Lynda J. McNally

Why is this candidate tearing down her own signs?

by Yvonne Abraham

"Hey, Georgia!" barks a grease-covered man in a 49ers cap. "Can we get some coffee in this place?"

The gang at Mike's Donuts, on Tremont Street, in Mission Hill, can be merciless. The half-dozen middle-aged men sitting around on a gray Saturday afternoon, sucking down coffee and nicotine, have seen a lot of pols: they promise stuff and then they vanish.

Tough these folks may be, but Lynda McNally, candidate for the District 8 city council seat, tries to work them anyway. Instead, they work her.

"You'll do as much as the other seven," says Richard Phillips, the man in the 49ers cap. (There are 13 councilors, but McNally lets that go.) "Everybody else forgets about us."

McNally assures him her office will be right here, on the streets of this district, which covers parts of Allston, Beacon Hill, Back Bay, the Fenway, and Mission Hill.

"Tell you what," Phillips says. "There's two or three I'm obligated to vote for, and the rest are just fill-ins. I'll give you a vote, but I better see you on the Hill."

She'll take what she can get. In a lot of elections, especially in a district like this, where the incumbent is strong, McNally will win some votes on her own merits, which include a passionate concern for poor residents. But she'll also win a lot of votes for reasons other than her stands on neighborhood issues. She sought and won endorsements from NOW and the Massachusetts Women's Political Caucus, mainly -- obviously -- because she's a woman (and pro-choice). And she coaxed a number of local unions into supporting her because she knew they were angry with incumbent Tom Keane. In politics, who you aren't can be just as important as who you are.

McNally quit her job in the state Highway Department in June so she could campaign full-time. Now, all of her days run together. Every morning the Back Bay resident puts on a smart suit and a pair of comfortable shoes, loads up her large beige shoulder bag, and takes the T to another part of the district, where she hands out flyers and bumper stickers.

McNally has "less than $10,000" in campaign funds, compared to Keane's $35,000, and few activist types warming up the neighborhoods for her. But she does have those endorsements from the women's organizations and, more importantly, the labor unions. The unions are mad at Keane for voting in July against councilor Mickey Roache's Living Wage ordinance.

"It was a very easy endorsement," says Tony Romano, executive secretary of the Greater Boston Labor Council, AFL-CIO. "If they were sympathetic to labor, we probably would endorse any challenger. We don't believe Keane is friendly to labor, and he's proved it." McNally milked that animus.

Still, McNally is unlikely to topple Keane, who squeaked into the seat in 1993 but ran unopposed in 1995. "We're sorry we didn't get the [unions'] endorsement, but we're going to move on from it," says Keane's campaign chief, Brian Wright.

McNally walks some of the streets near the doughnut shop with Seth Burns, a local supporter. She gets to a big, ugly, run-down apartment house and strikes up a conversation with one of the kids standing on the stoop.

"Didn't I meet you before?" she asks him. "Didn't I meet your mom?" Folks are walking in and out all the time, eyeing the diminutive white lady in the brown suit. McNally finishes the small talk and is heading down the street when the boy's mother -- thin and pasty-white -- comes running after her.

"We got no water," says the woman, a mother of six scarcely out of her 20s, pulling her long dyed-black hair into a bun. "We called the landlord a hundred times. We got 39 building violations in there, and he won't do nothing about it."

The landlord apparently has a reputation for this kind of thing. McNally is outraged. Then Burns sheepishly informs her the landlord has LYNDA J. McNALLY stickers in his window. She takes off for his house to confront him.

"Oh Seth," she says. "Why did you give him signs?"

At the landlord's house, four of the candidate's purple bumper stickers are posted in a front window. The landlord, despised in the neighborhood, is using McNally to make a stab at respectability. The landlord isn't home, so McNally tells two of his tenants she thinks "it's just horrible he's not attentive to this woman who has children." The tenants listen politely and look concerned.

"All right, Seth, I'm taking these down," McNally says. "I'm not having any affiliation . . . " McNally easily pulls off the first two stickers, then is up on her toes, straining at the next two. She can't quite reach them. Seth, who'd just as soon stay out of it, has to help her.

"Now Seth, dear," McNally says, twisting the stickers into a tight wad, "please don't give him any more. And if he asks you, say Lynda says not to."