Crowding the field

Charles Yancey can't count on minority voters to give him a shot at the Eighth, because everyone else is trying to court them away

Politics by Yvonne Abraham

Charles Yancey is playing to the home crowd. It is 8:15 on a sweltering Thursday morning, and the city councilor is on a median strip on Blue Hill Avenue, in Mattapan Square, the heart of his council district. He's been here just 15 minutes, but there's no shade, and already the sweat is pouring off his forehead. And the tie can't help much.

"Good morning! Have a wwwonderful day!" Yancey says over and over, waving like a jolly game-show host to the cars speeding by, eliciting honks of support. When the light turns red, Yancey does a kind of slow-mo jog down the column of traffic, waving, leaning into windows, shaking hands and squeezing shoulders.

Yancey, a candidate for the Eighth Congressional District, has been here before -- not just on this median, which he's worked every other year in his 15 years as a city councilor, but in this race. In 1992, he ran against Joe Kennedy, and made a pretty respectable showing as Kennedy opponents go -- 18 percent of the vote.

In this field, with its 10 Democratic candidates vying to win the September 15 primary (the final election is just a formality), 18 percent could be enough to send Yancey to Washington, making him the first black Massachusetts congressman in history. "Let's face it," says Lloyd King, a Roxbury activist. "This is the best chance a minority is ever going to have to get this congressional seat." Because the field is so big, minority voters -- even with their typically poor turnout -- could actually make the difference, for once. So Yancey is aggressively pursuing his minority council constituents in Dorchester and Mattapan, as well as voters in neighboring Roxbury.

But he doesn't have a monopoly on them: this time, the white guys have come a-courting in Mattapan.

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Yancey is the Boston City Council's gadfly on the left. He bitterly opposed the merger of Boston University Medical Center and Boston City Hospital. He fought to retain the elected school committee. He's pushed for external reviews of the Boston Police Department (especially in the wake of the 1989 Charles Stuart case) and has called for seized drug money to be used in addiction treatment. In all these battles, he has lost.

Among his successes, he counts the city's South Africa divestment legislation in 1984; the introduction of safety devices to keep kids getting off school buses from walking under the driver's line of vision; the living-wage ordinance, originally proposed by councilor Mickey Roache; and the $17 million in funding he helped secure for a yet-to-be-constructed library and community center in Mattapan.

Yancey and conservative council president James Kelly disagree on many things, especially race issues, and by all accounts they despise each other. In 1991, a disagreement over a proposed audit of the police department almost brought the two councilors to blows, with Kelly taking off his glasses and saying "C'mon, let's go." The two exchanged serious profanity right in the council chamber; then Dapper O'Neil got into the act, raining further abuse down on Yancey. There was another skirmish at a 1993 meeting to discuss race problems at South Boston High. Then-police chief Bill Bratton had to separate Kelly and Yancey.

But for all the fire in his relationship with Kelly, and despite his popularity in his own district, Yancey's political presence barely registers in Boston. After 15 years as a city politician, the soft-spoken Yancey, who smiles a lot, does have a reputation among his constituents for being dedicated. But he hasn't become a strong voice for minority communities in a town that has few prominent black or Latino political figures, despite the fact that the proportion of the city's population made up by minorities is inching toward the halfway mark.

"He hasn't grabbed that mantle of leadership and run with it," says former city councilor John Nucci. And if he's not exactly a titan in Boston politics, he's even more of an unknown quantity in the rest of the Eighth District. "A lot of what he does goes unmentioned," says his campaign chief, Paul Simmons. "He doesn't go around blowing his own horn."

Poll after poll puts Yancey out of contention for Kennedy's seat, even though the Eighth is the most heavily minority congressional district in the state. His campaign to date (although he has only just officially declared his candidacy) has been decidedly low-key, to the point of appearing halfhearted. It's plagued by organizational glitches and meager resources -- $22,000 at last filing. ("I take issue with the Herald when they say Flynn has the least financed campaign," Yancey jokes. "I do.")

"I knew I was getting into an uphill battle," says Simmons, a seasoned consultant. "It's like climbing Mount Everest without a rope. But given the demographics of the district -- roughly 38 percent black and overwhelmingly blue-collar -- it's winnable."

Yancey says he will win because history -- his council elections, and his 1992 run against Kennedy -- tells him so. "My constituents know me," he says. "I'll get 15 percent of the vote in [Mattapan, Dorchester, and Roxbury], and 10 percent in the rest of the district. I'm building on the 20 percent I got in '92."

But Yancey does not own the voters he got in 1992. Back then, he was Kennedy's only opponent, the un-Joe. Now, voters have many more options. And he doesn't even have a monopoly on the 4000 to 5000 voters who usually vote in his district in city elections.

"Most voters believe that melanin content isn't an issue that's strong enough to pull them to vote for a candidate," says Kevin Peterson, who worked on Yancey's campaign for Congress in 1992 but is now with city councilor Tom Keane, who's also running for the Eighth. Keane has had a campaign office in Dorchester since April, and he's been going to black churches for a couple of months now.

He's not the only one. Flush Cambridge enviro-guy John O'Connor has been making a similar effort, and he seems to have made some very useful friends in the Reverend Eugene Rivers and the Ten Point Coalition. (See "He Got Game.") Similarly, multimillionaire Chris Gabrieli has been buying up black political consultants left and right to ease him into the hearts of minority voters.

Many of those voters will go with Yancey anyway, because he is their councilor. Some minorities in Boston and elsewhere will vote for him because he is black and understands their issues. Yancey says he's had promises of support from many local ministers; he rattles off a half-dozen names. Some voters will go with an even lower-profile Latino candidate, former MCAD chief Alex Rodriguez. But other minority voters will go with candidates who have more money, more to say, more market penetration, and more convincing public personae.

Yancey argues that those candidates can't rival the breadth of his experience. "I've held office longer than anybody else in this contest," he says. "Some of my opponents don't have any experience at all in writing and shepherding through legislation." Yet all that experience has come on a city council where, constitutionally and politically, he has little power. And unfairly or not, his extreme long-shot runs for state auditor, in 1986, and against Kennedy, in 1992, have damaged Yancey's credibility as a candidate for higher office.

"Yancey is a perennial candidate for many offices," says consultant Mary Anne Marsh, who is unaligned in this race. "I don't expect him to meet with any more success than in the past."

To prove Marsh wrong, Yancey, with his limited resources, has to try to stanch the flow of his regular constituents to other candidates. But it won't be easy.

"He's got to work for it just like everybody else," says Lloyd King.

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