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The First Female President Of The Boston City Council In 30 Years

Maureen Feeney of Dorchester was elected as the first Boston City Council President in 30 years. This is a historical event because last woman who led the Boston City Council was in 1976 when Louise Day Hicks was President. It is also historical because she actually gained more support from other councilors than incumbent and longtime president Michael Flaherty. It is uncertain how such a blindsiding could have happened. Either it was due to Michael Flaherty’s own ambition or the ambitions of his colleagues getting in the way. Regardless as to how it happened, a lot of people think that it has been way too long since the last woman was in charge.

Of course, it is also known that Maureen Feeney was able to lock up the support of at least 8 of the 13 members currently serving on the Boston City Council. This was enough votes to help her capture the post. This is something that has thrilled Maureen Feeney who is eager to begin formulating an agenda as president.

While this brings Maureen Feeney great happiness, she also knows that she is privileged to work with a lot of wonderful people. What has really encouraged her though is that Michael Flaherty was actually gracious enough to offer to step aside and support her. He even went so far as to encourage Michael P. Ross, Jerry P. McDermott, Robert Consalvo and James M. Kelly to support her instead of him. This meant a great deal to her since his support came only days before the election when a major battle could have occurred instead.

Why This Is An Important Event

Some people may be wondering why this is even a big deal in the first place. Well, it is because of the way in which the political system has been set up in Boston. The system is formed in such a way that if anything should happen to Mayor Tom Menino, then the Boston City Council President Maureen Feeney will then be in charge. Otherwise, the position of Boston City Council President makes a nice jumping point for anyone who wants to become mayor.

The Woman Behind The Name

Maureen Feeney grew up in the Franklin Field projects in Dorchester. She is the daughter of a father who worked as a pipe-fitter and a mother who was a full-time homemaker. Her family consisted of 5 brothers and 1 sister, of whom she is the eldest.

For several years, Maureen Feeney worked in the insurance industry. Then in the 1980s she took a job at City Hall handling constituent services for Councilor James E. Byrne. When Councilor James E. Byrne decided not to run for re-election in 1993, she won his seat. This was her first term on the Boston City Council. Since then she has gone on to win the 4 following elections by an overwhelming majority of voters. For all of the great service that she has provided, she was selected as Woman of the Year in 2000 by Friends for Children. This is a charity that provides mothers and children with social services and directs them to other social service agencies as well. Now this 58-year-old Democrat from Dorchester is the first woman in 30 years to serve as a President on the Boston City Council. This will position her to be able to wield considerable influence over diverse matters such as policing, elections and education.

Previous Achievements

Success is nothing new to Maureen Feeney. She has a proven track record, which includes:
1.In the past Maureen Feeney has chaired the committee on Government Operations, Boston 2004, and University- Community Relations.
2.Maureen Feeney has served as Vice President of the City Council.
3.She has chaired the committee for Housing, the committee for Census & Redistricting in 2002.
4.She was the Vice-Chair for the committee on Ways and Means.
5.Maureen Feeney was a Trustee of the Boston Medical Center.
6.She sits on the board of directors of several organizations including the Daniel Marr Boys and Girls Club and the Bay Cove Human Services.
7.For about 20 years Maureen Feeney served on the Ward 16 Democratic Committee. Through a previous election she came to serve on the executive committee here.
8.She has also created a meals program at the Long Island Shelter.
9.Maureen Feeney is known for organizing annual blood drives throughout the city.

As you can clearly see, Maureen is an experienced leader with a proven track record. She is known for serving her constituents and is acknowledged as an expert when it comes to delivering health care services. Maureen Feeney has also taken a strong stand in protecting the non-profit health care facilities, which serve her constituents.

Major Changes On The Horizon

Just read DiningOutBoston’s review of Haru’s new Boston location, in the Pru, it seems cool.

Also, check out Puritan City’s review of Haru

…. and Ty Burr has the best editorial use of an illustration photo.

Belle Waring goes for the low-hanging fruit, in form of Mark Steyn, and the results are oh-so-dilectably hilarious. Go read.

I’ll have more to say on this, but for those who complain about the Boston Globe, just be glad the Philly Inquirer isn’t your regional paper. Talk about skimpy. The special Election 06 section promises in big, bold letters, “MORE THAN THREE PAGES OF COVERAGE INSIDE.” And this from a paper with a far bigger population and geographical area to cover than Boston’s dailies.

Wow, what a difference election night was this time around. Sure, some of the wild predictions for an electoral autodafe didn’t pan out, but a surprising number of the predictions did. It was highly gratifying to see Deval Patrick win, even from the vantage of a new city and state (where we are savoring Santorum’s defeat as slowly as a 30-year old armagnac). As someone who at points underestimated Patrick’s chances statewide, I’m happy to be proven wrong. It’s an odd bookend to my disappointment from the Reich campaign, a disappointment that was largely responsible for driving me to the blogging keyboard to begin with.

Given the suddenness of my move and demands of the new job (I’m teaching now at Temple University, and really enjoying it), I had to drop off the blogging scene for a while. Even now, I won’t have the time for current events blogging for the foreseeable future. But I didn’t want this blog to just linger without closure. So expect a few more posts before I hang up the hat.

Again, congratulations to Patrick and his campaign for an impressive victory. Let’s hope it’s a fresh page for Massachusetts politics.

I never got very far with my First Principles of Foreign Policy, but Matt Yglesias offers another:

The great irony of this all is that if there’s one thing the Republican Party does understand really well it’s the psychology and politics of nationalism. They understand it, that is, in terms of U.S. domestic politics. It doesn’t seem to occur to them, however, that these insights might want to be extended to how foreigners — who are, after all, human beings just like Americans — react to things.

To generalize into a principle, one should expect nationalism to define foreigners’ stance on the world stage as much as it’s defined ours in the most nationalist of moments.

Shorter David Halberstam: Mitt Romney should emulate someone who made a crazy-sounding (if not actually crazy) statement that cost him any chance in the primary.

I’m an unusual sort: I’m under the age of 50 and I watch local TV newscasts. A lot. I can’t fully say way. Part of it is just what TV scholars call “flow,” the sheer rhythm of the broadcast schedule and its amenability to my own life schedule, getting ready for work in the morning, cooking dinner when I get home. Part of it is simply the desire to know what’s going on in the city I’ve lived in. And, well, I’m just obsessed with the non-celebrity celebrity of local TV news talent.

So it’s in the most loving way that I say that local TV newscasts are dreadful.

Some are worse than others… Channel 7’s the worst offender; Channel 5 the most hidebound and traditional; and Channel 4 rapidly remaking itself in WHDH image. But they all suffer from a bloated generic form that offers viewers little substantive knowledge (what used to come first in news) about the place where they live.

Everyone has their own solutions and recriminations. For mine, I thought I’d offer these eight rules that I think would make for better, even stellar, local news:

No “off the satellites” feed stories: I honestly don’t see why I need to follow car crashes, building collapses, crazy animal stories and the like in California, Montana, Ohio or Georgia.

No national and world news: If we’re going to see the clip of a Bush speech or footage of Iraq war on the nightly network newscast, we don’t need to see it on the local news. It’s not local news. And there are plenty of sources for Mel Gibson news.

No police blotter stuff: Obviously car crashes, late night fires, shootings and vandalism are big deals for those affected. But in a large metropolitan area, stuff is always happening and it’s frankly not that interesting to me to hear that some triple-decker somewhere caught on fire. Now, if the item is treated in genuine news fashion that’s another thing. The rising homicide rate in Boston is a big deal, and serial arsonists may prompt a story pondering insurance scams. But enough with the ambulance and firetruck chasing.

No magazine trend lists: Pulling press releases of this or that magazine’s Top 40 Cities to Go on a Blind Date In or Worst Places to Park Your Car is the height of journalistic laziness. These studies don’t even really measure anything other than some artificial numerical index. If you want a lifestyle feature, go through the trouble to assess air quality, or restaurant scenes, or fitness cultures, etc.

Cut back on the tease: Advertising and self-promotion is a part of life. But respect some limits, by for instance teasers that can only last as long as one quarter of the duration the actual item they’re promoting. When weatherfolks can give the whole forecast in the amount of time they pose rhetorical questions, that’s an insult to the viewer.

Provide political analysis: Give a realistic assessment of why political battles play out the way they do. Is Beacon Hill stalling on that insurance regulation legislation or on that health care bill because of political gamesmanship? Because of closely held beliefs? Because of the beliefs of their constituents? Because of lobbyist money? These are tough questions, sometimes involving subjective judgment calls, but as viewers, and outsiders, we deserve elucidation, not knee-jerk anti-politician rhetoric.

Cover city politics: Too often Boston appears on local news merely as the cultural touchstone of the media market: the center of public events and sports teams. Yet, the news ignores city politics in a way that would be unthinkable in almost any other major city.

Less emotional interpellation: I’ve never understood why local anchors – and local anchors alone – have been told it’s their job to perform sympathy and emotional cues in such an exaggerated way. National news anchors tell you the news and let you react. I don’t need the head-nodding, tut-tutting, and endless patter about Sox losses. It’s embarrassing. Channel 5 is the only station were they manage to be conversational without being smarmy.

This is all a pipedream, I know. But given a crumbling network oligopoly, you think at least one channel would differentiate itself.

Mark Schmitt gets shrill:

Can someone explain what Senator Lieberman could possibly mean when he says the following:

“I’m worried that too many people, both in politics and out, don’t appreciate the seriousness of the threat to American security and the evil of the enemy that faces us — more evil, or as evil, as Nazism and probably more dangerous than the Soviet Communists we fought during the long Cold War,” Mr. Lieberman said.

First, there’s no antecedent to the word “threat” or “enemy” so we have no idea what threat he’s referring to. Is it al-Qaeda alone? Al-Qaeda plus Hezbollah and Hamas, plus Syria and Ahmadinejad? Or that thing out there that Little Green Footballs the President now calls “Islamic fascists”?

Who knows. But under any possible definition of “threat” or “enemy” it cannot possibly be as dangerous than the Soviet Union at the peak of the Cold War, with multiple thermonuclear devices pointed at every one of our cities and towns. And, I don’t know exactly how to score “evilness,” but not much matches Hitler. I suppose in some way bin Laden and Zawahiri’s hearts may be as filled with evil as Hitler’s or Stalin’s, but they don’t have the SS and Luftwaffe at their disposal. Maybe they would send us all to concentration camps if they controlled half of Europe, but thankfully, they live in caves and can’t use the phone. Is Ahmadinejad “more evil, or as evil” as Hitler? Maybe the potential is there, with his holocaust denial and all that, but so far it’s mostly talk.

I’m sorry, but this is just a deranged, or at best deeply confused and manic, thing to say. It shows a lack of perspective and reality and responsibility, even in its lack of clarity about what exactly the threat is and how to defeat it. Why does anyone accept that this kind of blather can be considered taking the threat more “seriously”? It’s not. It’s hugely unserious in its trivialization of the great moral challenges of the Twentieth Century and it’s bald politicization of the current challenge.

And here’s Matt Yglesias on the islamofascist label:

the main idea here seems to be that we need a proper noun to describe our foes. The noun ought to be pejorative, and it ought to include “Islam” or some equivalent. There’s not really any precedent for this sort of thing. We called the Nazis “Nazis” because that was the name of the Nazi Party. We didn’t feel the need to call them “Germano-Nazis” to remind ourselves that they were German. What we certainly didn’t do was take a term that already had bad connotations — “Bolsheviks,” say — and then call the Nazis “Germano-Bolsheviks” in order to make clear that we were talking about Germans rather than Russians. That would be nonsense. Al-Qaeda’s doctrine and methods have almost nothing in common with those of the National Socialist German Workers Party. Calling its followers “Islamo-Nazis” clarifies absolutely nothing.

Obfuscation, rather than clarification, was the goal to begin with.

I’m sure that the Lieberman turn-of-events has excited the dKos branch of the liberal blogosphere, what has become synonymous with the “netroots” label, but what’s interested me (naturally) is the way the Lamont victory - and the boneheaded commentary and rhetoric that’s tut-tutted at it - has reenergized the far less rootsy center-leftish blogosphere and pushed them, almost dialectically, into an articulate opposition to the playing out of foreign policy in the political realm.

To wit, Josh Marshall on Lieberman’s “toward the mainstream” comment:

But more to the point. This isn’t just inaccurate, it’s pathetic. I’ts a like a mini-version of the Iraq War or the War on Terror. You’re either with Joe or you’re with the extremists. Apparently half of Connecticut Democrats are outside the mainstream. This is really the attitude that got poor Joe into this bind. The mainstream is Joe Lieberman, along with possibly Sean Hannity and Bill Kristol. If you disagree with Joe Lieberman, a disagreement about policy is the least of it. It’s a major existential crisis for the Democratic party which risks conquest by unreconstructed leftists, extremists and miscellaneous other freaks.

Or Matt Yglesias’s sage words:

A Democrat who wants to win is going to need to make the argument that the invasion of Iraq has dramatically increased the risk of terrorist attacks on the United States. That it distracted our attention from a much more necessary stabilization and pacification mission in Afghanistan, ruined counterterrorism cooperation with several countries, turned Muslim opinion around the world against us, wasted huge sums of money that could have been spent killing actual terrorists and guarding against the same, that it’s been a huge strategic coup for Iran, etc., etc., etc., etc. It’s a good argument; one that can, should, and must be made. But it’s not an argument you can make consistent with the idea that Joe Lieberman’s mistaken views on Iraq are just some random thing on a par with a person’s position on the research and development tax credit. If stopping terrorism is very important, and if the Iraq War was seriously counterproductive to counterterrorism efforts, then being badly wrong on Iraq means you’re badly wrong on terrorism and that this matters.

Or, more basically, Charles Pierce:

More than anything else, the DLC created a generation of gun-shy Democrats, and that was fine, as long as we could be reasonably confident that the other side would not throw the entire United States government into the monkeyhouse.

… and Timothy Burke:

Opposing the war in Iraq is not the same as endorsing terrorism. It is not the same as refusing to engage in a protracted military and political struggle against terrorist movements. The war in Iraq is not the war on terror.

Uncritical, slavish support for the war in Iraq is sabotaging the struggle against terrorism. Uncritical endorsement of the Bush Administration’s attempt to claim unlimited executive authority in a definitionally endless state of war is undermining the defense of liberty and democracy here and abroad.

Bipartisanship is not endorsement of the entirety of the current Republican Party political agenda.

… and Kevin Drum:

This nonsense needs to be fought at every turn. Democrats have to make it absolutely clear, every single time somebody spouts this rubbish, that supporting the Iraq war doesn’t mean you’re “on offense against terrorism.” Nor does opposing the war also mean you oppose fighting jihadism. The truth is closer to the exact opposite, and chapter and verse should follow if necessary.

This needs to happen Every. Single. Time. We can’t allow the Rudy Giulianis and Dick Cheneys of the world to get away with this. They’ve dug us into too deep a hole already, and we can’t afford to let them dig it any deeper.

It’s a stretch to say that the Lieberman-Lamont contest has radicalized this quarter, who have protested the US’s direction in foreign policy for some time, often well, but it has given them (and me) a renewed sense that now’s the time to strike in a counterattack against everything that the Great-War-of-Terror mentality came to mean, that History has entered some pregnant Hegelian moment.

It’s more than the matter of administration incompetence in fighting the Iraq war, it’s the matter of a conservative foreign policy that mistakes nation-state geopolitics for nonstate terrorists; that’s obstusely unable to understand nationalist battles other than as projections for its own preferred Manichaen dramas; that takes one part of the Middle East (Iraq) for the whole; that trades in obfuscation that’s partly intentional, partly ideological, and yes, partly racist. Democrats are divided on foreign policy more than on most anything else, but observers don’t give them enough credit for actually having an answer: 1) drop the categorical opposition to traditional diplomacy and negotiation; 2) be aware that nationalist dynamics can work either for or against your cause, but aren’t themselves ‘the enemy’; and 3) whatever foreign policy instrument used, peaceful or bellicose, its application should be centered toward the primary objective (defense and anti-terrorism), not toward some grand geopolitical experiment with empirically problematic assumptions like the Flypaper Theory or the Domino Effect of Democracy. That’s hard to put on a yard sign, but it has the advantage of not spawning counterproductive wars.

Things have been slow posting around here in part because big news has been brewing: I have been offered a job in Philadelphia and have decided to take it. I’ll have to be short on detalis, since it’s all still be ironed out, including the official offer, but by now I’ve committed to the relocation, and will be moving away from this fair city in a little over a week’s time.

More reflection to come, as well as word on LeftCenterLeft’s fate.

Sometimes contrarian political positions are annoying in their mistaking of playfulness of stance with genuine insight. Sometimes, though, they’re really challenging in the best sense. Go read Tyler Cowen on the modern liberal vice and the libertarian vice.

Wow. I’ve refrained from commenting on a race that’s out of my state, but I have to say that now that Lieberman has lost, it’s quite a gratifying spectacle.

The news coverage, often in subtle ways, manages to patronize anyone with an anti-war position, or anti-Lieberman vote. Take, for instance, the lede of Rick Klein’s piece in the Globe:

Antiwar fervor helped topple Senator Joseph I. Lieberman yesterday in his bid for the Democratic nomination for his Senate seat, with challenger Ned Lamont capitalizing on President Bush’s low approval ratings to pull off a once-unthinkable upset of one of the nation’s most prominent Democrats.

Fervor, clearly, is a loaded word. People complain that races aren’t competitive any more, or that voters are apathetic, or that issues take a back issue to machine politics. And then when voters do treat an incumbent’s race as a real one, with real issues to vote on, all of a sudden it’s a case of wild-eyed fervor.

Yes, the developments in Connecticut are surprising, and “once-unthinkable.” But how about taking for given that primary voters have every right, even responsibility, to decide, among other considerations, which candidate best expresses their views?

Great observation from John Carroll:

Best line of the political-ad season so far: the Kerry Healey supporter who says in one spot, “She’s consistent, she’s articulate, and she tells it like it is.” This, about a candidate who has yet to say a word in her commercials.

We’ve been flooded with political ads lately, from everyone except Deval Patrick and Christy Mihos. Politically, the strangest to me have been Tom Reilly’s. After spending the first flurry of debates playing centrist to his opponent’s liberalism, he now seems to brandishing his anti-Bush and anti-corporate credentials in an effort to win some support of the base of primary voters. Perhaps others will see this differently, I can’t help but see this as a defense from a position of weakness. If he hadn’t been so cavalier about party activists a few months ago, maybe he could be spending his money more wisely now.

Politically, meanwhile, Gabrielli’s ads are smart, perhaps the savvyist of the lot, but they push a policy pet peeve of mine: the fetishization of New Ideas. Look, we all want to think that smart people are running the show, and we’d like to think that if there is some innovation to be found that would make government better and its positive effects more powerful, we’d find it. But what’s this business with “no such thing as Republican ideas or Democratic ideas, just ideas that work”? Policy battles - and political battles in general - happen because people have different ideas of what will work. Utilities regulation, school vouchers, the Bush doctrine, workfare reform… these sorts of things are half struggles between opposing interests (some people win out, some lose), but equally they’re struggle between universalizing ideas (e.g., the market solves problem X vs. regulation of the market solves problem X).

Take higher education, since that’s what Gabrielli’s ad touts. Why are college saving tax credits such a good idea? First, some, like Brad Delong and the TAPPED folks, have made the excellent point that while seemingly progresive such credits simply fund middle-class spending on college that would take place anyway. Second, if we’re concerned about making college affordable for working families, why not, you know, fund higher education itself? If there was political will, this state could make UMass free or virtually free for many qualifying students (say those with A or B average in high school). Not only has there not been the will to do that, but the tax credit route siphons away support from public universities toward private schools whose costs escalate more quickly. Gabrielli may sell credits as bold new idea, but to me they seem like a half-measure that accomplishes little appreciable, except a partial tax transfer between voters in order to win support among a given sector. That’s not bold, that’s either craven or misguided.

New is nice, but sometimes old ideas work fine.