Mayor for a New America
Page 5
But Tony, a hardworking member of Ways and Means, was ambitious. He wanted to replace me as committee chair, believing he could advance minority interests from that post. The council president appoints the chairs. I didn’t have to spell it out. If Tony backed me for president, I’d name him chair.
Hennigan thought that neither of us would get seven votes on the first ballot, giving her a chance to lure one of the three conservatives away from me. That strategy might have worked. The conservatives were livid with me for voting to override Ray Flynn’s veto of a bill that required most city restaurants to install condom vending machines—this after I supported, opposed, and supported it again! My coalition almost broke down. “I’m really getting beat up,” I told a reporter, who wrote that I “seemed likely to lose” my bid for the presidency. One of the conservatives might have voted “present” to punish me, or held off for a ballot to see what Maura had to offer. But the progressives behind Maura barely talked to the conservatives. I listened to them and would work with them.
Respect—shown by hearing people out and disagreeing without being disagreeable—is a vanishing political virtue. When I was new on the council, and the papers would quote me criticizing the mayor, my father would call me up to complain: “Don’t say things like that about the mayor. You have to show him some respect.” Carl Menino may have hated politics, but from him I learned the secret that kept my coalition together. Hours before the vote, the conservatives met behind closed doors and decided to go for me on the first ballot.
“It is heartening that a well-qualified candidate prevailed,” the Globe wrote of my 7–6 victory in an editorial titled “A Comer as Council President.” Black and Hispanic leaders who lumped me in with the “conservatives” could take comfort from these words in the editorial: “Since his district encompasses Hyde Park and Roslindale, two racially mixed neighborhoods, [Menino] has an acute sense of the changes that are transforming the city and a knack for reconciling newcomers and longtime residents.”
Maura was gracious in defeat. “It would have been wonderful to win, but it didn’t happen,” she said. “You live to fight another day.” That would be a long time coming.
The neighbors crowded round for a block party in the Readville section. Neat little bungalows, cheek by jowl, emptied as hot dogs, pizza and soft drinks disappeared. The new mayor gave a Readville-is-now-on-the map speech, and he danced in the street with Angela while somebody’s stereo blared Sinatra’s “My Way.”
—from David Nyhan’s column in the Boston Globe, July 20, 1993
In early March, Ray Flynn summoned me to the mayor’s office. Bill Clinton had asked him to be U.S. ambassador to the Vatican. Should he take the job? “Mayor” (never “Ray”), I said, “some of us from the neighborhoods might get to be congressmen, but name anyone from South Boston or Hyde Park who ever got to be an ambassador. Take it.” Ray said he’d mull Rome over. His call came at 2:30 in the afternoon: “Go out and get some new suits; you’re going to be acting mayor.”
“My whole life has changed in a matter of twenty-four hours,” I said to reporters during a flying visit with Ray to Doyle’s, a politico haunt in Jamaica Plain. “What’s important is not the political future of Tom Menino; it’s the future of the city.”
Adrian Walker of the Globe wouldn’t let me get away with that pious pose: “But even as he declared that government, not politics, comes first, Menino was moving to set up a campaign for November. While Menino worked his way around Doyle’s—pressing the flesh in a crowd that seemed far more interested in Flynn—veteran political strategist Edward Jesser, a Menino friend for 25 years, was sequestered in the restaurant’s office, recruiting campaign workers and planning fund-raising.”
I sent that clip to Ed Jesser and asked if it “rings a bell.” He wrote back, “I remember it well.” His recollection reads like a scene from The Last Hurrah, the classic novel about Boston politics, and politics everywhere:
I entered a few seconds before you to watch the crowd carefully. The place was mobbed. . . . Having spent the previous ten years as a regular of Doyle’s, a stomping ground for Flynn, his senior staff, and Globies, I knew the crowd well. I was interested in those who barely acknowledged or ignored the current mayor but pressed close to and bestowed congratulations on Your Incipience. Our future campaign workers. I braced them, confirmed their liking of the future acting mayor and moved it from support to pledges with ease. You were standing ten feet away and they had to tell me they were not with you to avoid my little whirlpool. A difficult task if you had to or wished to curry the favorable opinion of the next mayor. . . . Adrian [Walker] caught me not long after in Eddie Burke’s office using much of this information to enhance the Menino landslide, explain the train was leaving the station, preclude the anti-Menino idea of needing a meeting to decide on a favorite candidate, and, yes, begin arranging fund raisers. . . . It was a good day, a veritable wonderland for political operative and writer alike. . . . It rings a bell.
That was in March 1993. The U.S. Senate was scheduled to act on Ray’s nomination in May. Everybody assumed he’d be sworn in quickly as ambassador and resign as mayor. Technically, he had until July 12. Any later than that and city law required that the special election in November be for the remaining two years of Ray’s term, not for a full four-year term.
Ray blew hot and cold for weeks. He couldn’t be any old ambassador to the Holy See. He had to bring his message of “social and economic justice” to the poor everywhere. Ray Flynn had to be ambassador to the world.
Rule-bound and bureaucratic, the State Department was overmatched with Ray, who as emperor of Boston made the rules. No such posting as roving ambassador exists, they told him. Then create one, Ray said.
While Ray fiddled, Boston politics burned. Six candidates declared for mayor: four members of the City Council, the sheriff of Suffolk County, and a state legislator from Dorchester. A former police commissioner and a former TV news anchor would soon join the mix. A marathon of seventy-six forums and debates stretching to the September preliminary election began. Often, we wound up talking to each other’s sign holders. By the end I was so tired that, sitting through another candidate’s speech for the fifty-seventh time, I dozed off and fell out of my chair.
The campaign was three months old when Ray called the six candidates to a hurry-up meeting at the Parkman House, the city-owned mansion on Beacon Hill, to deliver the bad news: He might stay on as mayor of Boston. Rome just wasn’t working out. None of us could speak.
The next day the mayor made a dramatic announcement: He would go to Rome. Ray had used the Parkman House meeting to jam a decision out of State. To avoid weeks of damaging Ray-inspired leaks, it caved to most of his demands. We candidates were stage props in his play.
It was now June. I had hoped to be acting mayor. I could not talk the job. I had to be mayor to be elected mayor. That was my strategy. Ray was trashing it. Every day he hung on at City Hall was a day less to show my stuff.
Meanwhile, the voters had forgotten me. “Where Is Tom Menino?” a Globe headline inquired. Menino signs were “as rare as Red Sox victories.” I was “overshadowed” in a series of debates. I “laid an egg” doing stand-up at a comedy club. I was “a bit frayed in the syntax department.” A must-read columnist offered a backhanded compliment: “Tom Menino is no actor. He’s built like a longshoreman, talks like a truck driver, and works like a mule.” Notices like that hurt my fundraising. They demoralized my volunteers. My campaign was going nowhere.
Then events began breaking my way. On the last day of June, Ray was confirmed as ambassador to the Holy See by the Senate. On July 9 Ray was sworn in by Vice President Al Gore. Ray had until five P.M. on the twelfth to resign.
How did I stay sane that day in City Hall? Ray and his wife, Cathy, were booked on an evening flight to Rome—but Ray was missing. His staff did not know where he was. His police detail was in the dark. A friend reported seeing him slip out of the building in his running clothes.
We—Angela, my two kids, my brother, some friends, and the journalist Dave Nyhan, the one who said I worked like a mule—spent the time nervously reminiscing while Ray took his last run as mayor through the neighborhoods. Good thing Boston was only forty-four square miles.
I recalled my father’s reaction to the big news of a decade before:
ME: I’m gonna run for City Council.
CARL: You got two children and a wife to support. What if you lose?
ME: Dad, I won’t lose.
CARL: Give me a break! You’re gonna win?
ME: Dad, I’m gonna win.
Angela remembered being miserable during that first race in 1983. She’d been with me through two lost jobs. There was no guarantee my old job at the State House would be waiting for me. I was over forty. Most men were secure in their careers by then. I was trying to start over. True, the kids were grown, and she had a good job as a bookkeeper. With her salary we could cover the note on our $35,000 house. But we’d relied on my job for health insurance. And neither of us could expect much of a pension. I knew all that, but she knew the details of every dollar spent and made sure they always stretched far enough. She also knew how much I liked to shop, and eat. Not wanting to dampen my spirits, she kept her thoughts to herself.
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.