The Menino shuffle
GLOBE EDITORIAL September 27, 2005
DURING 12 years in office, Mayor Menino has faced
down enraged members of the firefighters' union on an unruly picket
line, grim youths in Grove Hall charging police harassment, and
even a rare form of cancer. Yet Menino becomes fainthearted at
the prospect of debating mayoral challenger Maura Hennigan, a
city councilor since 1981 and a thorn in Menino's side for nearly
a decade.
At the insistence of the Menino campaign, the format
of tomorrow's only scheduled televised forum leaves little, if
any, room for the candidates to address each other directly. Twenty
questions on taxes, crime, city services, affordable housing,
and other urban issues will be posed by a cross-section of voters
starting at 7 p.m. on WGBH's Channel 2. It is essentially a live
electronic town meeting. Candidates will have a minute to respond
to each question. But no rebuttal time has been built in for the
candidates. That leaves the moderator, Emily Rooney, host of ''Greater
Boston," with the task of follow-up questions and rooting
out evasiveness.
Both Menino and Hennigan are highly accessible politicians who
appear at numerous neighborhood events. It doesn't require an
electronic town meeting for Bostonians to experience such encounters
with these candidates. What is needed instead is a genuine debate,
with back-and-forth questions and answers between the two to help
voters determine who should lead the city.
The Hennigan campaign is understandably annoyed
with Menino's shuffling. But frustration with his refusal to debate
face-to-face is being heard in other quarters.
''It's a joke," says Samuel Tyler, head of the business-backed
Boston Municipal Research Bureau, whose organization sponsors
an annual luncheon at which the mayor outlines his economic agenda
for the year ahead. ''Let him defend his record. Let him define
his programs for the future."
Like so many longtime incumbents, Menino has come
to believe that the privileges of office include exemption from
tough, face-to-face questioning by opponents at election time.
But without such questioning, preferably under hot lights, incumbents
find it easier to evade both specific promises and accountability.
TV town halls are informative. They are a boost to participatory
politics. But they are not political debates, not by a long shot