Wow, all this hubbub and the election results turned out pretty much as you’d expect. Here are some thoughts:
Surprisingly little has changed. Yoon is the only new councilor, and given that the musical chair lost was Hennigan, not much is likely to shift in the alliances of city council.
Not only that, I don’t think we have any clear message on the big issues facing the city: neighborhood schools, housing policy, or crime reduction.
Hennigan didn’t do well enough that Menino really has to do that much different over his next term. Is the South End biolab going forward now? Sure, Arroyo and Yoon and (sometimes) Flaherty oppose, but since Menino paid absolutely no political price for the idea, I can’t imagine what councilors have to fear now.
How big a deal is gerrymandering? I’m stuck by the disparity between the at-large elections, in which the progressive-minority coalition performed pretty well, and the district defeat of Gibran Rivera. He did pretty well in his showing but West Roxbury was too big of an electoral powerhouse to let the Latino-left candidate get much traction.
What can improve civic involvement? No, really. Sure the "yuppies once again largely sat on their oh-so-toned asses", and I think they deserve some admonishment for it. But it’s one thing to say people have responsibility to learn about issues and vote; it’s another thing to ignore that they fail in that responsibility in large numbers and in socially predictable ways. By and large, people don’t vote for a number of overlapping reasons: 1) alternatives are disguised as similarity so that differences apparent to the insider are invisible to the outsider; 2) the policy choices that elections impose require a level of knowledge or abstraction that varies across education and class in the population; 3) candidates address the self-interest of some groups but not others; or 4) candidates address the ideals and sensibility of some groups but not others. I’ll leave it open which mix of the above lets Boston excel at a political culture that produces both religious devotion and apathy in its citizens.
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