brendan halpin

It’s been a few weeks since Josh Kraft withdrew from Boston’s mayoral contest, metaphorical tail between his legs as he got conclusively drubbed in the preliminary election.

Wu: 72 percent. Kraft: 23.1 percent. Ouch. I almost feel bad for him. Almost!

First let’s get this out of the way.

Okay, now let’s look at why Kraft got beaten so soundly. I will certainly concede that it’s always been extremely difficult to unseat an incumbent in Massachusetts, though Ayanna Pressley showed it could be done.

If there’s a rationale for your candidacy. And, unfortunately for Josh Kraft, his facist billionaire father and his fascist billionaire supporter Jim Davis, Kraft never seemed to have one. He made some noises about affordable housing, but his “plan” was just to turn the city over to the developers. If you want to know how well that strategy works for producing affordable housing, take a walk around Boston’s Seaport district and look for the affordable housing. (I’ll save you a walk through a depressing, soulless neighborhood: there ain’t any).

I mean, look, he did have a rationale for his candidacy, as I’ve written before: his daddy wants a stadium in Everett and was affronted that Michelle Wu played political hardball with him. And won. I assume that any friend of Trump’s is a misogynist, but, even more relevantly in this case, rich people hate being told no. Because when you have as much money as Bob Kraft, there is almost no rule you can’t circumvent with money. These guys see no as the beginning of a negotiation. It’s not the last word you get to say to them, because if they want something, they can spend enough to get it. So you can bet Kraft the Elder was pissed about not getting his stadium and told his youngest son to get in there and teach Michelle Wu a lesson about saying no to the Krafts.

Oops.

You can’t really campaign on “Daddy wants a stadium,” so Kraft was forced to flail. I got mailers from his campaign on a regular basis, and they almost all stressed that he’d be good at standing up to Trump. Which is silly and no one believes, but also had the effect of continually drawing attention to the fact that Kraft was running on Trump-friendly money. Instead of conceding this weak area and trying to build strength in another area, his campaign went full anti-Trump. And, I mean, did you see Michelle Wu with ashes on her forehead and a baby in her arms at the congressional hearing? That was a political masterstroke that neutralized anybody else’s claim that they’d be good at protecting Boston from the regime.

And so Josh Kraft will go back to laundering the reputation of his family name, and probably move out of his nominal home in Boston. Maybe he’ll run for selectman in Brookline, where he actually lives! Or maybe Robert Kraft will have to actually pick up the phone and call the mayor of Boston in order to get a deal done for his stadium.