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Flaherty tops at-large tickets
BY ADAM REILLY
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Two and a half hours before the polls close in the Boston City Council preliminary election, Michael Flaherty looks like a winner. As Flaherty strolls toward the entrance of the West Roxbury Branch Library, there’s a hint of swagger in his walk; his demeanor is relaxed, and his smile comes easily. But once the at-large incumbent and city-council president reaches his designated spot in front of the library doors, he begins greeting voters with the humble earnestness of a candidate whose career hangs in the balance. Flaherty’s eagerness when in full campaign mode points to a precious political truth: no matter how much support you’ve got, it’s not enough. Flaherty helped teach this lesson to Dapper O’Neil in 1999, when he edged out the long-time South Boston councilor for one of four at-large seats. Today, Flaherty’s something of an inexorable force, a prodigious fundraiser many observers predict will eventually become mayor of Boston. Still, he seems loath to take anything for granted, even in a relatively low-stakes preliminary contest. "Elections are funny things," Flaherty reflects, noting that Tuesday’s weather could keep elderly voters — usually a reliable off-year contingent — from making it to the polls. "Strange things happen on Election Day. You saw today we had intermittent rain with wind and heavy downpours. I’m not going to go out on a limb and make any predictions." In Flaherty’s case, this cautiousness — however commendable — seems a bit absurd. This is, after all, a candidate who was able to dispatch more than 500 volunteers across Boston on Tuesday, who made 60 vehicles available to ferry civic-minded seniors to and from polling locations, who sent out eight coffee trucks to reward diligent volunteers with food and drink and four sound trucks to spread the word about Michael Flaherty via megaphone, whose September 23 operations were run out of five separate headquarters around the city. This is a candidate backed by voters like Chucky Bruen, a fortysomething West Roxbury man who holds a sign for Flaherty in front of the library Tuesday night and describes his support for Flaherty in terms evocative of a bygone era. ("Not only do I think he’s a good councilor, but looking down the line, I think he’d be a good leader for the city," Bruen says. "There’s 32 voters in my family, counting cousins and in-laws, and we try to vote the same way — it gives us some power. People come to us and ask us, we’re there for them, and they’re there for us. That’s how Boston politics works.") Then again, there are little things that can go wrong, fires that need putting out. When Bruen takes a break from singing Flaherty’s praises to reflect on the preferences of West Roxbury voters, noting that the neighborhood’s never been too friendly to liberals, Flaherty rushes over and clarifies the nature of his own ideological stripes. "The balance I strike is moderate to progressive, which is a nice balance in Wards 19 [Jamaica Plain] and 20 [West Roxbury/Roslindale]," he says. "Liberal on social issues, closer to the vest on fiscal." Damage averted. Flaherty also makes a point of pitching his vision of the council, which — unlike that espoused by colleagues such as Felix Arroyo and Chuck Turner — leaves little room for dalliances with national and international politics. The president says he’s happy to tackle issues like the Patriot Act outside of council chambers, and that he’s done so in the past. But Flaherty also takes a little dig at this mindset: "‘Mr. President, a letter from the Boston City Council telling you not to cut military pay.’ ‘Get Rumsfeld on the phone!’ Can you imagine?" Later Tuesday evening, Flaherty’s notion of what the Boston City Council should and shouldn’t be appears vindicated when he tops the at-large field with 20,307 votes, giving him a comfortable margin over his next closest challenger, Stephen Murphy, who won 17,597 votes.
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