Official Participant in the Youth Media Blog-a-Thon

From: Boston Progress Radio

UPDATE: Literally two minutes – literally! – before this entry posted this morning, Sen. Dianne Wilkerson was arrested on suspicion of accepting bribes totaling over $23,000. All I can say is, I hope this is untrue and she is eventually vindicated. If convicted, she could face up to 40 years in prison. This adds a whole new dimension to the point of the following post – which was written before any of this information became public.

This is a very difficult topic to address, and you know, there’s no better way to address a tough issue than to just “sh*t your pants, jump in, and swim” – so to speak.

Boston politics are remarkably simple in many ways. Local folklore tells of a man who ran for City Council and walked around his neighborhood – I think it was the North End – going door-to-door to let people know he was running and assuage fears that if elected, he would bump his sister’s – who everyone knew was a city employee – pay grade a little higher. He didn’t win the Councilor position because people figured if he won’t even help his sister, why would he help me?

And so it goes. When I held up “Sam Yoon for City Council” signs outside a Dorchester polling place in 2005, I had a bunch of chit chat with the sign-holders for other candidates. And invariably, one of the first questions was “So how do you know Sam?” At this level it isn’t about if you think your guy is gonna be the best at the job, it’s more about how well you know him. (By the way, Sam ended up a city councilor and becoming the first Asian American candidate to ever win a citywide election in Boston.)

Most people – including myself – never think to complain about stuff like that, because while it may not follow the ideals we breeze through in civics class, it’s probably at least as good a motivation for running for office as any. If Candidate A knows 300 people well, and Candidate B know 100 people just as well, odds are Candidate A wins, right? And that means Candidate A is accountable to all those 300 people once in office, right? Having a person in local office who is accountable to the max number of people can only be good news. Right?

This kind of personal politics also gives the underrepresented a feeling of real power – something that you don’t get in national elections, what with precincts and places, counties and states, the electoral college, and a presumed losing candidate usually giving up before all the votes are counted. For example, our community partner Chinese Progressive Association has done a lot of great GOTV stuff in Chinatown in recent elections, and there have been concrete results. The aforementioned Sam Yoon, as well as Felix Arroyo (first Latino to win citywide election in Boston), both made it into office partly because of strong support from Chinatown – both came to Chinatown often during their campaigns, and told the neighborhood in no uncertain terms that they were on the side of the residents. So you can see how this kind of “vote for the guy you know” works so well in reality, even if it doesn’t seem as great on paper.

But there’s something going on this election season that has me kind of rethinking that.

A great advocate for Chinatown – Dianne Wilkerson – lost in the primary to Sonia Chang-Diaz. She has run into problems here and there during her time in the state Senate, but nobody can ever doubt that she valued her constituents, which included folks from Roxbury, the South End, Back Bay, Dorchester, Jamaica Plain, and Mission Hill, as well as Chinatown.

Although she lost by about 200 votes (out of about 18,000), ultimately, she did lose. Chinatown turned out in her favor, but the voters here understand you can’t win every time – and after paying gratitude to Senator Wilkerson, would probably get ready for working with the new state Senator. But after initially accepting that she was on the way out, it seems Wilkerson’s changed her mind and is now encouraging voters to write her name in.

And this makes me feel somewhat torn. As much as I’ve admired Senator Wilkerson and loved having her on “our” side, I think the rules at the local level (”one person, one vote” is actually true at this level) are fairly clear. Some of her supporters argue that a district that is so heavily populated by people of color deserves a person of color representing them. Never mind that Sonia Chang-Diaz’s father was of Asian and Latino heritage.

If Wilkerson’s write-in campaign is successful, then I would be glad to know we still have such a strong advocate for this community at the state level. If not, and Chang-Diaz wins, then I would look forward to seeing how she interacts with her constituents.

But this is where it gets a little sticky, because I actually think either woman could do a lot of good for Chinatown and the entire district. And so this general election comes down to who can get more people to come out to the polls on Election Day – just like the primary did. And so then, we’re not voting our heart, or our “wallet” – but essentially voting our address book.

I’ve long been disillusioned with national elections, but local elections – to me – have felt more substantive and substantial. But now I wonder if I was just kind of fooling myself.