Unchallenged power

A city in flux leaves Menino unopposed. But the calm may be deceiving.

by Yvonne Abraham

The political erosion works two ways: the potential voters left behind are cold to city issues, and the pool of potential candidates shrinks as promising people -- and those who would vote for them -- head for the hills. "Lots of politicians were part of this general middle-class flight out of the city," says political commentator Jon Keller. "You had a whole generation of political talent blown out as potential candidates moved to Winchester for better schools and back yards."

Even if they'd hung around in the city, the opportunities to run for political office in this town have shrunk over the last few mayoral administrations. The city council is fairly weak compared to those in many other cities, with no power to make major city appointments and limited control over the size of the city's budget. But at least the council -- with its nine at-large members -- was once a good apprenticeship for citywide office. That's been less true since 1983, when the proportion of district to at-large representatives changed. Now only four of the council's 13 members are elected citywide; the other nine councilors, preoccupied with narrower issues, are less able to develop support across many neighborhoods.

The elected school committee, too, was once a kind of citywide political apprenticeship for would-be mayoral candidates. Since 1991, however, its membership has been appointed, a change that was one of Mayor Ray Flynn's most important and controversial legacies.

Indeed, the politics of education is one of the central reasons for the electoral lethargy in which Boston now finds itself. The state of the schools, of course, is a major reason why long-time residents have been leaving the city. "A slow but steady erosion began in earnest with busing, in 1975," says Mike McCormack, "and when public schools began to be an unacceptable place for black and white parents to put their kids, the flight began."

But the schools figure into the equation in another way. The battles over desegregation were for many years the fuel that powered Boston's political machinery. "You know where I stand," went the campaign slogan of Louise Day Hicks, mayoral finalist in 1967 and 1971 (both times against Kevin White). Where she stood was firmly and passionately at the vanguard of the movement against school integration. The busing crisis inflamed political passions in this city as nothing had done for at least a century. It set blacks against whites. It set neighborhoods against City Hall. And it set working-class city residents against the middle-class suburbanites who would tell them what to do.

The controversy over busing mobilized communities, built politicians' careers, and defined political debate. But as desegregation played itself out, some of the ill will dissipated, and some of it just disappeared. Whites moved out of the city (some taking their grudges with them), leaving a public school system that is 83 percent minority today.

And when Ray Flynn got the elected school committee replaced by an appointed one in 1991, he appeared to have defused education as a political issue for good. A racially charged topic that had driven the city's politics for a generation was slowly becoming apolitical, and there was little to take its place.

Even race itself had become less explosive. Flynn, who opposed busing during the 1970s, had become mayor by winning a 1983 Democratic run-off against Mel King, a black state rep who made history by getting to the final. It was a compelling race, drawing more voters to the polls than had bothered to show in a generation -- 201,000. But perhaps surprisingly, the election took some of the divisiveness out of city politics. Both men campaigned on promises to improve race relations, and neither tried to score political points off his own skin color. Mayor Flynn's trademark was visiting the neighborhoods, especially minority neighborhoods, and showing up at the scenes of racial mêlées to salve the city's wounds. In 1987, he ordered the integration of public-housing developments in South Boston, which made him no friends in his old neighborhood but did resonate symbolically throughout the city.

Flynn, continuing where White had left off, did not necessarily smooth the city's racial divisions or improve the lives of its minority residents, but they effectively stopped those divisions from defining Boston politics.

So it's not surprising that the 1993 election was a very civilized affair -- maybe too civilized. Eight candidates ran for mayor, and there seemed to be little difference between them. Public-radio talk-show host Christopher Lydon, who was one of the contenders, called his seven competitors "a custodial caretaker field designed to make the city comfortable in its decline." The Globe's Chris Reidy described them as "a bland bunch, eight plodders long on perseverance and short on dazzle, vision, and fire."

And Menino, the winner of that election, has continued what his predecessors began. Education is his first priority, but his goal seems to be to keep the politics out. He ran an extremely aggressive campaign to retain the appointed school committee (a ballot referendum in the 1996 election), and he appointed a school superintendent, Thomas Payzant, who has steered clear of his job's political implications to focus doggedly on the quality of education.

Not that education has been cleansed of politics completely: witness councilor Peggy Davis-Mullen's push for a referendum on neighborhood schools. Or pick up the South Boston Tribune: there are neighborhoods where some folks have long, stubborn memories of the busing era, and vote accordingly.

But where kids go to school is no longer as important as what they do when they get there. It no longer drives the political debate in this town.

So what does? Not much, these days, apparently. There has been much talk about how little those Bostonians who are conscious of local politics at all expect from city government these days. Christopher Lydon abhors the vacuum that is voter expectation in Boston. "People have this sense that Menino is a decent guy, and that he's not stealing furniture out of public buildings [and that's all that matters]," he says.

That's certainly made politics here less tumultuous, but the relative harmony comes at a high price, says Lydon. Without a demanding electorate, important issues are ignored. "I'm sure he's not [stealing furniture]," he says, "but this is extended to the notion that the city is well-governed -- and it's not. The schools are not a model of anything, and people have stopped talking about it. The problem is, when the discourse dies, it's not just that news stories go begging -- a certain amount of self-government dies, and critical intelligence among the citizenry dies."

Of course, this needn't be the case. Boston's new demographics might eventually help the city's politics crystallize around new issues, especially if new and minority residents mobilize and make demands. Affordable housing, public safety, jobs in the city, poverty -- all could become important and explosive municipal electoral issues if the population of the city keeps evolving as it has.

Who knows? If the parents of 83 percent of Boston school kids manage to mobilize politically, the quality of education might become just as important and galvanizing an election issue as the location of that education was a generation ago.

Which would take us a long way from those political passions of yore.

With any luck

Yvonne Abraham can be reached at yabraham[a]phx.com.