Updated at 1:05 pm.
Shortly after noon Wednesday, acting Boston Mayor Kim Janey was sworn in on the third-floor mezzanine at Boston City Hall. Justice Kimberly Budd, the first Black woman to lead the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, administered her oath of office. Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., the first woman of color elected to the Boston City Council, presided, saying Janey’s ascension reflects “a shifting political landscape … great and historic strides made in leadership parity in the corridors of power.”
After she was sworn in, Janey spoke for about 15 minutes, recapping her life story and reflecting on her ascent to the highest levels of power.
“Today is a new day,” Janey said. “I stand before you as the first woman and the first Black mayor of Boston, the city that I love. … To paraphrase Vice President Kamala Harris, every little girl watching today can see that Boston is a city of possibilities.”
As acting mayor, Janey said, her top priorities will include dismantling structural racism; further reforming the Boston Police Department; and pushing for increased vaccination and testing as the city recovers from the COVID pandemic.
“We must do a better job of making vaccines accessible, especially in communities hardest hit.” Janey said. “As mayor, I will partner with our federal, state, and local community leaders to support increased testing and vaccinations across our city. I will fight to make this happen.”
From a purely functional point of view, the ceremony — which had restricted attendance due to COVID, but attracted nearly 1000 online viewers at Boston.gov streamed online at Boston.gov — was unnecessary. According to Boston’s city charter, as president of the Boston City Council, Janey automatically became acting mayor on Monday evening, as soon as Marty Walsh’s resignation took effect. Being sworn in doesn’t alter the capacity in which she serves, or increase the authority she wields. (The charter says acting mayors “possess the powers of mayor only in matters not admitting of delay” and “have no power to make permanent appointments." It only requires a swearing-in ceremony for “a person elected mayor,” which Janey was not.)
But Wednesday’s ceremony was also about messaging. It reminded the public that Janey is making history as she begins leading a city with a fraught racial past. (Janey's trip Tuesday to the Edwards Middle School, in Charlestown, where she was bused as a child during the court-ordered integration of Boston's public schools, did the same thing.) And it will likely obscure — for a news cycle or two, and possibly longer — the difference between what Walsh could do in his job and what Janey can do in hers.
In that sense, Wednesday’s ceremony called to mind the approach Tom Menino took in 1993, when he became acting mayor after Ray Flynn left to become former President Bill Clinton’s ambassador to the Vatican.
Menino was also a trailblazer: No Italian American had previously run Boston. Like Janey, he held his own unofficial swearing-in ceremony in City Hall — but with much less pomp — complete with a lengthy greet-and-grasp photo op with Flynn, the man he was replacing.
According to Ed Jesser, Menino’s longtime advisor and confidant, the late mayor's team worked assiduously from the outset to cast him as the mayor in full — long before he actually was.
“Acting Mayor Menino never lectured on any divisive issue,” Jesser recalled. “He ‘considered’ them, was ‘thinking about them,’ after listening to four or five of the smartest people on the planet — after having them come in to the mayor's office to talk to the mayor about it."
Janey has been taking a similar tack, utilizing tools that weren't available back in 1993. Her Twitter bio explicitly rejects the term, identifying Janey as the “Historic first Black mayor, first woman mayor of Boston. Not acting, doing.” The city’s website now refers to Janey as “55th mayor of Boston.” And on Tuesday, in a virtual "pre-swearing in celebration" event streamed online, Janey described herself as "the mayor of Boston, the first Black mayor and the first woman mayor for the city."
While Janey hasn’t yet said if she plans to enter the 2021 mayoral race, her current approach to political branding suggests that she’d like to run Boston for more than a few months. (So does the fact that she’s hired Northwind Strategies, a high-powered consulting firm, and is actively fundraising.)
The way Janey is framing herself also puts the candidates who’ve actually declared — including city councilors Michelle Wu, Andrea Campbell and Annissa Essaibi George, state Rep. Jon Santiago, and John Barros, who served as Walsh’s chief of development — in an awkward spot. Harp on the fact that Janey is really acting mayor, and they could be seen as gracelessly minimizing the history she made this week. Fail to push back, though, and they may become caricatured as overambitious aspirants for a job that’s already been filled — as opposed to one that’s still very much open.
Janey has a role to play here, too. The longer she delays announcing her candidacy — if she is planning to run — the more time Boston voters have to start thinking of her as Walsh’s de facto successor.
Consequently, Jesser argues, it’s in Janey’s own best interest to wait as long as she possibly can to make her intentions clear.
“The minute she says she's running, the press changes its act,” Jesser said. “If she announces her candidacy for mayor of the city of Boston, then you treat her as a candidate for mayor. You can slice and dice every word. When she's already got the job, you don't have to treat her as a candidate. It doesn't get any better than that.”
With a Rose Garden strategy based on patience, thoughtfulness and acting the part, Jesser said, Janey would almost certainly finish among the top two candidates in September's preliminary election and advance to the November final.
But Jane Swift — who became governor of Massachusetts when Paul Cellucci took the ambassadorship to Canada under former President George W. Bush in 2001 — believes Janey should use a different strategy to maximize her current role.
“As tempting as it is to bask in the historic nature of the appointment and ascension, if I were advising Mayor Janey, I would suggest — as was suggested to me — that she govern with nuance, pay attention to the issues she cares deeply about, but really grasp the opportunity to sharply define herself,” Swift said.
For example, Swift said, Janey could stake her acting mayoralty on getting Boston Public School students back in the classroom or on advancing reform at the Boston Police Department.
“Whatever the issues are — she should probably only have two or three — be razor sharp and clear about issues, and define [yourself] that way, because it’s going to be hard to break through the press’s attention to the … wonderful, historical nature of her becoming mayor of Boston,” Swift added.
Today, of course, the historic nature of Janey’s new role will be front and center. But with the preliminary mayoral election nearly half a year away, there’s plenty of time for Boston’s political storyline to shift. Before long, what Janey calls her job will matter less than how well she’s doing it.
