E-Mail This Article to a Friend Metamorphosis Maura Hennigan transforms herself into a serious mayoral candidate BY ADAM REILLY

It would be an exaggeration to say that Maura Hennigan gets no respect. But with Boston’s mayoral election less than a month away, she isn’t getting much.

A lack of effort isn’t the problem. Unseating an incumbent mayor is extremely difficult in Boston — it hasn’t happened since John Hynes defeated James Michael Curley in 1949 — but Hennigan is doing everything in her power to establish herself as a credible threat to Mayor Tom Menino. In recent weeks, the at-large city councilor arranged personal lines of credit totaling nearly $1 million, using her home and two rental properties as collateral, to help offset Menino’s hefty fundraising advantage. She bloodied Menino in the only televised encounter between the two candidates. And to make her case to the Boston electorate, she shelled out $70,000 for radio and television ads attacking Menino’s record — quite a contrast to Menino’s last opponent, former at-large councilor Peggy Davis-Mullen, who ran her first ads just two days before the election.

Hennigan’s rhetoric, meanwhile, has been unrelentingly combative. Throughout her campaign, she has argued that Menino deserves blame for a host of woes — deep dysfunction in the Boston public schools, skyrocketing real-estate prices, uneven allocation of city services, rising homicide rates, the exodus of local businesses. Last Friday, in a joint appearance with Menino on WBZ News Radio 1030, Hennigan added a new criticism: the mayor, she argued, bears ultimate responsibility for the death of Victoria Snelgrove, the Emerson College student who was killed by police during post-game rioting outside Fenway Park last year.

And yet, despite Hennigan’s aggressiveness, most political observers consider her run a long shot at best. To them she’s a lightweight — a half-comic, half-pathetic figure who’s headed for a lopsided loss on November 8. "I think she’s done the best she can, with the emphasis on she — she’s never been a particularly popular or well-financed or well-organized candidate," says one. "The campaign as a whole, and her campaign in particular, has been disappointing," adds another. "She really has no substance."

Even for a veteran pol like Hennigan, who’s held elected office for nearly a quarter-century, it can’t be pleasant to be dismissed in this manner. But when asked about the deep skepticism of the city’s political elite, she smiles indulgently and shrugs it off. "My strength has never been with the political establishment," she tells the Phoenix as she sits in her SUV outside a Charlestown church, waiting to join a march in honor of fallen firefighters. "They’re very nice people, but what they do is, they tuck in with the incumbent. That’s kind of what the MO is on that. I believe it’s the people who make these decisions, and they’ve always been wonderful to me.... I think we’re in good shape. I think it’s going well."

Given the odds Hennigan faces, this optimism has a distinctly Pollyanna-ish ring. But considering the course this year’s mayoral campaign has taken, there’s a chance — a slim one, granted, but a chance nonetheless — that it may not be entirely misplaced.

FAMILY AND REVENGE

The Hennigan-Menino race offers some juicy storylines. One is family-focused, with Hennigan striving for the same post that eluded her father, the former state representative and senator James Hennigan Sr., in 1959. (It’s been suggested that James Hennigan — who routinely corners reporters at his daughter’s public appearances and vows, à la Burgess Meredith in Rocky, that she’ll shock the world on November 8 — may actually be the driving force behind her candidacy.) Another narrative puts revenge front and center. In 1993, Menino was city-council president when Ray Flynn left to become Bill Clinton’s ambassador to the Vatican; as such, he automatically took over as acting mayor, and then used the powers of the post to win outright election that November. Menino’s rival in the January 1993 election for council president? None other than Maura Hennigan, who lost by a seven-to-six vote.

Hennigan, though, insists that these novelistic readings of the mayoral race go too far. While she waxes rhapsodic at the idea of her parents watching her swearing-in ceremony, she adds that no one pressed her to go into politics — and that, politically speaking, her father is a trusted advisor, nothing more. She also dismisses the suggestion that, if one councilor voted differently in 1993, she might be the mayoral incumbent in search of a fourth term. "That was all about inside baseball — that was predetermined," she says, alluding to Flynn’s behind-the-scenes efforts to maneuver Menino into the council presidency.

The truth, Hennigan says, is that she decided to seek the mayor’s job five years ago. She cites two specific catalysts: her mounting frustration with the Menino administration’s handling of development in the city, and her own limited ability to deal with that issue. Back when the millennium was still new and the Yawkey Trust still owned the Red Sox, Menino was more than willing to use his political muscle to help the team construct a new baseball-centered megaplex in the Fenway. Around the same time, developer Frank McCourt’s plan to bring a new Sox stadium to the South Boston waterfront, which Hennigan supported, went nowhere with Sox brass or inside City Hall.