"Rep. Stephen Lynch shifted views, but not local focus" by Michael Levenson | Globe Staff, April 08, 2013
When it comes to defending what he sees as his district’s interests, Stephen F. Lynch takes it personally....
Something I take personally:
After voting to authorize the invasion of Iraq in 2002, he also made more trips overseas than nearly any other member of Congress — 14 to Iraq, eight to Afghanistan....
Let's get out, Lynchie!
Related: The Reincarnation of George Romney
See when he first won election?
The trips have not prompted Lynch to propose major changes in war policy, but were intended instead to boost troop morale and to monitor reconstruction projects like the water filtration plant that he toured in Sadr City in 2008.
It is that type of work — on the ground, in Bridgewater, Braintree, or Baghdad, rather than in the corridors of Congress — that has become the hallmark of Lynch’s career.
It represents a sharp contrast with his rival for the Democratic Senate nomination, Representative Edward J. Markey, who has been heavily involved in national policymaking on telecommunications, energy, and the environment for three decades. But it is an approach Lynch promises to continue if he is elected to the US Senate....
Unlike Markey, Lynch has labored mostly on the back benches during his 11 years in Congress, with little to show in the way of big legislative accomplishments.
Lynch argued he has never had the standing to push bills into law.
“Look, legislative success requires two things,” he said. “It requires you to be in the majority, and for almost all of my time in Congress, we’ve had a Republican speaker. So that’s been a roadblock for me to get legislation through. Number two, you have to be a senior member of Congress. You have to be a chairman.”
Lynch’s views on social issues such as gay rights and abortion have also shifted dramatically over the years, sparking praise from some who say his worldview has broadened and criticism from others who argue that he puts political expediency ahead of core convictions.
The two issues before us are economy and empire, that's it.
A product of the Old Colony housing project in South Boston, Lynch was an ironworker for 18 years, and at 30 was chosen as the youngest-ever president of Ironworkers Local 7 in South Boston, a post that helped vault him into elected office. He then went on to become a labor lawyer.
He served from 1994 to 1996 in the state House, and from 1996 to 2001 in the state Senate, fighting for unions and taking on community complaints.
He battled to keep an asphalt plant out of South Boston, to keep young people with criminal records from moving into public housing, and to upgrade the badly outmoded signals that control the flow of buses and trains, arguing that those improvements should be prioritized over flashier expansions of the MBTA....
While Markey made the rounds of black-tie balls and charity banquets, Lynch played poker at the home of Representative Jim Langevin of Rhode Island. Early in his tenure, he sometimes hit the House gym with Representative Paul Ryan, who later became the 2012 Republican vice presidential nominee.
“Paul is a workout freak,” Lynch said, adding that he has not exercised with the Wisconsin congressman in recent years and is more likely to fly back to Boston than socialize in Washington after sessions. “But I’m a gym rat when I’m down there.”
Lynch said his three proudest accomplishments in elected office have been centered around his district. When a rash of teen suicides hit South Boston in the late 1990s, most of them related to Oxycontin and heroin abuse, he helped establish Cushing House, a drug rehabilitation clinic for teenagers.
When South Boston families were moving out of the city rather than send their children to neighborhood schools, Lynch worked with two graduates of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government to launch a charter school, South Boston Harbor Academy, in 1997. Although the effort cost him some support from teachers’ unions, the school, now called Boston Collegiate Charter School, boasts some of the state’s best MCAS scores.
And when three Veterans Affairs hospitals in his district were threatened with closing after Sept. 11, 2001, he worked with Senator Edward M. Kennedy to keep them open.
Tackling Dodd-Frank bill
Perhaps Lynch’s most substantive legislative accomplishment came in 2009 after Democrats took control of the House.
Though not known for immersing himself in policy minutia, Lynch delved into one of the most complex pieces of legislation that year, the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul bill. As a member of the House Financial Services Committee, he toughened part of the bill that created special clearinghouses to review risky derivatives. Lynch’s change limited banks to a 20 percent stake in those clearinghouses, to avoid conflicts of interest.
The final version of the law watered down that limit, but it was still a critical addition to the bill, said former representative Barney Frank, who chaired the House Financial Services Committee....
Some of Lynch’s hardest work has come on a less glamorous committee, where he fights to protect the postal service from cuts.
The subject is personal for him, as it often is for those that rise to the top of his agenda. Not only is Lynch the top Democrat on the postal subcommittee, his mother, two aunts, and two sisters were postal employees.
So after the Sept. 11 attacks, Lynch toured every post office in his district, and walked the route with a letter carrier, to express solidarity with postal employees who were under the threat of anthrax attacks. More recently, he has tried to fend off attempts to cut postal wages and benefits.
See: MSM Monitor: Sunday Globe Special: Anthrax Attack Aftereffects
It's enough to make you sick.
“He was one of our best friends,” said George Gould, who was legislative director for the National Association of Letter Carriers from 1979 to 2007. “He has a natural, personal, honest, positive feeling about unions, and about workers who belong to unions. And it’s not just a political position. He obviously believes it.”
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Related: Senate Election Special: Lynch the Loser
Maybe not.
"Outside money attacking Stephen Lynch in Senate race; Californian claims a link to ‘dirty oil’" by Michael Levenson | Globe Staff, April 08, 2013
As the Red Sox take the field for the first time this season at Fenway Park on Monday, a plane circling nearby will drag a banner that reads “Steve Lynch for Oil Evil Empire.”
The attack is not from US Representative Stephen F. Lynch’s Democratic rival or any of the Republicans in the race for the US Senate.
Instead, it comes courtesy of Thomas F. Steyer, a billionaire California hedge-fund executive and Democrat who has chosen to bombard Lynch with theatrical attacks from the skies and from the streets.
It's the first thing that is the problem.
He has poured $400,000 into the Massachusetts race so far, bankrolling planes with banners, trucks with video screens, and canvassers who plan to knock on 300,000 doors statewide.
Careful of the backlash, especially now.
Steyer is hoping to be the left’s answer to the Koch brothers, the billionaires who fund conservative causes, and has seized on Lynch’s Senate campaign against US Representative Edward J. Markey as a test case of his ability to elevate the issue of climate change in the political discourse.
Pfffffffft! We just had a bombing in Boston! The fart-misting fraud of climate change will have to wait.
Last month, he burst onto the scene....
But Steyer’s Wild West rhetoric, and determination to use giant sums of money to sink Lynch because of his beliefs, has stirred criticism from activists who worry about the influence of money in politics.
What'$ to worry?
“It’s a terrible problem, whether it’s a billionaire or an organization, holding our elected officials hostage to huge amounts of money that can be dropped in their race,” said Pamela Wilmot, executive director of Common Cause Massachusetts, a government watchdog group. “Money should not be allowed to amplify one person’s voice to the extent that it drowns out all others.”
It's the kind of ho$tage you wouldn't mind being.
Some environmentalists argue that Steyer’s spending and flamboyant tactics represent a vital counterweight to the influence of big oil companies in elections. They have welcomed Steyer and his so-called super political action committee to the Massachusetts race, saying it is especially needed after the Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court opened the floodgates for corporate spending in politics.
“He’s got money he’s willing to spend to help people understand what’s at stake here, so I say, ‘Hell, yeah,’ ” said Craig Altemose, a Somerville climate activist who encouraged Steyer to get involved in the Senate race. “Let’s use this to help our country solve the greatest problem we’re facing.”
Steyer declined to be interviewed, but has said he is determined to defeat candidates who he believes have not adequately confronted climate change.
Why don't you confront your own delu$ions, or is there $omething else at work? The Northern Hemisphere has been setting cold records all winter and spring.
Yeah, I know you didn't read about that in your Boston Globe.
“The goal here is to destroy these people. We want a smashing victory,” he told The Hill newspaper last week. Woah.
That's something I'd expect from the other side, you know, those icky Repuglicans.
A Steyer spokesman, Chris Lehane, declined to say how much Steyer plans to spend to defeat Lynch, but said Steyer considers his money a “a drop in the oil bucket” compared to what oil companies spend on lobbying and advertising.
“We see this as a David-versus-Goliath endeavor,” Lehane said. Lynch argues that Steyer is the angry colossus here.
“It seems pretty hypocritical that this guy vows to spend millions against me because I am still considering Keystone, but raises millions for President Obama, who is still considering Keystone,” Lynch said in a statement. “But I guess this is what billionaire Democrats do now — they forget about working people.”
Related: Biden's Boast
A major Democratic donor who last week cohosted a fund-raiser for President Obama, Steyer, 55, made his fortune as the founder of Farallon Capital Management, an investment firm in San Francisco....
During the last several weeks, Steyer has sent a plane with a banner to fly over Boston before a Bruins game, blasting Lynch for backing “dirty oil.” He plans to send another plane with a banner to the Boston Marathon.
Wonder how that worked out.
Trucks he has dispatched have rolled through Boston displaying videos that accuse Lynch of wanting to export oil to China. Steyer has also bankrolled the League of Conservation Voters’ field campaign against Lynch.
Actually, that is where the oil is headed after it's refined in Texas. And you thought you were getting it and the price of gas would be going down?
Steyer has not, however, been able to run television ads, unlike most billionaires with a super PAC, because Lynch and Markey have a signed a pledge designed to keep outside groups from running ads or sending mailers in their race.
The campaign has arguably put Markey in an awkward position.
Don't worry, Ed. You won't be around for long.
He stands to benefit from Steyer’s barrage against his rival. But the image of an out-of-state billionaire hammering a former ironworker could also backfire on Markey, and he has urged Steyer to stay out of Massachusetts....
And now Lynchie looks good while Massachusetts voters wonder WHERE WAS ED?
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"Born to high iron, Stephen Lynch forged his own way" by Sally H. Jacobs | Globe Staff, April 14, 2013
As a young ironworker traveling through the American heartland in search of work in the late 1970s, Stephen F. Lynch began to exhibit some behavior that his buddies found bizarre.
When a blizzard shut down his work site in Wisconsin in 1979, Lynch enrolled in night school. His fellow laborers tried to talk him out of it, while his sisters back home in South Boston were “baffled” by his action.
When shortly afterwards he declared himself a vegetarian at a diner in Wisconsin, the burly ironworkers crowded around the table roared in disbelief — and promptly helped themselves to the steak remaining on his plate. But when he adopted a diet of tofu and hummus and joined a local food co-operative, Lynch had clearly crossed a line.
“We thought Stevie was off his rocker,” declared Bobby “Batman” Maguire, one of a group of ironworkers who occasionally traveled with Lynch, a US representative for more than a decade. “We are steak guys, meat and potato guys. What he was doing was not the behavior of an ironworker.”
Now running for a seat in the US Senate, Lynch maintains that his 18 years on the high iron have instilled in him a far better understanding of America’s working men and women than his Democratic opponent, US Representative Ed Markey, whom he portrays as a remote Washington insider, will ever have.
He's not only right, but after 18 years up there he ain't afraid of nobody.
But if Lynch can identify with his fellow ironworkers, he also emerged as distinct among them from the time he first unfurled his cherished Wall Street Journal while eating a sandwich on a steel beam.
Oh, WOW! That is JUST THE KIND of GUY I want in charge of the UNION! He's KEEPING AN EYE on the BOSSES!!!
If what was different about him sometimes baffled his co-workers, it also fast became a reflection of his emerging ambition. The son of an ironman, Lynch worked for many years as a “connector” bolting steel beams hundreds of feet high in the air, one of the most dangerous jobs in the trade, and was an outspoken advocate for worker safety early on. At 33, he was elected the youngest president of his Local 7 of the International Association of Ironworkers ever, his victory heralded as the start of a more enlightened era for the trade.
But that turning point in his life is now a quarter-century past and Lynch’s leather work boots long ago cracked with age. Although Lynch’s candidacy is betting that his boots-and-workbelt biography will win over working men and women, the ranks of labor are not falling uniformly behind him.
Markey has the backing of half a dozen of the state’s large “white collar” unions such as SEIU and the Massachusetts Teachers Association, and says he has the backing of roughly half of the state’s union workers, according to his campaign.
In a surprising blow to Lynch’s campaign, the AFL-CIO last month decided not to endorse either candidate in the Democratic primary. Some union stalwarts say they are troubled by Lynch’s vote against President Obama’s health care bill and his once-conservative tilt on issues such as abortion and affirmative action.
Lynch, however, accustomed to the role of long shot in his nearly two decades in politics, is undaunted. Over a bowl of oatmeal at a Newton diner, he is quick to point out that he has 89 unions on his side, never mind that some of them are small locals. “I don’t cry about the ones I don’t have,” he declares. “We’re getting there.”
****************************
In 1988 Lynch became the youngest president in Local 7’s history. It was a turning point not just for Lynch, but for the union as well....
It was a crucial year for Lynch on many fronts. For some time, Lynch had been considering enrolling in Suffolk University’s night law school, but two months before the union vote he fell down a stairwell while working at the 75 State Street construction site and injured his back. Awarded a substantial settlement and unable to work construction for more than a year, Lynch enrolled in the day program at the more prestigious Boston College Law School. But a broiling union dispute made him three weeks late for class.
It began when Local 7’s nearly 1,800 workers walked off the job that summer, unable to reach a contract with the Associated General Contractors. The strike dragged on for weeks as construction around the city ground to a virtual halt. Anxious for resolution, the Ironworkers International ordered Lynch to sign.
When Lynch refused, angling for a better deal for his members, the international threatened to remove him from his post. When Lynch still would not budge, the International went over his head and signed the contract that he would not.
Lynch, the street fighter, was livid. In an aggressive move that union veterans recall vividly, Lynch filed charges of “coercion” against his own union with the National Labor Relations Board. In the end, he prevailed and the international agreed to back off.
Taking on the international made Lynch something of a hero among the rank and file, but it also shut the door on any aspirations he might have had to rise within the union hierarchy. After he graduated from law school in 1991, Lynch contemplated a different path — politics. Over the next few years, he would keep a close eye on the State House a few blocks from the law firm where he worked and eventually defeated an incumbent state representative....
And he might surprise again.
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"Donors give Stephen Lynch $1.5m to fund race" by Joshua Miller | Globe Staff, April 15, 2013
US Senate hopeful Representative Stephen F. Lynch, running against the Washington Democratic establishment’s favored candidate, raised $1.5 million since January, his campaign said Sunday.
Representative Edward J. Markey, Lynch’s primary opponent in the race to replace former senator John F. Kerry, has not yet released his fund-raising haul for the last three months. But Markey had more than $3 million in the bank at the end of 2012 and is expected to have had a robust fund-raising period.
None of the three Republicans in the race — Gabriel E. Gomez, Michael J. Sullivan, and Daniel B. Winslow — has yet released his tallies.
Lynch ended the fund-raising period that ran from Jan. 1 through April 10 with $514,000 in the bank. As he continues to raise money, that should give the congressman, widely considered the underdog in his primary race, enough cash to keep ads in rotation on broadcast television, essential for most any candidate to stay competitive....
Each candidate’s fund-raising number is a key metric in determining the health of campaign, as primary day nears....
I thought the last election disproved that.
Last year’s closely watched Senate campaign between Elizabeth Warren and Scott Brown was one of the most expensive races in the country. Warren spent more than $42 million in her campaign in 2011 and 2012, while Brown spent over $35 million over the two-year cycle.
But that was a marquee race that garnered significant national attention. The Massachusetts special election for Senate has been substantially more subdued, which, along with a compressed time frame, makes fund-raising a greater challenge.
Either Markey or Lynch will face the winner of the Republican primary on June 25.
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Whose he running against again?
"Once a ‘disrupter,’ Edward Markey now a mover in House" by Noah Bierman | Globe Staff, April 09, 2013
WASHINGTON — Representative Edward Markey is no longer the precocious newcomer from working-class Malden. He is the establishment, a House insider and practical lawmaker who pursues liberal goals with patience, cross-party relationships, and compromise. After 36 years in office, Markey is the gray dean of the state’s delegation, as inextricably linked with the House of Representatives as are the Capitol steps....
Time to go, Ed.
To help move the Internet from its infancy to adolescence, Markey co-wrote the Telecommunications Act of 1996 with Representative Jack Fields, a Texas Republican, which coaxed cable companies to build broadband networks, the platform for high-speed data regarded as crucial to the World Wide Web explosion.
“None of it was possible — Google, Hulu, YouTube — none of it was possible before the 1996 Telecom Act,” Markey said. “It required broadband in order to make the business models possible.”
I thought Al Gore invented the Internet.
Markey may have embraced the future, but he sometimes did a questionable job of predicting it. Gadgets that were greeted with euphoria in the mid-1990s have already become retro, almost kitsch, including the digital pen on Markey’s wall, used by President Clinton to sign the telecom bill.
Another big Markey priority in the bill, the subject of numerous press releases and guest columns, turned out to be a flop. The V-Chip, a switch implanted in televisions designed to let parents screen out violent programming with the click of a button, is still required in every set, though specialists say it is virtually never used by consumers.
The bill’s larger legacy on television and the Internet is mixed. Consumers have access to hundreds of channels, and high-speed Internet, but at a significant cost. Markey lost battles to retain more rigid price controls.
“The cable bills are astronomical,” said Mark Cooper, research director at the Consumer Federation of America.
Cooper blames the industry, Clinton, and the Republicans, who then controlled the House, for overpowering Markey’s intentions.
“We never got the competition they promised us that would replace the regulation they were taking away,” he said.
Though Markey was continually hailed as an ally by consumer groups, his transition into one of Congress’s most influential voices in telecommunications helped him quietly build one of the state’s largest fund-raising operations.
Haven't we had enough of thi$ $tuff?
Communications and electronics interests contributed $2.4 million of the $12 million he raised between 1989 and 2012 — his biggest source of industry money, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan organization that tracks money in politics. Throughout much of the 1980s and 1990s, Markey refused money from political action committees, but he lifted the self-imposed ban in 2003.
Though he readily accepts corporate money for his campaign coffers, at other times Markey has seemed to relish poking powerful interests in the eye. He was especially aggressive with British Petroleum executives after the 2010 oil spill, forcing the company to release live footage that became the popular “spillcam,” and questioning executives to help build pressure for the company’s $4.5 billion settlement.
Although the episode demonstrated a knack for grabbing the spotlight, Markey also has shown patience and hard work on far less glamorous projects....
Oh, okay.
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Related: Senate Election Special: At Home With Ed Markey
Don't worry, Ed; you can still stay there as Representative.
Clearing the fog in Senate race
That's not going to help.
And when they go face-to-face:
"Stephen Lynch and Edward Markey debate civilly; Rivals highlight their humble roots and discuss gay rights and the spending by outside interests" by Michael Levenson | Globe Staff, April 08, 2013
LOWELL — They charged through a range of issues, from areas where they believe they could work with Republicans to their views on the use of drones by the American military....
The debate was the second of four and was streamed live on the website of The Boston Herald, a sponsor, but was not shown on television and did not produce any explosive moments that could upend the dynamic of the contest....
The Marathon did that.
The Marathon did that.
On social issues, both candidates said they support same-sex marriage....
Fine, let's move on.
Fine, let's move on.
Markey sought to underscore his ability to agree with Republicans when he declared that he supported Senator Rand Paul’s recent filibuster to demand information from the Obama admin istration about its policy on drone strikes. “I agreed with Rand Paul,” Markey said. “The American people . . . have a right to answers.”
How about ending them, Ed?
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