The bills were sent by the Boston Water and Sewer Commission, an appointed body beyond the voters' reach. The mayor picked the three members of the commission board. I asked one of Ray's holdover lawyers if I could order the board to freeze the rates for a year. The law was murky, but the lawyer doubted I had the power. “Can't do it?” I interrupted. “Want to bet?”

I announced the freeze in the morning. On the TV news at noon, City Councilor John Nucci, until recently one of my competitors in the mayor's race, said I lacked the authority to freeze the rates. On the six o'clock news he hailed the freeze as a relief for hard-pressed home owners paying for the wasteful, crony-laden sewer commission. Between noon and six, irate constituents had flooded his office with calls. John's turnabout was a test of the water rates issue. It was a winner. “It's Tommy's week,” an anonymous councilor told the
Globe
.

Freezing the rates became our rallying cry in the preliminary and general election campaigns. Hit again and again in television ads. Pounded home in speeches, debates, and media interviews. A textbook example of entrepreneurial politics: Find a voting issue unexploited by your opponents and make it your own. We veterans of the three Timilty-White fights, of Jimmy Carter's '76 and '80 campaigns, of my '83 and subsequent council campaigns—we old hands knew how to play this game.

An August poll showed Rosaria falling from 22 percent to 19 percent. She was stuck on gender. Too late, she realized that her pitch—vote for me because I'm “not one of the boys”—wasn't giving people enough reason to vote for her. She was also battling the prejudice against electing women to executive office. And she misread the mood of the voters in attacking me as “Kevin Flynn,” as if balancing downtown development with neighborhood services was somehow unprogressive. As Ray Flynn himself said, Boston had moved on from the anti-downtown politics of 1983. In a slumping economy, people wanted a “Kevin Flynn” for mayor.

The same poll had me stuck at 14 percent. But I was confident my numbers would rise after the rate freeze. It was popular in itself. Who wants to pay a higher water bill? And it showed me acting like a mayor.

Another mayoral moment came in September, two weeks before the preliminary. The School Committee agreed to a new teachers' contract. I said, “Go back to the bargaining table and get a better deal for the city.”

Dave Nyhan scored it a win for me. “Everybody used to make fun of the way you talk,” he wrote. “So you lose a few ‘g's' here and there. People hereabouts talk like you talk. Nothing fancy. But when you got the chance to say ‘no' [on the teachers' contract] you said it loud and clear. Can Menino handle the job? No question. Case closed.” Fifty-eight percent of the voters agreed.

Soon,
FOR MAYOR MENINO
signs sprouted in yards across the city, exploiting the magic of incumbency in Boston elections. Flyers in sixteen languages conveyed my commitment to safe neighborhoods, good schools, and caring government.

 

As Rosaria lost ground, Jim Brett gained it. A veteran state legislator representing white Dorchester, Jim was at home in neighborhood taverns and downtown boardrooms, an articulate, attractive candidate and a very good guy.

Those were some of Jim's positives. There were three negatives.

First, although he was a player at the State House, Jim had no name recognition outside Dorchester. Second, he was a close friend of a controversial politician, State Senate President William “Billy” Bulger of South Boston, brother of the famous gangster “Whitey” Bulger. Brett argued that his ties to Billy Bulger would benefit the city. But the Bulger association, which extended through Jim's wife, who worked for Bulger for twenty years, was a burden to Brett, especially in the minority community, where Bulger's anti-busing politics of the 1970s was not forgotten or, like Ray Flynn's, forgiven. Third, Jim's down-the-line Catholic opposition to abortion, an issue not relevant to city politics, gave this work-and-wages Democrat an undeserved reputation for conservatism. Progressive and minority voters got the impression that he would not be a mayor for
them
.

Balancing these negatives was a big cultural positive. Since 1925 Boston had elected seven mayors. All were Irish Americans. So was Jim Brett. The Irish voted above their falling weight in the population: “Heavy-voting ward” was ethnically neutral shorthand for an Irish American neighborhood. Jim Brett was of Irish descent. Former news anchor Christopher Lydon topped that, boasting that he was the only Irish
citizen
in the race. Mickey Roache, Ray Flynn's former police commissioner, wanted it known that he received the Blessed Sacrament seven days a week.

By the 1980s Italian Americans my age were tired of the “Pick-a-Mick” choice of mayors on the ballot and for once wanted to vote for one of their own. I learned that walking house-to-house in my '83 council race. A man would come to the door, notice the name on my campaign button, and say, “Menino? I'm with ya. I'm Russo.” When I addressed Italian American audiences in '93, it wasn't my charisma that excited them. The green tide in Boston politics was receding, and Italians weren't the only group standing on the beach happy to see it go.
^*

 

Come November 3rd—the day after you elect me mayor—the city of Boston will begin a new era in which the needs of families are given the highest priority.

 

—from a speech delivered the night the election became a two-man race

 

The winners of the September preliminary were . . . me, with 27 percent of the vote, and Jim Brett, with 23 percent. Rosaria Salerno, with 17 percent, was out of the running.

Boston would not have its first woman mayor, but it was likely to see its first Italian American one. Polls showed me with a big lead.

The swing vote was nearly all to Jim Brett's left. It was now my vote. One poll showed me running 28 points ahead among “liberals” and, reflecting my support for abortion rights, 19 points ahead among women. It didn't help Jim that Bishop John Patrick Boles picked this moment to endorse him.

I had a good record on gay issues but, unlike Salerno, I had not supported domestic partner benefits for city employees. That did not matter to the Greater Boston Lesbian and Gay Political Alliance. It did not matter when, in a speech to them, I came out for “the distribution of condominiums.” I wasn't Jim Brett. They endorsed me.

When Roache called for an end to affirmative action in the Boston Police Department, I said, “We have to have a police department that reflects the diversity of the city.” Salerno, Sheriff Robert Ruffo, City Councilor Bruce Bolling, and Lydon had all taken the same position. Only Brett, “who hails from conservative Dorchester, remained ambiguous on the issue,” the
Globe
reported. Then at a meeting held in a Roxbury church, Brett, normally a careful speaker, referred to “you people.” This was a year after Ross Perot, addressing the Urban League, had created a furor by speaking of “your people.” The Roxbury audience seemed shocked. “Condominiums” for “condoms” revealed my struggle with language. “You people,” to African Americans, betrayed contempt. In this context it wasn't surprising that Bolling, the only African American in the race, now endorsed me. So did Mel King, the civil rights legend who ran against Ray Flynn in 1983.

Jim's chances of winning were fading fast. A question in our last debate destroyed them. A
Herald
columnist quoted a Brett campaign slogan calling Jim “a forceful, intelligent voice for Boston.” Picking up on the implied contrast, he asked, “Do you consider yourself more intelligent and articulate than Mr. Menino?” Jim, sensing danger in sounding superior, objected: “I find that question rather insulting. I have never said that and I know Tom would never say that.” The debate was held before a large audience at the Boston Public Library, and there was a rush of applause for Jim. Yet the idea that Jim's slogan was slyly equating my thick tongue with a thick head was out there.

It wasn't as if I was hiding my difficulties as a public speaker. My TV ads included the line “I'm not a fancy talker” (pronounced “talkah”), “but I get the job done.” And in interviews I was careful to say things like “Hey, I'm not the best-looking guy in the world and I know nobody is ever going to ask me to host
Masterpiece Theatre
.” And then add: “But mayors don't get paid by the word. You can't talk a playground into being clean.”