Race For the 8th

The Boston Phoenix
May 28 - June 4, 1998

[Race for the 8th]

O Come, All Ye Faithful

Ray Flynn heads for the churches. But will he be joyful and triumphant?

by Yvonne Abraham
"Oh! My lucky day!" yells Sophie Cwhelu, a small Cambodian woman behind the register at a café on Cambridge Street, in East Cambridge.
Of all the cafés on all the streets in all of the Eighth Congressional District, Raymond Leo Flynn has come into hers, and she is beside herself, flushed and enraptured. It is as if Elvis himself is pumping a coffee mug full of her vanilla blend. "My lucky day!" she says again. "Oh, I can't believe it!" She can't seem to think of anything else to say.
Flynn is delighted. "An Irish coffee shop, with a Cambodian lady, in a Portuguese community," he says, putting a hand on her shoulder. "Mamma mia!"
As he sits drinking his coffee, Cwhelu leans on the counter and just stares at Flynn, a huge smile on her face. "We all know him," she says later. "Everybody loves him. All the Asian people love him. He's going to have a lot of votes."

Marjorie Clapprood

That people love Flynn is beyond question. The former state legislator and Boston city councilor, who was mayor of Boston for 10 years before becoming ambassador to the Vatican in 1993, is recognized everywhere he goes. And not just recognized, but feted. Folks come up to him to pay homage, to shake his hand and say, "How are you?" or "How's the Holy Father?" or "Remember me? I met you at. . . ." When he's walking down the street, or giving a speech outdoors, as he was on a recent Saturday, motorists pull over to say hello, or sound their horns and yell, "Raybo!" to which Flynn waves and yells, "How ya doin'?" mid-sentence.
That Flynn is able to inspire such awe -- which he does over and over again on the campaign trail -- is entirely at odds with his personal presence. Perhaps because of the toll the last four years have taken on him, the man does not brim with personal magnetism. The broad-shouldered, speckle-faced Flynn, with his square smile, graying reddish hair, and doleful blue eyes, is more Ed Sullivan than David Letterman, more polite than charming, readier with a "God bless" than a "How 'bout them Red Sox?" He has no pizzazz.
And yet, he is so far the biggest celebrity among all of the candidates for Joe Kennedy's Eighth Congressional District seat (although Marjorie Clapprood is close). He may not have flash, but he does have history. He has a whole set of associations -- a mystique -- collected during his decade as mayor of Boston. "Ray Flynn is for the working man." "Ray Flynn always has time for the poor." "Ray Flynn is a racial healer." "Ray Flynn has shaken every hand in the city." People who don't even work for him volunteer these tropes to anyone who will listen.
But since he left for Rome in 1993, Flynn has gathered another set of associations, ones that -- added to his pro-life stance -- may blunt his appeal in this congressional race: accusations of campaign finance wrongdoing; state department reprimands for international grandstanding; assertions that he was a bad ambassador and a drunk to boot (these on the front page of the Globe and on televisions across America via 60 Minutes); depictions of him as an unemployed carpetbagger.
Flynn has felt each of these blows keenly, and they've made him wary of the press, to say the least. They've also allowed him to cast himself as something of a victim. But they don't seem to have diminished his appeal for certain constituents. Among God-fearing citizens and among the blue-collar people who grew up, like he did, in struggling working-class families, Flynn's appeal is still unassailable. In the churches and the workingmen's bars, he is loved, and his roots run deeper here than those of anyone else in the race. And so far he's looking good: an early poll has him out in front on name recognition, and he's quickly marshaling a campaign organization to his cause.
But whether his deep roots also run wide enough to win this seat is another question entirely. If Flynn is going to build on his polling figures, he will have to broaden his appeal beyond the churches on which he is so focused right now to include liberals, yuppies, and women, among others. It is by no means certain yet that Flynn needs these voters in large numbers to win the Eighth, but his opponents are going to make sure they won't come easily.

It is a balmy Tuesday night and Flynn, in short shirtsleeves and tie, is sitting at the end of a pew five rows from the back of the Union United Methodist Church in the South End. He's early for the service, as usual, and sits alone quietly. But not for long.
Some of the folks in the rows around him point discreetly and mouth the words Ray Flynn to each other, but as other parishioners file in, many of them stop to say hello, and some of them give Flynn warm hugs.
"You've got my vote," a small black woman whispers loudly, leaning over him.
"I was delighted you got in the race," says a tall man visiting from Trinity Church.
"Heat it up," says Flynn, standing up to shake his hand. "Like the old days."
At one point he is surrounded by well-wishers. "There's lots of good faces I see back again," Flynn says, happily. "It's like I never left! We're all together again!"
"So, you're doing the church thing," says one parishioner.
"It's not that I'm doing the church thing," he says. "I go where I feel comfortable. This is where the work is going to be done for the poor people, so I want to be here."
That's Flynn's current campaign strategy in a nutshell. Forget the image of Flynn as Mayor of the People, standing at the bar at Doyle's or Foley's, surrounded by jolly, red-faced supporters. This Flynn -- the Flynn who would be congressman -- is more likely to be found beneath the high, vaulted ceilings of the district's churches, among the faithful. In a recent four-day period, Flynn went to church at least eight times: to Holy Cross Cathedral for an ordination mass, to Saint Anthony's Church in East Cambridge for the Feast of Santo Cristo, to his own Gate of Heaven parish, back to Saint Anthony's, to Saint Patrick's in Watertown to pray for peace in Ireland, to St. Mary's in Revere for a funeral mass, and to Union United for an interfaith service for social justice.
Flynn has always spent a lot of time in church, but he's definitely stepping up his devotional duties now. The church is a perfect environment for him, completely bound up with who he is and has been. Flynn made a life and a political legend out of feeling others' pain, but in good times, the there-but-for-the-grace-of-God philosophy doesn't stick so well -- except in church, where the poor still turn up for food and comfort, and helping them remains everyone's ineluctable obligation, regardless of economic climate.
And the church is kind to Flynn, too, accommodating his contradictions. There, he can be both lefty advocate for social and economic justice and unapologetically pro-life, a combination that does not play as well outside. In church, he can be flawed and still accepted: there, none of the insinuations stick. Opponents' challenges to his integrity and competence -- which surely will come as the campaign heats up -- have no force. In church, and especially among fellow Catholics, his time in Rome -- this close to Pope John Paul II -- give him even more of an aura than he had as mayor.
Best of all, in church Flynn is among hundreds of people who are there primarily because they think like him: ready-made votes. And most of the time, all he has to do is show up. If enough of these folks, who love him so well, vote, and the field of candidates remains crowded enough so that whoever wins does so with a small majority -- perhaps even less than 30 percent -- the mandate of the faithful may make all the difference, and Flynn will go to Congress. If they don't show up at the polls, and Flynn can't broaden his appeal, he'll be in trouble.
Saint Anthony's Church, a Portuguese parish in East Cambridge, is celebrating the Feast of Santo Cristo, and hundreds are gathered on Cardinal Madeiros Way to march through the streets behind a red velvet-draped statue of Christ. Every two or three minutes, one of them comes up to shake Flynn's hand and ask him how the Holy Father is.
"Will you honor us by joining our procession?" asks a man in a good suit. Flynn is flattered and grateful for the invitation, but he's afraid he has to be somewhere soon.
"All right," the man says. "But will you come back tomorrow? And listen, if you need any help with your campaign, you let me know." Turns out the man is president of the local Portuguese business association, and Flynn pulls out one of the many scraps of paper he carries around to write the man's number down. He'll be calling him.
But when the band finally strikes up and the procession begins, Flynn can't resist. As the sun sets over East Cambridge, he and wife Cathy take their places at the head of the congregation, proud and honored guests, fellow Catholics. Whatever liabilities Flynn may have are now submerged by the forgiving crowd.
"I love a parade," he says later, happily. "There aren't enough of them anymore."

Just a month ago it was impossible to imagine Flynn at the head of a parade, so happy. A month ago, he was the gubernatorial candidate without a hope in hell of being nominated, the guy who was nationally famous courtesy of the 60 Minutes report on the Globe's front-page allegations that he was a bad ambassador with a drinking problem. He was tormented and tense, and above all suspicious.
"We don't want any publicity," said Flynn, backing away from a reporter after mass at Saint Monica's, in Southie. The man who as mayor showed up on TV so many times at the house fires, the shooting scenes, and the sites of myriad other human tragedies that he was pilloried for grandstanding, was actually trying to get away. "We're running a grassroots campaign here."
Grassroots or no, that campaign wasn't going so well. Flynn had no organization, no money, and only a slim chance of making it onto the primary ballot. He had been trying to bring his concern for the issues on which he'd built his legacy -- education, health care, affordable housing, hunger -- to a statewide electorate clearly in thrall to the other candidates' promises of tax cuts. His appeal simply wasn't broad enough.
"I can't tell you I'm getting standing ovations," Flynn had said. Soon after, he threw in the towel in favor of a shot at Congress.
Now, as a candidate for the Eighth, Flynn is personally and politically transformed. And yet, it isn't Flynn himself who has changed: it's the context. Now, he's angling for a compact district, which includes parts of Boston, his natural base. In the Eighth, retail campaigning -- the low-budget, handshake-and-how-ya-been approach for which Flynn is famous -- could make the difference. A survey taken just before Flynn's departure for the Vatican in 1993 found that 43 percent of Bostonians either knew him personally or had met him. He knows how to work an electorate.
Fortune having provided him with one of the few remaining square holes in the country for his square-peg populism, Flynn is no longer a punch line. Indeed, a May 10 Globe/WBZ poll designated him the early front-runner in the race with 21 percent of the vote (although such an early poll is really about name recognition more than anything, and his opponents' campaign spinners say Flynn, with almost full name recognition, has already peaked. Flynn's people say that, with a third of the sample undecided, is hogwash).
And the fact that he now has a chance of winning has attracted allies to his campaign: John Nucci, Suffolk superior court clerk and former Flynn foe, who is opening doors for him in East Boston; Boston Redevelopment Authority research director Bob Consalvo, who is helping the campaign with education issues; former Boston Housing Authority chief David Cortiella, who's helping build Flynn's housing policies; and Don Muhammed, minister and local Nation of Islam leader, who could deliver black votes. And the unions, too: already, branches of the ironworkers', the longshoremen's, and the government employees' unions have pledged allegiance.
The seat for which Flynn is now gunning has been held by Joe Kennedy for the last dozen years, a man after Flynn's own bleeding heart. When Flynn was mayor, he endorsed Kennedy for the seat. Kennedy, like Flynn, makes the dispossessed and working families his political priority. They've been to Ireland together and have a strong connection through former trusted Flynn adviser Ray Dooley, who now works for Kennedy. Flynn, who met with Kennedy one Friday a couple of weeks ago, was already dropping the sitting congressman's name at a press conference the very next day. And Kennedy has even publicly said he would consider an endorsement in the race, and has spoken highly of Flynn, telling a Herald reporter he is "a great friend, and a great friend of working people throughout his career."
That career is the engine that drives Flynn's campaign. "We want to send a strong message that there's a candidate in this race that has done what other people are talking about doing," campaign aide Paul Barrett said at a recent press conference. Flynn often says his candidacy isn't about the past, but the future. That's not true. He's continually touting his record as mayor -- in job creation, development, racial healing, linkage funds -- and his foreign policy expertise from his time in the Vatican to prove he deserves to be sent to Washington, where he'll be pushing for the same things.
Of course, many may find it hard to imagine Flynn in Washington. As a state rep, and especially as mayor, he was clearly in his element. For what seemed like 24 hours a day, he was among the people who had elected him. In the Vatican, Flynn found the formalities of ambassadorial life incredibly constricting. He could not stay out of domestic politics, as ambassadors are required to do, and he insisted on traveling to trouble spots all over the world, as a kind of roving humanitarian envoy, neither of which endeared him to the Washington establishment. He will likely feel similarly frustrated as a junior congressman in a Republican-controlled, red tape-wrapped House, far from the neighborhoods. He won't have to stay out of politics, of course, but he won't be able to effect much, either.
Flynn has run his campaign, and his entire political career, on an image of himself as a kind of outsider antipolitician, a grassroots guy rather than a machinery specialist, a truth teller rather than the kind of pol who changes his message after polls. And remarkably, he managed to maintain that image even as this city's chief executive. It may be harder to portray himself as the antipolitician in the nation's political epicenter.
If he gets there.

The old folks are getting restless. Flynn was supposed to visit them at the Lewis Mall apartments for the elderly in East Boston at noon, but here it is one o'clock and he hasn't shown. The workers have given the elderly residents lunch and are delaying dessert -- Italian pastries -- to make sure they stick around, but they're not sure how long they can hold them.
At 1:20, everybody gives up, and John Nucci suggests the workers release the cannolis. Bingo, after all, is at 1:45, and they've got to get ready for that. "I want to apologize for Ray Flynn," begins Nucci. "He really wanted to be here, and I'm not sure what's keeping him, but I guarantee you he'll be here within the week."
Flynn, of course, is in church, at the funeral of state rep Bill Reinstein from Revere, and it runs long. Then, on the way back, he happens to come upon a six-alarm fire in Chelsea, just like the Mayor Flynn-as-Superman of old, with such a good sense for where the fires were that it was as if he'd gone and lit them himself. But nobody in Lewis Mall knows this. Instead, old ladies who can barely lift pastries to their mouths are somehow managing chug-a-lug gestures. "No, no, no," says Nucci.
For all of the vote-winning mystique that surrounds Flynn, he also carries a slew of potential liabilities, which are very close to the surface. Opponents need not raise them specifically: merely alluding to the campaign-finance woes, or his time as ambassador, or the Globe story, will be sufficient. Recent questions about the validity of his signatures won't help, either.
Flynn cries foul on most of the accusations. "This Kate here," he says, referring to Globe reporter Kate Zernike, "She got on a plane and arrived in Rome, and [some of my friends] reluctantly agreed to do interviews. She never wrote the good stuff, but when she asked them about the drinking habits, she had the pen raring to go like it was a loaded revolver. A couple of them called me up afterwards and said, `I think I was manipulated.' I told them this is just politics, you can't gauge it, sometimes they ask tough questions and write a fair article." He says he was wrong.
But the drinking accusations will dog him nonetheless. As will suggestions of campaign finance wrongdoing and the assertion that his run for the Eighth is a desperate attempt to find whatever job happens to be open. He has denied all of this, of course, and he's also fallen back on the argument that he's being victimized: by the patrician Globe, for example, or by that zealot Scott Harshbarger. But questions about his integrity could put off voters outside the churches and the unions, leading them to wonder whether this is really the kind of man they want to send to the hallowed halls of Congress. (Although pundits eager to write off Flynn's chances here would do well to remember that other, more clearly flawed politician who came back to power via the churches: Marion Barry.)
If the character questions don't hurt Flynn, his position on abortion, which is much more black and white, just might. Before he became mayor, Flynn's pro-life position was clear: as a state rep, he cosponsored a bill to cut off Medicaid funding for abortions. But once in office, Flynn managed to soften the edges of his earlier pro-life efforts, just as he'd done with his anti-busing past, and the issue became all but irrelevant. In Congress, however, he will be forced to take a position.
If the Globe May 10 poll is right, abortion does rank much lower than other issues, like education, taxes, and health care among voters' priorities. But if other candidates succeed in making a fuss about abortion -- and Marjorie Clapprood is definitely going to try, since it's one of few things that distinguish her from him -- Flynn will be vulnerable.
Flynn's campaign, of course, says they won't get hit. Opponents can bring up the Flynn-Doyle act, says campaign aide Barrett, but they should look instead to his time as mayor of Boston, when he never once even considered trying to stop abortions at Boston City Hospital, which was under his direct control.
Flynn ducks the issue more convincingly: "Yes, I am pro-life, and I am also strongly pro-woman, pro-family, and pro-poor, and I have the record to back it up," says Flynn through Harry Grill, who is helping to run his campaign. "My administration was one of the most progressive in the country and that's why it attracted so many dedicated and committed women to work at City Hall." Flynn, of course, is referring, among others, to opponent Susan Tracy, who will surely try to challenge him on abortion as the campaign progresses.
And if that doesn't work, there's a fallback position.
"If people say that's not enough," Barrett says, "he'll say, `Well, that's fine.' Ray Flynn never tried to be all things to all people."

On a warm Sunday afternoon, about 50 people are gathered at Somerville City Hall to rally for the approval of a proposal to raise city workers' wages to $8.03 an hour.
Almost every candidate for the Eighth is there: Marjorie Clapprood, who speaks so loudly for the ordinance that her voice can probably be heard all the way to the Charlestown Navy Yards; Somerville Mayor Michael Capuano, who is very popular in these parts; George Bachrach, John O'Connor, Susan Tracy, Anthony Schinella, and Charles Yancey. The audience is composed of a few union officials, and many more concerned, stylishly spectacled, Birkenstock-wearing liberals, who cheer loudest when Clapprood talks about how the federal government is screwing women with welfare reform.
The living-wage issue is tailor-made for Flynn, and he's supposed to be here, but he hasn't arrived yet. Campaign guy Charlie Burke, getting more and more nervous, is pacing behind the crowd, trying to reach Flynn on his cell phone but having no luck.
Flynn never arrives to take his place among his opponents and, more important, these woman-friendly liberals. Where could he be? Later on, word finally comes that he's been held up.
At church.
Yvonne Abraham can be reached at yabraham[a]phx.com.