Race needs pressure
By Eileen McNamara, Globe Columnist
October 9, 2005
This will be remembered as a historic year in Boston
politics -- the year the incumbent, the media, the business community,
nonpartisan public interest groups, and a complacent electorate
chose to forgo a mayoral race.
Oh, there will be a vote on Nov. 8. There just won't
be a campaign to precede it.
No one can claim that Maura A. Hennigan hasn't tried. The 12-term
city councilor challenging Mayor Thomas M. Menino in his bid for
a fourth term is hoarse from demanding the imperial mayor come
down from his throne to debate the state of education, housing,
public safety, and municipal services.
What she lacks is a chorus.
There is plenty for the candidates to discuss. A
school system that serves the poor because it cannot hold onto
the middle class. A rental market that prices young and old out
of the city of their birth. A police department that requires
remedial crowd control training to ensure that it does not kill
innocent people. A property assessment crisis that saw real estate
taxes on single family homes jump an average of 12 percent this
year. A public works operation overwhelmed by trash-choked gutters
and snow-clogged streets.
In the past, any one of those topics would have
merited a 90-minute debate, carried live by every local commercial
television station and more than one radio outlet. Voters would
have packed Faneuil Hall or the John F. Kennedy Library to listen
to a stage full of candidates make their case. In 1983, there
were nine candidates in the preliminary round, and no one considered
forgoing debates because of that unwieldy number.
This year, one month before casting their ballots
in the general election, Bostonians have settled for a one-hour
forum on WGBH's ''Greater Boston" that most of them did not
see.
That a public broadcasting station sponsored the only televised
meeting between Hennigan and Menino says as much about the failures
of commercial television in Boston as it does about the admirable
commitment of WBGH to local programming. This is the legacy of
deregulation, of a Federal Communications Commission so preoccupied
with potty-mouthed disc jockeys and breast-baring rock stars that
it has abandoned its more fundamental responsibility to ensure
that those licensed to use the public airwaves provide local programming
that is in the public interest. ''The Main Streets and Back Roads
of New England" does not count.
The media alone is not to blame for Menino's likely
cakewalk to another four-year term. By their silence, every player
in Boston, from the business community to the League of Women
Voters, is complicit in this emasculation of the democratic process.
Whether those interests are satisfied with Menino's performance
during his 12 years in office is beside the point. Elections are
about ideas as much as they are about candidates and, after 24
years on the City Council, Hennigan has earned the right to be
heard.
If not now, when is Boston going to revisit the
issue of an elected versus an appointed school committee? It has
been nine years since residents surrendered the right to elect
their own representatives.
It is not enough in defense of an appointed board
to unearth old stories of the buffoonery and corruption of past
elected committeemen. It is necessary to ask whether an appointed
board has been as accountable to the people as it has been to
the mayor.
If not now, when is Boston going to confront a housing
crisis that has driven working people to Brockton and Fall River
in search of affordable rents, and recent college graduates out
of state in search of a less prohibitive cost of living? It is
not enough to blame the ''housing bubble." It is necessary
all these years after the end of rent control to ask whether any
effective housing policies have taken its place.
A popular mayor with more campaign funds than fresh
ideas is not going to agree to the debates Bostonians deserve
without some pressure. Who is going to apply it?