There are (at least) two interesting new candidates running for Cambridge City Council: Urban planner Sam Seidel; and Jesse Gordon, the "professional thorn in the side of the Democratic establishment".
Jesse’s exploits at the Democratic Convention in May are well-documented, and he was a prolific commenter on the blogs on the hijinks of the party brass.
As for Sam, he’s a fellow Ward 6 guy (I’m sad to be leaving them — I’m moving to Medford this weekend); in my dealings with him he’s been sane, gracious and responsive. Take that for what it’s worth.
From their websites, they both seem to be smart, creative people with fresh ideas. Give their websites a gander if you’re a Cantabridgian. Other candidates should let me know if they’ve got websites and/or would like a mention.
I’ve been working on Jesse Gordon’s campaign, and I also like Sam Seidel. Both of them have attended the Cambridge area DFA multiple times. In fact, I believe it was Jesse who brought Sam to Cambridge DFA, and encouraged him to run for City Council. That’s one of the really nice effects of our unusual voting system here in Cambridge: multiple friendly challenger candidates actually help each other’s chances.Jesse and Sam were both founding members of Progressive Democrats of Cambridge, I believe, and Jesse was PDC’s founding chair. Jesse co-founded MassForDean at the beginning of 2003, and thus was one of the people who started the Cambridge Dean meetup, which was the progenitor of Cambridge-area DFA.We’ve got a blog at http://jessegordon.com/blogand although I’ve been neglectful in the past week, I do have a couple of fairly interesting posts coming up soon.(disclaimer: I’m not currently on Jesse’s campaign’s payroll, but I have been in the past and may likely be again in the future)
[Sorry for the double-comment, the first one was an accidental click that didn’t seem to work.]I also want to mention that the most comprehensive source of information about Cambridge City Council elections, including past results, all candidates on the ballot, and so on, is Robert Winters’ Cambridge Civic Journal, commonly referred to by Cambridge political types as just “rwinters dot com”
Best of luck on the move, Charley!(I know exactly how unfun that can be!)
Cos, I edited your double-post there, hope that’s OK.And thanks for the disclaimer. Rule of thumb for everyone is that they should disclose if they’re being paid by a campaign. I explained in another comment that volunteer commitments do not require disclosure: Volunteering comes out of one’s own feelings about something; paid work, not always.Thanks, Lynne. The apartment is now filling up with musty four-year-old boxes… joy.
Oooh, Charley hon, if you need boxes…I HAVE TONS!! Please, take them off my hands!!
Hasn’t Cambridge suffered enough at the hands of progressive leftist Democrats? How are these two candidates any more interesting than the jamokes already on the Council? The two interesting candidates in this race are Bill Hees and Andre Green. If you want to really shake things up on the City Council, try something that hasn’t been tried before, put a Libertarian and a Republican on there! That would get some real political diversity on the council.
snort Man, have YOU ever come to the wrong blog…It seems to me, looking in from the outside mind you, that Cambridge is doing pretty well under “leftists.” I mean, it looks booming.And of course, you managed to commit the very dubious action of posting anonymously, I congratulate you…Hey Charley, unrelated to the topic but – in my ramblings around the blogosphere just now, I found this Health Care for Massachusetts group, which is looking to forward a health care amendment – do you know anything about it?
The Cambridge City Council is pretty solidly liberal but not entirely progressive. In fact, on a lot issues important to progressives, they’re in the minority on the city council. The organized progressive groups in Cambridge, such as DFA, are very concerned with process, accountability, and open government, not just with traditional liberal positions.For example, on gay marriage there is unanimity. Every single incumbent is strongly supportive of it, and proud that Cambridge was first in the nation. Any challenger likely to get elected probably feels the same. That’s “liberal”On the other hand, when it comes to whether policy decisions are made by the professional city manager without oversight by any elected officials, or whether the elected council decides to start taking responsibility for making policy by transferring meaningful oversight authority back from the manager to the council… there you’ll find progressives in the minority. That’s more or less the defining issue: Any councilor who is satisfied with the current way of doing things, where the manager makes all the decisions and the council just listens to him and thus takes no responsibility for anything, is not a progressive.As Ken Reeves (a progressive incumbent and former mayor) often quietly pleads, “we can do it if you [the voters] elect five city councilors who want to do it”. Clearly he wants to be one of those five (and I believe he deserves to be), but he’s also telling us that they do NOT currently have a five vote majority to address this issue, and he’d like us to replace one or more of the incumbents, and give him that 5 vote majority to improve accountability.It’s all coming to a head this year with the property tax increase that the council complacently let happen, even though they knew how awful it was going to be. Jesse Gordon’s research shows that over 4,000 homes (housing probably over 20,000 people) saw their tax assessments go up by more than 20%, with many hundreds of homes seeing it doubled or even tripled, while the city runs a budget surplus significantly larger than the extra amount raised by the increase in property taxes! And yet, the city council pretty much shrugged their shoulders and passed the buck. The assessors office came up with the new assessment model, the state set the guidelines for it, the elected officials had nothing to do with it. They didn’t even make much effort to inform residents of what was about to hit them, and as a result most property owners found out only when they opened their tax bills. That’s not progressive!All our city councilors fall on the political “left” on the national spectrum, yes. But we have a real split between the complacents and the progressives, and we need more progressives on the council.(And by this measure, Andre Green, the Republican, IS a progressive – though I think his chances are poor because a lot of his views are out of step with Cambridge)
Sam Seidel is indeed sane, gracious and responsive. He’d make a great City Councillor.Jesse Gordon, on the other hand, is the exact opposite. Being the candidate and a campaign advisor are two entirely different worlds. He’ll find that as a candidate, the questionable tatics he’s used as a campaign advisor, will come back to bite him in the rear.
I’m really grateful for all comments from informed people about the race, regardless of what position you hold or what candidate you support. I would just ask everyone to be as specific as possible with criticisms or praise.That being said, here’s a generality: incumbent councilor and former mayor Ken Reeves is also a Ward 6 guy; I’ve talked with him, and he also seems to be a good and sane fellow.To anyone: I’d love to hear your opinions on who deserves to be “the five” and why.
Lynne, thanks for the offer of boxes, but we’ve actually got plenty.I’ve posted on your question about health care. Thanks for the prod.
Cos: nice assessment, wow!So it’s really back to the old “open government and reform” vs “incumbent old boy network” isn’t it?We’ve got pretty much 100% of the latter in Lowell…Charley: lol you’re welcome and if you run out of boxes, lemme know!
Lynne: It’s not exactly the same kind of split you tend to see in many other parts of the state, and the state party. There are old boy networks everywhere, of course – and Cambridge’s are far more diverse than just “old boys”. I think the key here is complacency. Jesse talks about “lack of accountability” but I think complacency captures what he’s trying to point at by that.If elected officials let the professional, unelected city manager be in charge of everything, they can avoid having to take responsibility for anything. They can take credit for the good things they do – and the good things he does – but when anything isn’t right, they’ve already pre-emptively passed the back before it even happened. And the city manager, as good a job as he does, has no real incentive to listen to voter concerns. Neither do his appointees (the manager has absolute hiring and firing authority for the planning board, license commission, etc.). There’s nobody in a position of responsibility and authority in this city who ever has to worry about getting re-elected or communicating with voters. So neighborhood groups get ignored in development projects, and excessive property tax increases go through without people even knowing they’re coming, and so on.I know not everyone on the city council is satisfied with this state of affairs, but clearly a majority is.Additionally, “the way things are done” is pretty much set. There’s no incentive for change. We’ve had the same manager for decades, and the incumbent councilors have all gotten re-elected for several elections in a row (because, hey, they’re not responsible for anything anyone doesn’t like). In some ways, the city does great things, but in other ways, it’s lazy. The same remedies for the rat problem get proposed over and over by neighborhood groups but nothing changes. The city barely even talks to Somerville or the MBTA when there are projects they ought to be involved in. All sorts of initiatives get proposed and have broad support both in the city and the council, but just never happen. The city doesn’t lobby hard for home rule petitions it submits. We need some more hyperactive, tireless councilors who will not only stay in contact with voters, but push for things and get them done.
Practically speaking, a lefty challengers would be likely to unseat a more lefty incumbent – David Maher, Henrietta Davis, Brian Murphy, Marjory Decker, Ken Reeves, Denise Simmons – right? I don’t think replacing any of those five would neccessarily be a huge step forward for Cambridge – and actually might send a message to lefty elected officials that Cambridge progressives don’t have your back, which I dont entirely agree with. The issues are important and should definitely be discussed but as far as ive read, I dont think that the current challenger messages do much except chip away at the credibility of the current progressive councilors (many of whom we sure did love last May). Lets keep the good politicians on their toes but not cut them off at the knees.
No, that’s now how Cambridge elections work. It’s about turnout, not persuasion, and each new candidate brings new voters to the polls.First, as I discussed above, there’s no traditional left/right split here – they incumbents are all lefties – so it’s not quite right to say “a leftie challenger”. But let’s say “progressive”, as I described it. Any way you name it, though, Cambridge’s PR voting system is structured such that similar candidates help each other more than compete with each other. The more progressives running, the more progressives are likely to get elected, in general, because they’ll bring more progressive voters to the polls, and those voters will more likely fill their downballot choices with progressives. So, whichever of these candidates get dropped in the early rounds, will result in more ballots being transferred to the others. It takes one quota’s worth of ballots (where a quota is roughly 1/10 of total ballots cast) to elect one candidate, so if there are 5 quotas worth of progressive ballots they’ll elect five progressive candidates, regardless of which progressive candidates those happen to be.As for which individual candidates will lose if any challengers win, it’s not based on their ideological similarity with the challengers as much as on their relative number of voters. Who came in 9th, 8th, 7th, last time – those are the ones most in danger. Except, remember, similarity with the challengers puts them in less danger than they’d otherwise have been. It’s a turnout game.Ken Reeves actually came in last in 2001 but I think he’s on an upswing. The Dean connection helped him do better in 2003, and two Deanie candidates running this year will bring more pro-Reeves Deanies to the polls. Some will vote #1 for him, boosting his total right at the start, and then if either one of Jesse or Sam doesn’t make it, at least some of their ballots will transfer to him. In 2003 Denise Simmons was last, but again I think more progressive candidates is likely to net a few more votes for her. My intuition tells me that Marjorie Decker, despite coming in 4th in 2003, may one of the most endangered incumbents this year – I think many of her voters are displeased with her and looking for someone new to vote for. Fortunately, we’ve got some good candidates for those people to choose.In the DFA-Cambridge endorsement process, I voted for Jesse Gordon, Sam Seidel, Ken Reeves, and Denise Simmons. I’m pretty sure the final results were that DFA-Cambridge endorsed exactly that set of four candidates. Those are the four I’d really like to see get in this year. If any of the seven other incumbents loses, and is replaced by Jesse or Sam, I personally think it would be a significant improvement (not that I think all seven other incumbents are necessarily bad, I just think Jesse and/or Sam would be significant improvements over all of them). I especially want to see Jesse elected (which is why I went to work for him) because I know he’ll tirelessly get stuff done that some other councilors, no matter how “lefty” they might be, are either too complacent or too jaded and resigned to tackle anymore.As for whether we “have their back”, I think that only applies to those councilors who’ve stuck their necks out for us in the past. Not all of the ones you label “lefty” have made any effort at all to court progressive groups like PDC and DFA, or to really fight for the things we care about consistently.You listed six incumbents. If all six of them were truly progressive, that would be a 6-3 majority on the council. The city manager would not be the city dictator, and the city council would actually be excercising some real oversight and taking responsibility for things. We very obviously have at most 4 real progressives on the council right now (and perhaps fewer), so at least two of the ones you listed don’t belong on the list. Which ones?
P.S. the best way to keep any incumbent politician “on their toes” is a strong electoral challenger. That’s how electoral politics is intended to work. If they beat the incumbent but it’s too close for comfort, that’s what keep them on their toes.
So you are saying that David Maher, Henrietta Davis, Brian Murphy, and Marjory Decker (i think thats everyone else) are not true progressives? And that Everyone on the council EXCEPT Denise and Ken are complacent and jaded. Man, theres no love in this city for its leaders. Harsh! Does your candidate (Jesse Gordon) agree with that too?Cambridge is not that big but doesnt seem to have real in-depth local news. Where do people tend to get their perspective on local leaders? Do you know them personally? On another note – is there a good explanation of the Cambridge voter system somewhere online or on paper? Also off topic- anyone got any ideas about the lieutentant governors race? Is there a thread for that somewhere? I feel clueless in that regard.
Just a couple of comments as a former Selectman in a small community.The comment of the city manager of “you can do that if you find five councilors to support it” is absolutely true. We had a dumb issue in our town, whether to build a new town garage, and it languished for 29 years because there were never three votes (out of five) in favor of it. I ran in favor of the garage and the minute I won, the other two ran to the front of the parade. City managers and town managers don’t really have a “choice” when it comes to the council or Board that they’re dealt. BUT they do have the ability to set an agenda if the council/board can’t or won’t and say “This is what you hired me for. This is my recommendation. If you can’t come up with a better alternative, maybe you need a new city manager.” Because, at the end of the day, sitting around waiting for feckless politicians to stop sticking their collective fingers into the wind is a job that they can’t PAY you enough for!Thanks to ben for the question on the Lt. Gov’s race. I am underwhelmed by the current field. Sorry you three if I hurt your feelings. There’s no one currently in the race who I’d feel comfortable with leading the state on the off chance that Deval is appointed to the SCOTUS in his second term.