In the first week of September, 2001, the big story for the Valley Advocate was the mayor's race in Springfield between incumbent Michael Albano and challenger Paul Caron, a well-respected state representative at the time.
Caron, a progressive, good-government type, promised to take the city back from the clutches of a corrupt and arrogant regime—a mayoral administration that would eventually leave Springfield effectively in state receivership with a whopping $50 million budget deficit. That period of Springfield's history would see more than a dozen city officials and Albano cronies indicted and convicted in a sweeping federal probe into organized crime and public corruption.
Albano, a swaggering career politico from Longmeadow, may have had enough in the tank left to survive Caron's insurgent campaign, but by Labor Day 2001, he was definitely running on fumes.
Would Albano have lost the race if it hadn't been for the cataclysmic events of Sept. 11? We'll never know for sure, but it is indisputable that Caron's campaign lost all momentum that day. As the nation turned its collective attention to the carnage in New York, the election in Springfield suddenly seemed to be a fairly minor concern.
Springfield, of course, is just one small city in an enormous nation, so what happened there after Sept. 11 happened thousands of times over, all across the country.
If that had been it, if the attacks hadn't triggered the reaction inside the White House that it did, if the attacks had not soon been used as a pretext for the invasion and occupation of Iraq, as the rationale for the Patriot Act, as the excuse for the systematic dismantling of civil rights, for the use of torture and for so many other horrible policies that have done more harm to the United States of American than the terrorists could ever have inflicted, American voters would probably still have tended to pay more attention to national politics, particularly presidential politics, than to local civic affairs. Voter turnout would still have shrunk in off-year elections and swelled in presidential election years.
But the Bush Administration did exploit the passions stirred by the events of Sept. 11. With an arrogance not dissimilar from and no more justified than Mike Albano's, George Bush set off to conquer the world—and very few were keen to try to stop him.
The former Texas governor, a mediocrity who seemed destined, like his father, to a single-term presidency before Sept. 11, saw his popularity soar in the months after the attacks. It was short-lived approval—not that Junior Bush appears to have needed approval. Even as the lies he and his top cabinet officials told en route to war were exposed, as the cost of the war, both in lives and dollars, mounted and his occupation went south for everyone but the war profiteers, the most prominent of whom have been connected to and entangled with Old Man Bush and Cheney for years, Bush pressed ahead.
Scandal after scandal, ineptitude after ineptitude, he pressed ahead. And now, historically unpopular, with a Democratic majority in Congress, he presses on. His war goes on, as do fundamentally his economic policies—policies that are destroying the American middleclass while making millionaires into billionaires, that have damaged, perhaps irrevocably, the status of U.S. currency in the world, and that have resulted in frightening trade imbalances and staggering national debt.
Meanwhile, the globe keeps getting warmer.
Since Sept. 11, the many misadventures of G.W. Bush have drawn the public's attention to Washington and to a host of national and international problems, including many that went unresolved and largely unattended to even before Bush came to office. At the same time, it appears that voters pay decreasing amounts of attention to local politics, to the significant issues that can only be addressed at the local level. Voter turnout at local elections has declined.
Is it possible that even now, with all the problems we face as a nation, we have it backward? Is it possible that, as important and interesting as national affairs are, it's local affairs that deserve our greatest attention?
Is it possible that we wouldn't be in such a mess if we'd been paying more attention to what was happening close to home?
Even before events conspired to kill Paul Caron's chances in the 2001 mayor's race, the state rep found himself at a disadvantage on Beacon Hill. Caron had earlier opposed the rise of Mattapan state rep Tom Finneran, a conservative Democrat, to the position of House Speaker, openly supporting Finneran's more liberal challenger, Richard Voke. Though scores of other lawmakers backed Voke, Finneran was eventually elected speaker. Finneran, in turned, used the power of his office to punish the Voke crowd, including Caron.
Across the state, the media knew about Finneran's heavy-handed style, but tended to view his efforts to marginalize lawmakers like Caron with amusement, with tacit acceptance of the old saw, "to the victor go the spoils." The media became only slightly more critical of Finneran when it was revealed that he was trying to use a 2001 redistricting plan to eliminate the districts of some of the liberal Democrats he viewed as opponents.
Finneran eventually left office in disgrace after pleading guilty to obstruction of justice; in effect, Finneran admitted to making false and misleading statements while testifying under oath about whether he had seen and reviewed a redistricting plan that a federal court had ruled unlawful and discriminatory. The disgraced lawmaker now makes his living as a radio talk show host in Boston. The fall from grace had a padded landing—not an unusual situation in modern politics. Former Republican Congressman Peter Blute, who left office amid a fundraising scandal, similarly got himself a radio show in Boston. Boston is not the only place where radio is heavily populated by disgraced public officials: Watergate felon G. Gordon Liddy, Iran-Contra's Oliver North and ex-Providence Mayor Buddy Cianci all parlayed criminal convictions into radio gigs.
Finneran was merely one of a legion of political scoundrels parading around Massachusetts in the days before Sept. 11, 2001. Finneran's predecessor, Charles F. Flaherty, had also left office in disgrace, pleading guilty to tax fraud and a series of state ethics violations. Senate President Billy Bulger, the brother of organized crime boss Whitey Bulger, managed to leave office without get snared in several federal and state investigations into a questionable real estate deal involving Bulger's law partner, from which Bulger initially profited.
After leaving office in 1996, Bulger, a Democrat, was appointed President of the University of Massachusetts by Republican Gov. William Weld. Bulger's tenure at UMass ended with a battle royale over his pension: Bulger took the state to court and convinced Superior Court Justice Earnest B. Murphy—now under scrutiny for possible ethics violations—to give him a housing allowance and other perks, raising his annual pension to well over $200,000, in addition to a severance package worth nearly $1 million.
In the runup to September 11, frequent revelations of political corruption from Beacon Hill to City Hall in Springfield and everywhere in between—everything from elaborate criminal conspiracies to relatively isolated ethics violations—did little to help people like Caron and his legislative colleagues such as Ellen Story (D-Amherst) and former State Rep. Chris Hodgkins (D-Lee) in their efforts to expose systemic problems and champion reforms. When former state Attorney General L. Scott Harshbarger pursued a criminal investigation into an insurance scam in Worcester and Springfield, he found himself on the outs with the Democratic Party. Many key Democrats, including Congressman Richard Neal, worked against Harshbarger in his 1998 race for governor, which he lost to Paul Cellucci.
In an era of unprecedented national prosperity, with the Cold War over and arguably enough time and resources to begin carefully reforming a range of public institutions that needed it, the political class seemed to resist any effort at reform, marginalizing critics and dismissing clear violations of the public trust as mere aberrations. Yet, while many elected and appointed officials would speak of themselves and their colleagues as hardworking and noble, people who sacrificed the opportunity to earn private-sector wages in order to serve the public, it was clear to anyone paying attention that politics had, at nearly all levels, become a career, and a potentially lucrative one.
The public undoubtedly saw what was happening. In Springfield, people knew that Mike Albano had basically sold City Hall, at least access to lots of grant money and no-interest loans, to his biggest supporters and campaign donors, including some well-known organized crime figures. In Springfield, voters must also have known, as did the daily newspaper, that while Albano was busy taking care of his pals, little else was getting done. Businesses were fleeing the city; crime remained a constant threat to the vitality of the downtown; race relations deteriorated as City Hall did little to deal forcefully with chronic allegations of police brutality coming from African-American and Hispanic residents.
Even in more genteel places like Northampton, the public knew the harm that politically connected but ethically challenged people could do. The collapse of Heritage Bank in 1992 had destroyed local businesses and the lives of those who owned them. It was well known that Pat Goggins, a former city councilor and local real estate broker, had taken part in a number of questionable deals that eventually led the bank into trouble; Goggins was associated with development projects that ultimately cost Heritage, and U.S. taxpayers, more than $13 million.
But neither Albano nor Goggins, men who left a terrible mess in their wake, suffered much more than a brief spate of bad publicity for their highly questionable behavior. Albano was re-elected three times and left office for his own political consulting firm, his slate wiped clean by many newspapers, including the vaunted Boston Globe, when he briefly championed the cause of allowing seniors access to cheaper prescription drugs from Canada—lip service that cost him nothing. Goggins remains deeply connected to Northampton City Hall, enjoying a lead position in the shaping and selling of the redevelopment on Hospital Hill and of a prospective redevelopment of the Three County Fairgrounds.
It will not be easy to reengage the public in local affairs. The media has, on balance, cut back significantly on local reporting, which is significantly more costly than running wire copy and clever syndicated columns focused on national politics. Moreover, the networks of people, in and out of government, who support the Albanos and Goggins of the world are prone to be self-protecting and sufficiently influential in steering reporters and reform-minded citizens away from potential scandals.
Hard as it may be, it is also critical that voters pay attention to politics in their own back yards, particularly scrutinizing the rising political stars who display bigger and bigger ambitions. The consequences of not doing so are considerable and grave. If Mitt Romney, for example, were to go on to win the presidency, wouldn't Massachusetts voters be in part responsible for his ascendancy? We, in turn, have every right to blame voters in Texas for the man who now occupies the White House.
