Tag Archives: Bob Ferrara

Night of the underdog

Posted by thebastard on

City Councilor Bill Linehan got a dose of reality last night when Suzanne Lee captured first place in the three-way preliminary race for District 2, though it should really come as no surprise that Lee took first.

Sure, as someone who does not live in South Boston it’s easy for voters to view her as an outsider, especially considering the number of Southie residents old enough to still be bitter about having to “comingle with coloreds” following the whole busing fiasco, but that does little to explain the extent of forces at play in this race.

Simply put, Lee is a career community organizer who knows how to spread her message. The other candidates do not.

When Linehan first ran for City Council in 2007, he finished at a close second place in the preliminary race to Susan Passoni. Linehan was Mayor Thomas Menino’s guy and the sole Southie resident left for the final election, which helped him clench the seat. I could speculate that campaigning played a part, but I’m still not sure Linehan really knows how to do that, considering he never returns calls, leaves his campaign managing duties to a half-wit and barely even knows what social media is.

He was pretty well-matched in that regard by Bob Ferrara, who on a dare from Michael Flaherty, tried to get elected about as hard as Southie bartenders try to prevent drunken date rape – not very. To his credit Ferrara did walk away with 25 percent of the vote, but there’s no telling how much of that were votes for “the white guy who isn’t Linehan.”

Linehan must have noticed the success that Lee has had with social media, as he registered a brand new twitter account yesterday. Among his first tweets from last night was that he was looking forward to counting the votes to see who finished in second place. I don’t think he realized he was talking about himself.

The question is, what will happen now that Ferrara’s out of the picture and Linehan is against the ropes? He’s been there before, but that was during a special election with no other races, leaving Menino’s political machine without any distractions.

This year, the machine’s major distraction is that other South Boston politician, Michael Flaherty. The at-large race has been quiet thus far, but with the clock ticking, someone is bound to notice the blood in the water. It’s just a question of who’s blood that is. At this point, my gut tells me it’s Flaherty’s, but a lot can happen in 40 days.

One thing is for sure, Linehan is an idiot, who should appear in drunk in public more often, if for any other reason than a public drinking problem would better explain his performance as a City Councilor and a campaigner.

Dorchester on the other hand, was also the site of an upset for Menino’s pick. John O’Toole was favored to take first in the District 3 race thanks to a bump from Maureen Feeney’s endorsement, not to mention the non-secret that Menino personally wants him in office.

Instead, O’Toole got to give his weepy, victory speech from second place as Frank Baker stole first.

Political reporters have been explaining Baker’s win as the result of O’Toole and Craig Galvin splitting their constituencies. Although there may be some merit to this, it doesn’t account for a tendency among some voters to automatically side against the establishment, especially when it’s easy for voters to dislike Menino for no other reason than that he’s been in office long enough

I wouldn’t be surprised if the turnout from last night doubled for the final election, which is a lot of ground to cover for either candidate.

Preliminary Election Day

Posted by thebastard on

Today is election day for three of the city’s nine district, which means that a field that has a total of 14 candidates will be whittled down to three pairs by barely enough voters to fill a single polling precinct.

Here are my predictions for the three races:

District 2 

Look for Bill Linehan and Suzanne Lee to easily top the ticket, sending Bob Ferrara back to Southie wondering why he didn’t get more support from Michael Flaherty’s campaign. With Suzanne Lee possibly grabbing the most support outside of South Boston, look for Linehan to take this as a message to activate his South Boston base in time for November. Though, one could just as easily expect Linehan to continue being useless, so the final election remains up for grabs.

District 3

The seven-way battle for Maureen Feeney’s seat is set to enter its second act after tonight’s results. All expectations have it coming down to two of John O’Toole, Craig Galvin and Frank Baker. If I had to take a shot in the dark, I would go with O’Toole and Baker if only because O’Toole and Galvin have a similar base to split and O’Toole is City Hall’s guy. As for November, it’s tough to say, considering that after tonight, supporters of five also-rans will be deciding which horse to back.

District 7

In Roxbury we have the battle to lose to Tito Jackson the six-month incumbent. It’s probably not fair to easily dismiss Althea Garrison and Roy Owens, but it does happen to be accurate. I say Sheneal Parker, a Fenway activist, will easily waltz into a November pounding at the polls.

On a side note, I’m putting my money on the most at-large candidate sitings taking place in Dorchester.

 

 

Naivete versus the lazy machine

Posted by thebastard on

Among the district City Council races, perhaps the most interesting has been that of District 2, where a lackluster incumbent is facing his first challenge to the office from an angry, yet impotent fellow South Bostonian and a legitimately-threatening dark horse candidate from the other side of the district.

In 2007,  Bill Linehan was elected to the District 2 seat, following the passing of James Kelly. That election saw Linehan come in second in the seven-way preliminary race, only to edge out Susan Passoni in the final election.

Suzanne Lee is a first-time politician from Chinatown, who has decades of service as an educator under her belt. She also has experience as a community organizer working for causes that impact the Chinese-American community in Boston.

Bob Ferrara is a South Boston native known more for his ability to revitalize youth sports organizations than for his ability to actually run a successful campaign. Ferrara, who announced his challenge to Linehan last May, was also in that 2007 race, finishing dead last.

On paper, this race originally appeared to be one in which a naïve political outsider found herself on the sidelines as two Southie guys spar for the district that has historically been controlled by South Boston.

Instead, voters are getting a race where an ineffectual incumbent is waiting for the city’s political machine to help him take out an activist challenger, while not having to worry about Ferrara splitting the neighborhood vote.

To make a cheap, half-assed comparison about campaign style to the 2012 GOP field, Linehan is kind of like Mitt Romney, Lee is strangely comparable to Rick Perry and Ferrara is more like former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson.

 

 

Who is Gary Johnson? Exactly.

 

Ferrara has received a lot less media attention than the other two candidates, but then it’s tough when you don’t have a website, you don’t check your e-mail, and the only phone number anyone can find is a home line without an answering machine. I’m still not sure Ferrara is even trying to run, so it makes sense that there’s a rumor going around that he was coerced to run by Michael Flaherty who needs a bigger South Boston turnout so that he has a chance to get back on the Council.

In terms of money, Lee has almost matched Linehan. Since announcing last December, Lee has raised just under  $83,000, while in that same period of time, Linehan raised about $84,000, which does not include the $7,923.05 he had on hand at the beginning of Dec. 2010.

Since June, Ferrara has raised about $8,500 and has managed to accrue overdraft fees in six of the last seven half-month reporting periods.

 

 

Bob Ferrara may lose votes with his latest fundraising strategy of cutting into the neighborhood’s homeless booze fund.

 

 

One of the larger issues of the district is neighborhood representation.

On constituent service and his record representing the parts of the district that aren’t South Boston, Linehan has repeatedly said that all anyone needs to do if they have a problem is to call his office and he will respond, which is kind of a roundabout way of saying that if you’re unhappy with his service as a district Councilor, that’s your fault for not calling him.

Linehan has criticized Menino, but only in a ham-handed way that I imagine was intended to appeal to his anti-Menino constituents who don’t really pay attention to his words. In a forum covered by the South End News, Linehan called out Menino’s decision to “cut 12 libraries” as absurd. That proposal was actually 10, then four libraries, though it isn’t clear if the error in numbers came from Linehan or the reporter.

Either way, Linehan took the safe route in appealing to the residents who had opposed the possible closure of the Washington Village library in South Boston.

Aside from that, when Linehan wasn’t going along with the mayor’s office, he was pitching half-assed initiatives like his attempt to banish towing cars for street sweeping in place of a $100 ticket or showing up at an endless series of parades or banquets with open bars.

 

 

Linehan’s key constituents are those too drunk to remember his office number.

 

Residents supported that idea about as well as South Boston supported integration.

It should not come as a surprise that Lee has done so well generating support in the district, as she’s the only candidate who does not seem like she has her head up her own ass. Instead, she’s making the poor assumption that there is no longer enough sexism and racism in South Boston to stop her campaign.

She should easily trump Ferrara in the preliminary election, though who knows whether she or Linehan will be on top in the polls that day. The following month will be another matter entirely. October will be the time for the city hall establishment to ramp up its support of incumbents, though who knows how pre-occupied that machine will be in its attempts to bury Michael Flaherty in the at-large race.

Lee has been racking up endorsements from non-South Boston based groups, such as DotOUT, Massachusett’s Women’s Political Caucus, the Bay State Stonewall Democrats and the Boston Ward 4 Democrats, while Linehan has the public support of at least three of the seven regular drunkards at The Corner Pub on Lincoln Street.

Ferrara has plenty of endorsements, but they all come from underage non-voters on his Pop Warner team.

As I mentioned in my previous post, Lee is the only candidate to respond to my request for an e-mail interview, though to be fair, I’m not sure that Ferrara has a grasp on social media let alone anything else on the internet, while Linehan is too busy waiting for the opportunity to ignore a constituent call to be bothered with anything else.

 

 

 

 

 

Suzanne Lee Q&A

Posted by thebastard on

Along with Bob Ferrara and incumbent Bill Linehan, Suzanne Lee is one of three candidates throwing down in the District 2 City Council Race. In preparation for an article about the race, I contacted all three candidates with a series of questions and Lee was the only one to respond. I assume that this is because Linehan was too busy pretending to work for a living, while Ferrara pretends to actually try to win an election.

After reading Lee’s responses, I realized that her answers didn’t quite fit the article I was writing. So instead, I figured I would just post the whole unedited Q&A here:

 

How do you feel headed into September’s preliminary election?

 

I feel great.  The thing that has really kept my energy up and driven me along this campaign is my conversations with people.  I’ve personally knocked over 2,000 doors and made more than that many phone calls and my dedicated volunteers have helped my campaign knock on nearly 8,000 doors and make well over 12,000 phone calls.  And the reactions have been great.  People are happy that they have a choice – its what democracy is all about.  And people really do believe that our city can do a lot better, especially when it comes to education.

 

I also think that as a first time candidate, we’ve done a fantastic job at fundraising (we’ve raised $83,000 so far), which I believe is because of the vast amount of people who’ve seen my work over the past 35 years and know of my record of results.  I’ve received contributions from over 660 individual donors, many of which are small dollar donations.  And that is what touches me the most — not any total sum of money — but rather, how many small donations I’ve received from regular working people who believe in my message and truly want the type of leadership that I can bring to the Boston City Council.

 

What role has social media played in your campaign?

 

I believe social media has played a great role in getting people information about my campaign.  I maintain a twitter account, facebook page and flickr page so that people can both find out information about my candidacy as well as follow me on the campaign trail.  I believe that we must do a better job of ensuring that everyone in the district can get information in the medium that they use — whether that means print media, social media, email, or by maintaining a presence in community meetings, our local schools, and in living rooms across the district.  This is also the reason why my website is trilingual (English, Spanish and Chinese) and I have campaign literature in all three languages as well.   (NOTE: Our website launches trilingual tomorrow, Friday September 16th – so by the time you write the story, it will be live)

 

We need leadership who puts effort into being accessible to everyone.  To be truly accessible to the diversity of the district you have to recognize that its not one-size-fits-all.  That’s how I would run my City Council office, because I believe ensuring that everyone has equal access to city services and information as well as engaging them proactively to take part in decision making is essential if we are to make Boston better.

 

It seems like District 2 tends to be treated as the South Boston Council seat. Do you think that the non-South Boston portion of the district has representation?

 

For as long as District 2 has contained the precincts that currently make-up the district, the councilor has come from South Boston.  So its not surprising that some treat it that way.  But I don’t believe that a councilor or elected official has to be from a neighborhood to represent it properly.  At the Josiah Quincy School where i was principal for 10 years, we had children from all over the city and I worked to make sure that every single child in my building received exactly what he or she needed to achieve in the classroom.  My 35 years experience working in schools all over Boston and educating children from all sorts of backgrounds has proven to me that when we all come together — no matter who you are or where you’re from — and we make decisions with everyone’s input, we always come to a better solution.

 

How do the needs of the non-South Boston neighborhoods differ form that of South Boston?

 

There are certainly specific issues block-to-block and neighborhood-to-neighborhood.  For instance, in the Old Dover neighborhood of the South End, the crime that surrounds the Pine Street Inn is a major concern for residents.  In Chinatown, one of the big issues is that we are fighting for a branch library.  But these are not so different from issues in South Boston, such as the crime that surrounds the Andrew Square area near the methadone clinic, or the residents’ push to build an arts and cultural center.  The thing that I’ve noticed as I’ve stood at doorsteps and in living rooms from Fort Point Channel to Dorchester, from South Boston to Bay Village, from Chinatown to South End, is that everyone wants the same things:  They want great schools for their children, access to good jobs, to be able to afford to keep living in the city as prices seem to skyrocket, and to have safe and thriving neighborhoods.

 

There has been plenty of discussion of Ayanna Pressley possibly being the last female on the council. Do you feel slighted by this representation?

 

I believe that the Boston City Council absolutely must have women’s voices in its membership.  I’m proud do be endorsed by the Massachusetts Women’s Political Caucus and am a very passionate advocate for electing women candidates to public office.  Beyond that belief and passion, I can only speak about the message of my campaign, which is about proactive leadership, results in reforming our schools, and a commitment to increasing transparency and accessibility in city government, and not merely that I am a woman.

 

From the beginning, Bob Ferrara has said that he was running specifically to oppose Linehan as being subservient to Mayor Menino. What are your thoughts on this view?

 

I have a lot of respect for both Bill Linehan and Bobby Ferrara.  With that said, I can’t really speak on the message my opponents are using on their campaigns.  My campaign is concentrating on listening to voters, at their doors and on the phone.  In my schools I always made sure education was about the children and parents, and not just about the teachers, principals or school committee.  Curriculum is only part of what can make a school successful– the rest has to come from bringing in input from everyone and finding the way the school can work best for its children.  In that same way, Boston needs to make government work better for people.  And we can’t do that without listening to them — going to them — not just waiting for them to call their councilor’s office, but engaging them, and bringing everyone together and working together to build a better future for Boston.

 

If you do not make it past the preliminary election, will you vote for Bob Ferrara, Bill Linehan, or none of the above?

 

I have to honestly say that right now all of my efforts are put towards running the best campaign possible for the preliminary election on September 27th.  As I mentioned earlier, I’ll be on the phones and on the streets all over the district talking to voters from now until then, and then I’ll be ready to keep working after the 27th if I move on.

 

With education as the centerpiece of your campaign, do you think helps or hinders your efforts to be associated with a single issue?

 

I don’t see myself as a single issue candidate.  For over 35 years I’ve been a leader in our communities, bringing people together and helping new residents, immigrants, young people, seniors, and working families have a voice in local government.   In 1975, I organized the Chinese Parents Association, so that the Chinese community had a voice during the busing era. Three years later, I brought people together to form the Chinese Progressive Association, which over the last 3 decades has played a pivotal role in standing up to police brutality, organizing garment workers to obtain bilingual job retraining so they can get back to work, fighting for affordable housing throughout Boston, and boosting voter turnout and civic engagement in Chinatown. I also collaborated with the Boston Foundation to address persistent poverty in our neighborhoods.  I’ve spent decades fighting to make sure that ordinary people have a say in the decisions that effect their community and ensuring that everyone has equal access and opportunity to succeed.

 

That being said, I do believe that most people in this city want to improve our public education system.  And I am a candidate who’s done it.  I’ve taken on tough fights, and I’ve gotten results.  I took over one of Boston’s lowest-performing schools and in just 4 years made it a nationally recognized model for school reform.  I also served as principal of the Josiah Quincy School for 10 years, which was named one of the best public schools in Massachusetts during my tenure. A quality public education system is the foundation of our democracy and I know that good schools build strong communities.  I believe that if we can educate our children to be successful, provide them with non-school enrichment programs so they stay off the streets, and train them to compete in a 21st century global economy, we can make Boston the best it can be.