brendan halpin

Years ago I snarked at Michelle Wu on Twitter—she said something about supporting public education, and I asked her why she then kept voting for budgets that harmed it.

Her response was to reach out to me and ask if I wanted to get some folks together who knew about school budgets so she could listen to us and learn. Some time later, I got people who knew a LOT about school budgeting (I was in touch with such people then because Twitter facilitated building communities of like-minded local folks to get stuff done, which is probably another reason Musk wanted to kill it) together and we met with then-councilor Wu in the meeting room at the JP Library. She took the T from City Hall and walked 15 minutes from Green Street to the library. And she really listened. And took notes.

And so this is how I came to break one of my own rules, which is “don’t stan politicians.” I volunteered for Michelle Wu’s first run for mayor and really believed that, unlike Marty Walsh, she cared about people who live in Boston, not just people who use Boston. She had all kinds of cool progressive ideas for making the city a better place, so much so that she was derided in right-wing circles as a “radical left mayor.” (This was mostly because she opposed the secret police rounding up our brown neighbors.)

And then, running for a second term, she absolutely, conclusively THUMPED Josh Kraft in the primary, which is effectively the final in Boston because we are not electing Republicans here. So now she’s been unleashed to really enact her progressive agenda!

Except…it’s not happening. She’s frozen work on a bunch of safe streets projects. (i.e. projects that may inconvenience car drivers in order to make the street better for people walking, biking, and using public transit.) The city may lose federal funding already allocated to these projects if they are frozen too long.

The new city budget (the council technically votes on the budget, but the way Boston is set up, the mayor has a ridiculous amount of power over the budgeting process, so I’m laying this at her doorstep) eviscerates the schools. Hundreds of young teachers across the city are losing their jobs. Class sizes will increase. The quality of education will decrease.

Meanwhile the Wu-appointed school committee voted to give Superintendent of Schools Mary Skipper a 15% raise. (!)

Oh yeah, and the Boston Police Department is level-funded. (The BPD’s overtime budget, which is primarly spent on having cops stand around and do nothing outside of construction sites, eats up 100 million dollars per year.)

So—keeping the city car-centric and prioritizing policing over education. Actually over pretty much everything else, as most city departments have had their budgets frozen.

Man, I’m glad we didn’t elect the billionaire!

So why, with an absolutely absurdly strong showing in the recent election, has Michelle Wu suddenly abandoned the priorities she professed? Well I have an idea.

We know she’s ambitious, which I do not hold against her. She doesn’t want to be Mayor of Boston forever, which I think is a good thing. The city certainly didn’t benefit from being Tom Menino’s personal fiefdom for 21 years. We also know she’s a mentee/former student of Elizabeth Warren, whose current term will expire in 2030, after she turns 81 years old. Perhaps Warren has given Wu the heads up that there’s going to be a vacant Senate seat in 4 years, and Wu, who is widely loathed in the suburbs, is selling out Boston in order to win over the suburbs. And the wealthy suburbanites who bankroll Senate campaigns.

The sad thing about this is that abandoning making Boston a better place to live does absolutely nothing to shore up Wu’s chances with people who will never forgive her for being “from Chicago.” (She is originally from Chicago, but has lived in Greater Boston for nearly 20 years and chose to settle and raise a family here. People who complain about her being from Chicago use it as code for other facets of her identity they’re not allowed to complain about openly, at least in Massachusetts.)

Another incredibly dumb thing about this strategy is that it follows the conventional idiocy of the Democratic Party, which seems to be “don’t do anything that might alienate Republicans.” But people are hungering for politicians they can support who seem to actually have principles and who are willing to ruffle feathers in order to get things done. Wu is a skilled politician who has the ability to explain progressive policy choices, and people like the idea of a politician who stands for something!

Instead, it looks like she’s decided to follow the failed Democratic playbook of pretending to be progressive and then being centrist. Thanks, Obama! No, literally, thanks, Obama, who won the presidency in Michelle Wu’s sophomore year of college by pretending to be progressive and then proceeded to be a moderate conservative President.

Nobody can predict the future, and it may well be that Wu’s intelligence and charisma and the fact that she’s both a woman and a Chinese American will give her the appearance of progressivism to the statewide electorate while not actually ruffling the feathers of the big money people who are ruining everything. Good luck to her, I guess.

But damn—is it so much to ask that Democratic voters actually get the candidate we voted for? People on the right vote for hatemongering theocrats and by and large get exactly that. And hatemongering theocrats who fight like hell to enact their troglodytic priorities! Where the hell is that energy from the Democratic party?

I’m going to continue to vote because I believe that it’s foolish to abandon any of the tools at my disposal to make the world better, but I have probably knocked on my last door as a campaign volunteer.

I say that, though the next time we get someone posing as a progressive running for mayor, I’ll probably support them enthusiastically as well, hoping, like Charlie Brown, that this time I’ll finally get to kick the fucking football.