Andrea Joy Campbell’s defeat of long-time Boston City Councilor Charles C. Yancey, and Annissa Essaibi-George’s win over veteran Councilor Stephen J. Murphy, intensified the trend toward electing younger, more diverse, more smoothly progressive, and less quirky and cranky candidates to the city’s 13 member council.
In the coming days, there will be talk of a new energy, new ideas, and new initiatives. And that is as it should be. But the council is by legislative intent designed to keep a powerful mayor in check. It’s more of a regulatory body than a legislative one.
The stately stampede toward youth and ethnic and gender diversity on the council coalesced in the wake of Mayor Thomas Menino’s retirement and the subsequent election of Marty Walsh.
While the political new comers and their reelected comrades will be center stage Wednesday, it’s really Mayor Walsh who occupies ground zero. His reelection campaign for 2017 begins today.
Yancey and Murphy were high maintenance councilors. It’s hard to predict how Campbell and Essaibi-George will develop. But as freshmen, their professional lives will be more fecund if they enjoy friendly relations with Walsh.
Yancey and Murphy have been totems to blue-collar workers in their respective black and white communities.
Their defeats were not about race, or lunch bucket politics. It was about style as much as anything else. Murphy and Yancey would feel quite at home in the fictionalized world of The Last Hurrah, Edwin O’Connor’s elegiac political novel set in a Boston-like city with a James Michel Curley-like mayor in the years before Jack Kennedy remade politics.. It’s the story of how time eventually overtakes all men, as it just did with Murphy and Yancey.
If that’s one theme from Tuesday, the other is that sisters are doing it for themselves. (Up music! Annie Lennox! Aretha Franklin!)
Essaibi-George, 41, a public school teacher living in Dorchester is also a small businesswoman with a Dorchester Ave. yarn shop, Stitch House, to her name.
Campbell straddles the African-American narrative of promise and pain. Educated at Princeton, she took her law degree at UCLA before serving as an aide to former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick. At the same time, she saw her brother die in prison.
When it comes to raw political power the power to initiate, the power to make exceptions Mayor Marty Walsh is the undisputed leader of Boston.
But the second tier of great influencers is no longer exclusively male. Ayanna Pressley and Michelle Wu topped the at-large with Mike Flaherty coming in third.
Councilors Tito Jackson and Matt O’Malley are talents to keep an eye on.
But so are State Senators Linda Dorcena Forry of Dorchester and Sonia Chang Diaz of Jamaica Plain.
