Same town, different places.
The Boston dailies have very – wait for it – different takes on how candidates of color fared in Tuesday’s mayoral preliminary. Start with the front page of today’s Boston Herald.
Inside story, with Rivers’ byline:
Fractured minority bloc defeated itself
Of the Irish it has jokingly been said by members of their own community that they love to fight and hate to win. And of the Palestinians it is frequently observed, again by their own, that they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
My experience in this mayoral contest has confirmed the belief that we blacks appear to be a combination of the two observations above.
(Just wondering: how is it that Eugene Rivers winds up in the news pages of the Herald when his piece clearly belongs on the op-ed page? The paper should be covering the guy, not embedding him in the newshole.)
After establishing that he was a “very public and outspoken” supporter of Charlotte Golar Richie (although, he writes, “this is not a brief for Richie”), Rivers proceeds to blame the absence of a black candidate in the general election on the black community’s failure to unite behind one candidate. “[W]e could have rallied around the individual who was most likely to survive the preliminary election and have a shot at becoming the first minority leader of the city.
That individual, of course, would have been Charlotte Golar Richie. Not to get technical about it.
Crosstown, the Boston Globe didn’t consider it a total loss.
In loss, city’s diverse candidates made a mark
They had come this far.
Each had slogged through countless handshakes, participated in numerous debates, and struggled to raise money, while trying to make history as the first minority mayor.
When polls closed and ballots were counted Tuesday, the six candidates of color had collectively garnered 34.7 percent of the votes.
But none of those candidates made the final cut.
According to one political observer, the race was a success in “[showing] that these diverse candidates are qualified to be mayor and can get nearly 40,000 votes in the primary.” But it was a failure in terms of actual political power.
The Globe piece called it a “solid showing” and added this:
More people are engaged in conversations about affordable housing, educational achievement, and jobs for at-risk youths, and the mayoral contenders attribute that to having a diverse pool of candidates in the race, political observers said.
Cold comfort, no?
Interestingly, there’s no specific mention of the too-many-candidates-of-color issue, but Darnell Williams, president of the Urban League of Eastern Massachusetts, promised a “come-to-Jesus meeting . . . to put the needs of the community before individual interests.” And, he added, that called for “trustworthy ambassadors.”
Your conclusion goes here.
Posted by Campaign Outsider 
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