Walsh earlier statement on mailer.
“I condemn these kinds of personal negative attacks,” Walsh said in a statement. “This mailer, and the attacks on my opponent’s family, are out of bounds. John is my friend and there is no place in this campaign for personal attacks like this.”
Guess not. New attack mailer.
Please share widely!
So Marty says these are the people who will listen to him at the negotiating table and hear the hard truths. Apparently they’ve already stopped listening to him.
Compelling argument.
I also like the part of calling the Nativity Mission Center School “an Elite New York private school”. I guess they mean the place that enrolled low-income Latino youth in the poorest census track in all of NYC. Charged them $75/mo for a $15,000/yr education.
Great article on the school and why it closed last year: http://www.thelodownny.com/leslog/2012/07/a-closer-look-why-nativity-mission-school-closed.html
Actually Marty said he had the ability to talk with and settle contracts with unions representing public sector Boston workers. He correctly pointed out that settling contracts avoids the arbitration process.
And the Unions that represent Boston workers are not behind these mailers, so it appears they are “listening” to Marty when he asks that supporters not go negative during the campaign.
Actually, that doesn’t appear to be true. The previous one was from DC-based Working America, but the return address on this one appears to be “Greater Boston Labor Council, AFL-CIO.” Am I wrong in thinking that this one is locally produced and funded?
GBLC and Working America clearly coordinated on the design (not illegal) and GBLC probably paid for and sent this version to their local members. “Jake M. from Dorchester” is actually a member of Laborers Local 223, which is the union Marty was the president of for a long time.
I’d also note that the Working America version has “Norm M. from West Roxbury” instead of Tryone K. The ethnicity of the person was switched too.
and neither does Marty Walsh.
That said, do we 1) need to have a diary for each and everyone? There are gazillions of people supporting these candidates and various groups on both sides will eventually go negative. (And no, the People’s Pledge wouldn’t have mattered here — these are mailers and/or fliers, none of which have ever been covered on any People’s Pledge used thus far and probably never will be — too hard to enforce.)
2) Do we need to intimate that Marty in anyway supports these (which is what I take from johnk’s “guess not”) when he’s clearly come out against them?
3) Finally, how does that jive with the other absurd yet repeated attack among several, that these are examples of how he can’t really get labor to listen after all? (as if listening somehow equaled getting them to follow orders.)
It can’t be both 2 and 3, folks. Maybe before the next inevitable johnk post on the evils of the dastardly Marty Walsh, you should all share notes and get on the same page.
WFA piece showed up in my mailboc today along with identically sized, printed and designed negative piece from Walsh campaign. Pretty obvious stuff.
Don’t try to bull**** me.
my typos above? Wondering.
Perhaps that was just a coincidence but it doesn’t help Walsh to disassociate himself from the negative mailers.
Maybe Marty really means what he says and doesn’t want his partners to attack Connolly in this fashion. Nevertheless, it is happening and Walsh stands to benefit from attack ads and claim he has clean hands. Whether Walsh is complicit or not, I don’t like it at all.
Ya think?
That’s actually not correct – the Pledge that Ed Markey and Steve Lynch signed in their Senate primary did cover mailers. Just FYI.
should be “jibe”
“Please stop mailing negative, attack pieces about my opponent…” Wink, wing, nod, nod, chuckle, chuckle. Anyone who thinks that these mailers aren’t condoned by, if not coordinated with, the Walsh campaign is in denial.
because I have seen enough nonsense with the Tea Party and the Heritage Funds and the various scum of the earth organizations (like the Kock Brothers) to believe that they will do and say whatever they want regardless of the desires of the candidate to advance their own agendas.
Interesting comparison. Of course, the interests of those supporting Walsh in this case are one and the same with Walsh.
…trying to hold candidates accountable for communication from outside groups? This is starting to sound like a rerun of blaming Katherine Clark for EMILY’s List. As folks may recall I wasn’t a big fan of that either.
Walsh has very clearly and emphatically came out against these mailers.
Katherine Clark didn’t.
So, if anything, I think Walsh has won a few points here.
Perhaps, wink, wink, he is not really asking them to stop. And if he truly is asking, if they won’t listen to him now, will they listen to him if he’s mayor? Troubling. It is not a good strategy for the campaign or for the unions…it makes them both look bad.
I find this to be an utterly bogus line of argument, into which the Globe has clearly bought, lock stock and barrel. Ah well.
I’ve long been of the opinion that candidates should not have to babysit or handhold any supporter. The candidate should only be accountable for the words of himself and his staff.
Why wouldn’t he speak against them? It gives him the appearance of having clean hands. He would be stupid not to.
And if the negative mailers don’t stop, then his repudiation isn’t really worth all that much.
do these types of mailers and doesn’t represent Boston anyway, but this is the kind of stuff that gets done in unions that represent other professions. It may work with their membership, but it alienates the rest of public and gives all unions a bad name.
I don’t live, and therefore won’t vote, in Boston. I don’t have a dog in this race.
These mailers strike me as pretty tame to be called “attack” ads. I see no outright lies, no outrageous distortions — nothing comparable to, for example, the SwiftBoat attacks on John Kerry or Scott Brown’s “heritage” attacks on Elizabeth Warren.
I’m more interested in how each candidate views the long-standing abuses of pension and disability benefits by the police and fire departments, and what each candidate intends to do about those abuses (if anything).
I’m more interested in each candidate’s vision of Boston. Kevin White, for all his warts, clearly recognized the distinction between Boston and Cleveland, an intellectual feat that has always escaped Tom Menino.
I’m therefore going to take a pass on these innocuous mailers.
But I’m not sure that the Swiftboat or “heritage” attacks should be the yardstick we use to determine whether something is an attack ad or not. Granted, this isn’t even remotely close to a Willy Horton ad, for instance, but if saying that a candidate is trying to “fool the people” and is “pretending to be something he’s not,” i.e. calling him a liar, isn’t an attack then what exactly would be, saying that he eats babies? Let’s also not ignore the cheap “son of privilege” attack. While true, it’s pretty disgusting to dismiss a class of people because their parents happened to have money. So we shouldn’t have elected Teddy or FDR or JFK?
SwiftBoat, Heritage, Willie Horton — those were attack ads.
These are not. The fact is that the campaign of Mr. Connolly does seem to be distorting his history. Remember that truth is an effective defense against any claim of slander or defamation — and it seems to me that there is enough truth in those claims to make them fair game.
As EB3 has observed elsewhere, the “son of privilege” criticism wouldn’t be nearly so effective if Mr. Connolly were not attempting to present himself as something different. Scott Brown’s utterly failed attempt to discredit Elizabeth “Professor” Warren failed because Ms. Warren never claimed to be other than a Harvard Professor. Similarly, neither “Teddy” (I assume you mean Kennedy), FDR, nor JFK ever claimed to be anything other than a “son of privilege”. The same cannot be said of Mr. Connolly, especially as he is portrayed in the Globe.
So what IS Mr. Connolly’s position on the abuse of pension and disability benefits by police and firefighters? What IS is his view of the veritable army of professional attorneys and doctors who enable those abusers?
What IS Mr. Connolly’s summary of the differences between Boston and Cleveland?
I think context and intent matter.
Just to be clear, though I currently live in NYC, I’m supporting Walsh in this race, reaching out to friends in Boston and trying to get them on board. So this isn’t an “I like Connolly, so I’m pissed about these mailers” post.
But imagine if some group supporting Connolly sent out a mailer saying, “Marty Walsh is an alcoholic. As a youth, he hung out on the corner firing racist taunts at his minority neighbors. Is this the man we want as our next mayor?” It seems, by your logic, that this would not be an attack ad because it would all be true. I don’t think you’d have many people agreeing with you on that one.
If you’ll allow that this is a pretty tame attack ad compared to the ones you just cited.
As I said above, “this isn’t even remotely close to a Willy Horton ad.”
in contrast to the other one.
On balance it’s not good for Walsh, though he is handling these things right. It threatens to derail his own message, which has been unflaggingly positive, and become a Thing in this campaign.
Despite that, saying “guess not” after Walsh’s statement is a nonsequiteur at best.
The incredible argument made above SomervilleTom:
THIS.
Seriously, I have used bulk mail in the past and you need to go to the post office and buy a bulk mailing permit, and then you need to include the bulk mailing permit in the area where a stamp would normally go, before you print the mailer. Then you need to send the front and back to the printer, where they need to split into 3 color separation. And THEN and only THEN, do you start printing, which takes time.
Then, you need to take the mailings to a mailing distributer or a bulk house like Work Inc, to either transfer the labels onto the mailing, or run them through a secondary printing to print the addresses directly onto the mailing.
THEN and ONLY THEN, the mailing is taken to either by the printer or the mailing house or the originator of the mailing to the Fort Point Post Office near South Station and weighed and accepted. If I am not mistaken, I believe you need to get them to Fort Point Post Office before 5PM.
So, depending on the use of labels and a mailing house or a combined mailing house/print shop, this mailer was probably already out of the hands of the originator of the mailing (and in the hands of the Post Office) by Monday, possibly earlier, so expecting that this mailing could be stopped based on something Marty Walsh said at WGBH last night around 7PM is obsurd.
I would suspect that this mailing was probably already printed and sorted within the Post Office by last Saturday, so the simple TIMEY-WHIMEY Cause and Effect steps that you need to get to a bulk Mailing arriving in voters mailboxes today, in any way, being able to be stopped as of 7PM last night is rediculous and totally unrealistic!
Someday, I hope we can edit and correct spelling mistakes.
n/t
To save on shipping, a lot of organizations will use the cheapest bulk mailing from the post office… which basically sets the mailers back a week or two in time. No exaggeration.
n/t