brendan halpin

Okay, I wrote a clickbait-y headline. I don’t know this for a fact. I’m just inferring it.

I answered the first push poll I got from research-polls, a shady outfit that turns out to be one guy in his condo in Fort Lauderdale. So now I get ‘em all!

The third and most recent one begins with the standard “do you have a favorable or unfaborable opinion of this person” question. So we’ve got Michelle Wu, Josh Kraft, Donald Trump, and…Marty Walsh?!

What possible reason could Mr. Research-Polls (I picture him as an extremely sweaty, bespectacled white guy with a mustache in a dirty Hawaiian shirt hunched over a bank of monitors in a dark room, though of course I know everybody in Florida has AC) have for asking me about Marty Walsh? He’s not running for anything!

I mean, I guess Josh could be testing a messaging strategy of “taking us back to the good old days in Boston when a white man was in charge as God intended.” We certainly can’t rule that out. But I think Josh is going to make a big announcement about how Marty Walsh is endorsing him to shore up his Boston bona fides, which is definitely something he needs because, as I’ve pointed out, MF still owns a house in Brookline 25 minutes away from where he nominally lives in Boston and was confused about his city of residence long after he supposedly took occupancy of the pied a terre.

I think a Trumpy billionaire who doesn’t really live in Boston is a terrible, terrible choice for mayor, which is why I keep writing these things.

And I take comfort in the fact that his campaign is being run by people who are either incredibly bad at this stuff or very good at this stuff and intentionally sabotaging his campaign. I get a mailer on an almost daily basis proclaiming how Josh is going to stand up to Daddy Trump (or, Demented Grampy Trump, to be more accurate).

Now, I firmly believe Josh is in this thing just to try to secure his biological daddy a stadium deal and not to be a Trump proxy. But realistically Josh Kraft can’t afford to stand up to Trump in any meaningful way. Because Trump is petty and vindictive. So if Josh defies Trump, Trump will go after Daddy Kraft’s business. The only way for Daddy Kraft to fix this would be to cut Josh off.

And guys like Josh Kraft who have grown up with unimaginable wealth have no idea how to live like regular people. I’m sure the idea of having to scrape by with no family money on a million bucks a year for some bullshit job he’d get after being mayor is actually terrifying to a guy like Josh Kraft. He’s not going to stand up to Trump. He can’t afford to. And these daily mailers have strong “My T-shirt saying I’m not in Trump’s pocket is raising a lot of questions answered by the shirt” energy.

But back to the Walsh endorsement. Although the local media loved him (because they’re mostly suburbanites, and Walsh consistently prioritized the needs of suburbanites over Boston residents), there’s not a lot of residual love for this dude in Boston.

Walsh bailed on Boston as soon as he possibly could, lobbying hard for the Labor Secretary job well before the 2020 election. He’s out of most Bostonians’ consciousness, probably because he went from Washington to Toronto, where he’s now head of the NHL Players’ Association. I don’t think getting an endorsement from a man who doesn’t even live in the United States of America is a great way to prove what a real Bostonian you are, but I don’t work for the Kraft campaign.

And then there’s Walsh’s record. He started his term by trying to throw a ton of our money at the IOC with an Olympics bid, then tried the same thing with a Formula 1 race in the Seaport. Thwarted in both attempts to throw public money at a private entity and get nothing back, he then got together with Republican governor Charlie Baker to throw a bunch of public money at GE to facilitate their building their headquarters here! Which never happened! But at least he made the most cringe video of all time, walking around the Common in a faux-fur jacket and shades while Adele’s “Hello” played, which was somehow supposed to celebrate the bipartisan effort to pad GE’s bottom line with our money.

(The video has disappeared from the internet, but I KNOW someone has a copy. If it’s you, send it to me. I beg you.)

And then there’s Walsh’s utter contempt for the Boston Public Schools, which culminated in him appointing the laughably unqualified Laura Perille as Superintendent. (She had literally never worked in a school!) Perille’s notable achievement in her time on the job was lying about the condition of the former West Roxbury High building. “OMG it’s totally unsafe we have to close it now!” she proclaimed in October 2018. Nearly seven years later, it’s still standing like Elton John, and still in use by the Boston Police!

Some folks have forgotten about this, but a lot of very vocal and extremely online people in Boston (the “ten people on Twitter” Walsh blamed for undermining his plan to bring the Olympics to Boston) have not. You wanna remind us of the Walsh administration? PLEASE, Josh. DO IT.