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Hizzonah in the house
By adamg on Wed, 04/22/2009 - 5:48pm
Ryan Barrett works at the Boston office of high-tech PR agency Digitas on Arch Street, where Tom Menino just announced his record fifth straight mayoral candidacy. She posts photos, says he was actually there yesterday practicing his speech.
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Menino practices his
Menino practices his speeches?
From his speech
From the Herald: Tom Menino says, "We'll make sure no one is priced out of their neighborhood, foreclosed out of a home or left living on the sidewalk," Menino said when announcing his candidacy. He also promised to cut crime, improve education and help fill empty store fronts in the city. He also said he'll push to build more green buildings along the city's shore and work to make college affordable for everyone..."
Not reported in the Herald: He then goes on to say "...Yes and I'll cure cancer, solve the middle east peace problem, put a chicken in every pot and let them eat cake. The buck stops here. But only if you pass a meals tax, allow casinos and everyone takes a 10% pay cut every year for the next 10 years. Otherwise I'll fire all the teachers, firefighters and cops (except my son - somebody has to work the Sox bullpen detail). He concludes, "Sorry I haven't gotten around to all this in the past 16 years - I've been too busy shaking the hands of 50% of Boston."
A Great Man, a Useless Company
How could a man as great as His Honor, connect himself with such a wasteless company as Digitas? Mr. Mayor, you've just given me my first reason why I should NOT vote for you.
What's your beef with DTAS?
For realz, I'm really curious!
We Can Has Term Limits Now?
Seriously - I'd love to see if we could get a statewide referendum on the ballot to limit city mayor tenure to 10 years of service.
Political inbreeding is not good.
I'd vote against it
People get the government they deserve. If people want to vote for Tom Menino (or whoever) again, why shouldn't they have that right?
Menino's speech
OMFG
I thought that once Bush was gone, I'd never again cringe while watching a pol-with-power talk but mannnnnn oh mannnnn
Rich! It's rich, i tells ya.
Not sure how everyone else is doing. I made it to about 20 seconds before I had to turn away.
That's really Menino. right? The mayor of a major American city? that guy? My relatives would never believe it.
Yeah, he can't give a speech
But on the plus side: Our trash gets picked up regularly, our neighborhood is safe, the streets get plowed in the winter, the kidlet's going to a decent public school, our sidewalk was redone last year, etc., etc.
I realize not everybody who lives and votes in the city of Boston can say the same thing about their quality of life (especially when it comes to public safety and schools), but enough people can to mean it's going to be difficult to unseat him - even given the challenges facing the city and his own faults. When it comes time to vote, I'm not going to decide whose oval to fill in based on how tongue-tied a particular candidate is.
You're serious?
You're talking about Boston? Seriously?
There are LOTS of safe places in the country. He didn't make it that way.
Trash? There was a thread here last week about the trash being SPRAYED all over the street by trash pick-up guys. I've seen them do it.
DECENT public school. Decent? is that before or after the layoffs?
This mayor has DEFERRED all the regular maintenance that cities are supposed to do, both physical and procedural... and the city's starting to pay the price for that now. DTX is just the biggest symbol of how dysfunctional Boston is, how all that neglect has stacked up.
Yes, I'm serious
I didn't say Boston was a utopia. I said *my* neighborhood is doing OK. I said there are other neighborhoods that are doing OK.
Yes, there are neighborhoods that are far worse off (we've never had trash guys leave our street worse than they found it; we've never had to worry about gunfire outside our front door). Yes, there are structural problems in this city - of which the BRA Memorial Hole is just one example. No, Menino has not done everything perfectly - of which the BRA Memorial Hole is just one example. Ask me next year about our decent public school - there haven't been any layoffs yet.
But when Bostonians do vote, a lot of them will be in similar circumstances as us - in relatively decent shape, all things considered, and wondering if a Flaherty, Yoon or McCrea would really be able to do any better. And I bet few of them will be voting on how eloquent the candidate is - or really give a flying fig what somebody in another state thinks of our mayor.
Two, three, many BRA memorial holes
Did you read Yvonne Abraham's column this morning?
Yes, I did
And she made an excellent point. But I'm not sure you can blame the city for everything - Is what's happening along Centre Street in JP the city's fault, or the economy's fault?
The "real hurt" is in both places
for every small shopkeeper in JP who's hurting because of neglect by developers and the city, there are (or were) probably two in Downtown Crossing.
It's not either-or. The problem is just as bad in either place, and in every place like that around Boston.
And that's a shame
because it lays out how the city's been walking the path of mediocrity since I've known it (quite a number of years).
Those with plenty of money just stay uninvolved because they can buy a layer of insulation from the crap. The rest are at battle with one another or wasting hours of their lives begging for the city to do what cities are supposed to do, or working AROUND their own city. There are several contemporaneous threads right here, right now, that lay out that case.
People "accept" that
- the streets are in crap condition due to the "don't repair your utility dig - give us cash and some day in the future the City will fix the road"
- holes where businesses used to be are somehow normal
- the trash parade kinda sorta is the case everywhere (glad your street doesn't have it but i've seen the trash confetti flying it from Roxbury to the Tony Back Bay, particularly there)
- dysfunction reigns supreme in the operation of "complex" cities. See, Boston is DIFFERENT than every other place and so the normal rules don't apply here. yeah.
- cities have little control over their police or fire department personnel, over staffing policy, or training.
- muny workers on the clock, seldom work (see prior Globe coverage; see how nothing has changed since that coverage)
- i won't go on, the list would be long and tedious and i have happier things to think about today.
How Long ya Been Here?
In the Flynn years, the cameras followed old Raybo to every fire and on foreign junkets too ... everywhere they could go where the burnt out street lights, potholes, and trash weren't so noticeable and the violent crime not so visible.
Boston isn't any different from the rest of the state in its failure to maintain major infrastructure. That's a regional problem - which is why it doesn't get solved because everybody loves them some towns and cities and thinks they all have walls.
Were you around during the last of the White years?
Flynn was hardly perfect, either (Charles Stuart, anyone)?
But you think Boston is bad now? We have nothing on Boston in the early 1980s. Allston/Brighton, a neighborhood of 60,000 people, didn't have a police station. The city stopped plowing the service roads along Comm. Ave. (so after a storm, the way it worked was: the last drivers would get out and push the first car up the hill until it got going, then get back in their cars and wait for new people to show up behind him).
Entire blocks of the Fenway and JP were burning to the ground as landlords discovered they could make more money through insurance payments than rents.
Flynn at least brought stability and services back to the neighborhoods that White had either given up on or could no longer serve due to 2 1/2.
Arrived in 1984
I don't know if I missed the White years or not - I wasn't old enough to vote yet anyway. I lived in the Kenmore area until 1989. Remember it well.
I can understand why people appreciate Menino's ability to get small things fixed.
It could be worse.
We could be California.
Obviously, we've got a gap, and we'll have to make ends meet by cutting costs and raising taxes. And there isn't much low-hanging fruit. Someone's going to lose, and someone's going to be unhappy.
But at least we're not California. We haven't been bleeding our schools dry for twenty years until they trail Mississippi. We don't have a budget that is almost entirely controlled by mandate. We're not so deep in debt that we can't even pay the interest on time anymore. We don't have to make up $42 billion dollars out of thin air.
I think Adam's point is that, sure, many things are not going optimally here. But it's not so bad; it's been worse. For a crisis - the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression - it's not so bad for us here in Boston. And what's the proof that any of the other candidates would do a better a job? Many people think 'better the devil you know.'
The mayor of a major American city?
Well, until the 2010 census comes out ... unless the Boston City Council's undying love for students translates into additonal warm bodies (but no more than four to a household).
I can't wait for that bonehead student-hating councilor to try to get the US Census to break federal confidentiality requirements in his latest quest to enforce his petty little anti-student grandstand. Sadly, I expect just that level of cluelessness, and may stock up on the popcorn to munch while viewing the fireworks when the numbers come out.
Size isn't everything
don't be a size queen.
There's more to bigness than size.
Why, Boston is embiggened by its vast historical heritage, its blah, and mumble/shuffle/mumble-some-more, its world class thises and thats, its beloved sports thingys, the letter T, the number 5, and listeners like you.
Fifth, not fourth?
Adam, shouldn't the post itself read "fifth straight mayoral candidacy" not "fourth"? Elected in 1993, 1997, 2001, 2005, and now running in 2009.
Yes
Fixed, thanks!
Boston 2004 vs. Boston 2009
I don't claim that my experience is at all representative, but I remember how I felt about this city during the summer of 2004, when the DNC came to town. Walking around town during the Convention, the city was alive, and it was celebrating itself in a good way. I really felt that Boston was entering a new era.
Later that year, the Red Sox shook off the Curse of the...Yawkeys with a roster of players that looked nothing like vestiges of the team's racist and bumbling past.
In 2004, Boston seemed to be on the cusp of leaving the worst of its past in the rear-view mirror without completely jettisoning its history, while becoming something possibly very special.
It doesn't feel that way anymore to me. When you look around, the same old leadership, with its same old divide & conquer tactics, pervades the city's public, private, and non-profit sectors. That leadership is aging, but still cannot bring itself to share the torch with others. The dominant power centers remain an elitist, exclusionary core of pseudo-liberals and a parochial, exclusionary bunch of good ol' boys (and a few girls).
This remains a very attractive place to live for so many people, and most of the time I count myself among those who see more positives than negatives. But when I look at this mayoral election, I'm at a loss. I think we've seen the best of Mayor Menino. He did some good things at a time when Boston's fortunes were on the upswing, and even if his speeches aren't Kennedy-esque, he understands people at a grassroots level. But the Filene's hole is symbolic of his leadership when things are getting tough -- I'm not sure he's a can-do guy during more difficult times.
The two major contenders have not demonstrated the ability to galvanize, inspire, and lead with visionary ideas. Flaherty appears to be doing a competent job of putting together a base of support and taking some good pings at the Mayor. Though I was delighted over Yoon's election to the Council four years ago, he's having some trouble getting out of the starting gate for this mayoral race, perhaps tripped up by some Menino-triggered campaign antics. Both Flaherty and Yoon are well meaning and smart, but neither has seized the moment and articulated why people should bail on Menino and go with change.
Personally, that sense of optimism I had over the city's future in 2004 is no more, and sadly (for now at least), the mayoral race has only reinforced that sense of lost opportunity.
Sorry for the length of this post -- just had to yammer a bit.