Tuesday, September 24, 2013

My Vote For Mayor of Boston

Just putting up my lawn sign.

"There is more on the line than the usual bragging rights. The winner of the Nov. 5 final election will not only assume the mantle of mayor, but will also be able to quickly appoint the new leaders of the school and police departments. Those choices can reshape much of city life. 

I know it is an important election for the city, but I don't live there.

Related:

Uncertainty for schools as superintendent retires
Boston police leader Edward Davis to resign

Obomber's new DHS?

Polls open at 7 a.m., close at 8 p.m.

--more--"

I can't really remember the last time I wrote about this election, but my choice were I allowed to vote:

"David James Wyatt is elusive, camera shy" by Wesley Lowery |  Globe Staff, September 14, 2013

Editor’s note: The Globe is not publishing a full, front-page profile of David James Wyatt because he declined repeated efforts to be interviewed for such an article.

I'm liking him already.

“Well, I’m a Republican, and a conservative, as one would expect a Republican to be,” David James Wyatt said with a sigh and a shrug. “I am also 100 percent prolife.”

On the first I am, barely, and I tolerate abortion due to the state I live in and my libertarian underpinnings.

In a race that centers on who is the best choice to replace Thomas M. Menino, Wyatt stands out by eschewing any talk about wanting to win and by rarely appearing on the campaign trail. Instead, he has said that he hopes to give voters a conservative option, someone with deep antiabortion convictions.

With just $17 in his campaign account — some of his opponents boast war chests of more than $1 million — Wyatt has been largely absent on the stump and a rare sight at the dozens of forums and debates that have been held over the summer.

The race’s most mysterious candidate, Wyatt has not produced any official campaign materials and has proven elusive to many of the journalists covering the race. He returned very few candidate surveys and dodged a Globe reporter who tried for two weeks to secure a full-length in-person interview for this profile.

That never endears you to them.

Wyatt does have a website, a holdover from an unsuccessful City Council run in 2007, but has otherwise does little campaigning. At times, he stresses that he is the only candidate in the race who has run for mayor before, referring to a short-lived write-in campaign in 2001.

Born and raised in Roxbury, Wyatt is a former Boston public school teacher who now works 12 hours a day at two jobs, including a job selling copies of the Boston Herald.

Strike two with the Globe, even though they print and distribute the Herald.

He acknowledges that he was fired from his teaching job, and court records show that he spent several years in the mid-1990s suing the school district in an unsuccessful attempt to win back his job.

And he's a troublemaker. Strike three, your out!

Often camera-shy, Wyatt slowly contemplates each question he is asked and sometimes looks surprised when forum moderators turn to him for a response.

His answers almost always hinge on one of a handful of his core political stances: Boston should stop spending so much money on school buses; the city should return to an elected School Committee; and the next mayor should use the position as a bully pulpit to trumpet antiabortion views.

Also seeBoston’s new school-bus tracking system catching on

They have sobriety checkpoints now.

“It’s important that people have options from both parties,” Wyatt said after one of the recent forums that he did attend. “This is a nonpartisan election, and I am the only candidate who is a Republican, who is conservative.’’ 

I agree, especially in the one-party liberal fa$ci$t state of Massachusetts.

One of six candidates of color in the race, Wyatt says it is important that the city elect its first minority mayor. That stance earned him what was probably his first applause of the campaign last week at a candidates-of-color forum in Dorchester.

But the vocal crowd support was short lived.

Moments later, members of a crowd of more than 150 gathered outside under a tent and turned on the candidate, who had begun a long-winded defense of Police Commissioner Edward F. Davis.

The moderator glanced over to Wyatt apologetically, but his sympathetic glance was met by the candidate’s familiar shrug.

He really did not seem too upset. Just what I like, a calm, collected, thoughtful person. 

--more--"

Yeah, he would make a lousy mayor.

And if I were to cast an anybody but ballot:

"It was a kitchen conversation with his mother in 1984 that perhaps shaped his worldview just as much as years of hearing his father discuss the horrors of Nazi concentration camps. When he was 13, his mother sat him down in their modest home behind the neighborhood grocery in Newton to tell him she was a lesbian.

Wow, does this guy have issues.

He admits that, as a teen who was trying to fit in, he was initially shy about his mother’s sexuality. But, Ross says, growing up in a blended family that included his mother’s new partner forced him to value equality from an early age.

“You can’t grow up in that environment — with a father imparting stories from the Holocaust and a mother living in an openly lesbian relationship — and not pick up some values along the way,” said Ross, who would be Boston’s first Jewish mayor if elected.

Look, I remember, I remember, you don't have to keep telling the same stories over and over again.

--more--"

Globe is sure putting the effort forth for him.

And look at the mayors he admires, although de Blasio might have trouble winning election, especially after his most recent endorsement. Looks like Lhota may not be a loser after all, and what did happen to the steel from the crime scene you destroyed, Mr. former federal prosecutor?

Also see:

No clear leader in mayoral race, Globe poll shows

Black voters split in Boston’s mayoral race

A clumsy effort from Charlotte Golar Richie 

So sayeth the white man.

Will women turn tide for Charlotte Golar Richie?

I guess some Boston voting blocs are monolithic, and others are not.

Boston’s crowded mayoral race makes choice hard

The money behind the messages in Boston mayor’s race

A look at mayoral race campaign donations

Coverage of Boston’s mayoral race

Nothing to do now but wait for the results. 

NEXT DAY UPDATE:

"Walsh and Connolly come from the same ethnic tribe.... the city’s next mayor will be a white man of Irish heritage." 

Do I even need to remark on the internalization of inculcated values?