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Peggy’s playbook


What Davis-Mullen must do to become the next mayor

BY DORIE CLARK


AT LAST COUNT, Mayor Tom Menino had $1.1 million in the bank. Compare that to the $19,243 campaign chest of his only prospective challenger, City Councilor Peggy Davis-Mullen. After nearly nine years in office, Menino’s popularity is still sky-high, with 85 percent approval ratings according to both a Davis-Mullen poll taken in mid March and a Boston Herald survey conducted six weeks ago. And Boston’s 18,000 city employees provide a base of volunteers and voters whose future in many ways depends upon Menino’s. With voter turnout usually low in city-election years — only 24 percent came to the polls in 1999, and 28 percent in 1997 — it’s difficult to imagine Menino losing. “I would be at loss if I had to come up with a strategy to beat Tom Menino now,” says former city councilor John Nucci. “I just don’t know what it would be.”

But Davis-Mullen — who was elected to the Boston School Committee 14 years ago at age 27, and has served as an at-large councilor since 1993 — is expected to announce her candidacy against Menino any day now. “I don’t want to officially announce today, but all indicators are that this is something I expect to do,” she says. Local political observers know the race will be difficult. “It’s almost as if the mayor is an aircraft carrier, and Peggy’s in a rowboat,” says former city councilor Mike McCormack. Others take an even grimmer view. “She’s no more of a serious candidate than [Jack E.] Robinson was against Ted Kennedy,” notes one long-time City Hall observer. “It’s a joke.... Robinson even had money and she doesn’t.”

There’s a reason Mickey Roache, a popular former Boston police commissioner and a sitting at-large councilor, bowed out of the mayoral race after forming an informal exploratory campaign earlier this year: the odds were too long.

But never say never. Former president Bush, riding high on the patriotic fervor of the Gulf War, was considered invincible when he lost his 1992 re-election bid to a governor from Arkansas. Economic woes can sour voters on incumbents. Scandals, or at least embarrassments, can hit at unexpected times. And the right endorsement, or even a memorable photo op, can change the course of a campaign. But politicians can’t count on developments like these. So if Peggy Davis-Mullen is serious about the race — and she insists that she is — here are the steps she’ll have to take to win in November.

1) Raise some money. The magic number that someone needs to run a credible mayoral campaign in Boston is generally pegged at $750,000. Even after a recent fundraising blitzkrieg, Davis-Mullen has less than $20,000 in the bank. Compare that with the $200,000 that Councilor Daniel Conley of Hyde Park — who isn’t expected to run for any other office this year except his own re-election bid — has in his account. Clearly, she needs to bring in more money.

Davis-Mullen notes that she has several fundraisers scheduled in the next couple of weeks and that she has an extensive network of donors yet to tap, particularly among the women’s legal community (she passed the bar in 1991) and from her school days at Boston College, the New England School of Law, and Harvard (where she’s currently in the mid-career Master of Public Administration program at the Kennedy School of Government). But finding big-money donors will be difficult. “The pool from which you’re looking to raise the money is constricted,” points out McCormack. “It’s usually developers, and they’re not going to give money to a challenger and risk the ire of an incumbent.” Especially a challenger who has taken Menino to task for his pro-business concessions on the waterfront and with the Red Sox. “We’ve never thought we’d out-fundraise him,” says Davis-Mullen. “The race won’t be about money; it’ll be about grassroots organization.”

Sounds good, but winning the election with her now-minuscule campaign chest is a pipe dream. “There’s no way she could win against an incumbent” with the amount of money she currently has, says former city councilor Gareth Saunders.

To convince donors she’s serious, she also needs to avoid stupid mistakes, like the one that came to light with last week’s discovery that a newly printed batch of official city-council stationery listed her personal Web site — which had links to campaign information (they have been subsequently removed). “It was definitely an oversight,” says Davis-Mullen. “It was an error and it’s off.” But not mixing governing and campaigning is a lesson from Politics 101, one that she should have learned by now.

In the meantime, Davis-Mullen wants to send a message to those disgruntled with the Menino regime but who fear mayoral retribution. “Your readers should know they can give anything under $50 anonymously,” she jokes. It would take only 15,003 of those contributions to make her financially viable. Good luck.

2) Use the media. Newspapers across the city are starved for a race. The Phoenix editorialized in February (before Roache decided against a bid) that “as long as they’re testing the waters, Davis-Mullen and Roache should jump right in.” (See “Looking for a Fight,” News and Features, February 9.) “Run, Peggy, run,” urged the Herald’s Wayne Woodlief. “We need the debate. We need the race itself,” said Boston Globe columnist Adrian Walker. Former city councilor Tom Keane agreed, writing in the Herald that Menino needs “[a] real election, with a tough opponent and a genuine engagement of ideas.” Menino was unchallenged in 1997 (his cakewalk was the first time in Boston’s history a mayor had run unopposed), and local activists like South Boston resident Gerry Vierbickas think it would be undemocratic for that to happen again. “I think it’s good for everybody — the people and the politicians — to have a race,” he says, because it will allow for serious policy discussions.

But the press has another incentive to urge Davis-Mullen to run: it’s awfully boring to report on Menino’s march toward coronation. It makes reporters’ jobs easier and livelier if there’s a race. A City Hall observer noted, “She’s gotten much more free media coverage than you’d expect in this race. The press wants a fight, and they want the mayor to be pushed a bit. They’re not happy with how they’ve been treated by him, and she’ll get better coverage because of that.”

Until she raises enough money to compete with Menino in paid media — such as radio and television ads, or billboards — she must rely on reporters, especially since her poll showed that 36 percent of likely voters don’t know who she is (a figure not uncommon for a city councilor, according to Larry DiCara, who used to serve on the body and made his own mayoral bid in 1983). “She’s going to be very dependent on the free media,” admits Jim Spencer, a political consultant who advised Davis-Mullen during her 1997 re-election campaign and who served for 10 years as former congressman Joe Kennedy’s political director. “If the media decides, ‘This isn’t a race and we’re not going to cover it,’ that’d be very damaging to Peggy.”

She’s doing well so far, dragging out her decision to enter the race and releasing her poll results and campaign strategy slowly, so that she’s in the headlines every day. The hearings she conducted as chair of the Ways and Means Committee — the first time a chair has formally conferred with the departments before the mayor’s release of his budget plans — were a PR masterstroke, and she should work on developing other innovative approaches to governance. When her official campaign announcement comes, she’ll need to make sure that the backdrop and message set the right tone — upbeat, confident, and of-the-people. And above all — as John McCain learned in his presidential bid aboard the “Straight Talk Express” — she should give the media as much access as she can stand, because it creates genuine goodwill.

3) Work the woman thing. Clearly, you can’t — and shouldn’t — run a campaign based on gender alone. But no woman has ever been the mayor of Boston, and that prospect could generate a lot of excitement. When Dorothy Kelly Gay was elected mayor of Somerville two years ago, it created a buzz. “I saw the wave of women saying, ‘I want a woman in there,’” notes Spencer of Kelly Gay. He suspects the same feeling could take hold in Boston. McCormack speculates that Davis-Mullen’s gender could make her stand out in a way that just another white guy in a suit might not. “I think the fact that she’s a woman is a plus,” he says. “It’s a nice balance to the Menino persona — so much a man.” He also thinks her gender could protect her from the full force of Menino’s criticism: “You have to be careful; you don’t want to look like someone beating up on a woman challenger.” Remember Rick Lazio’s get-tough approach with Hillary Clinton during their debates in last year’s US Senate race in New York? They backfired, making him look like a bully.

Davis-Mullen herself insists that she won’t make gender an issue, because “you need to be judged on your ability.” But, she says, “I don’t think being a woman hurts.” With Jane Swift taking over the state’s corner office, the more polished Davis-Mullen’s bid to become the first female mayor of Boston doesn’t seem so improbable. Indeed, if anyone can appeal to women voters, it’s the councilor, who got a 48 percent favorability rating from women in her poll (compared to 36 percent among men). On a personal level, she boasts impeccable credentials: she’s a 41-year-old mother of three who works, goes to school, and talks about bread-and-butter issues like housing and schools. Of course, she shouldn’t be too obvious about playing the gender card, since it would take away from the serious issues she says she wants to discuss. “She’s only going to get one crack at shaping a message, and [gender] is not what I’d use as my main message against Menino,” says Tobe Berkovitz, a professor of politics and communications at Boston University. But if she can subtly encourage female solidarity, and stress the importance of breaking the political glass ceiling, it can only help her candidacy.

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