Walsh vs. Connolly: Their First Years as Mayor

This month I wrote posts comparing John Connolly and Marty Walsh’s policy proposals, in an effort to get beyond conflict over the candidates’ personalities and campaign styles and focus instead on the most pressing issues facing the city. I think these posts were worth doing. They brought out some real differences—if not always in their respective end goals, certainly in their emphasis and approach. In education, while Connolly’s priority is extending the school day throughout the system, Walsh has pledged to achieve universal early childhood education. On housing, Connolly focuses on building certain types of units (family-sized and micro-apartments), while Walsh targets key locations, such as transit and retail hubs, with a wider variety of housing types. In economic development, Connolly places his emphasis on nurturing start-ups, while Walsh leads with a complete overhaul of the development bureaucracy.

But perhaps I shouldn’t have turned away from the character question completely. It can be re-framed in a way that is more concrete and less divisive. David Bernstein wrote recently that Walsh and Connolly’s relatively minor policy differences should cause us to look instead at their respective leadership skills, their “ability to lead an organization, to galvanize the public, to draw and keep talent to City Hall, to exercise good judgment.”

This practical question of leadership ability may be a better way of comparing the two candidates than by trying to infer moral character from their campaign tactics. But Bernstein doesn’t offer us much help on this score. He claims both Walsh and Connolly are largely untested, assigning them blank-slate leadership profiles that are even harder to distinguish than their policies. 

I disagree with Bernstein on that point. It’s true that neither has run a city-sized entity, but I think evidence does exist, in both their political careers and their mayoral campaigns, of their respective leadership abilities and styles. And I would add to that category their different kinds of relevant issue-based experience.

Walsh’s 16 years as a state legislator have been marked by relentless collaboration and consensus-building, not just as a team player but as a leader: he’s universally respected on Beacon Hill, and he’s had a hand in driving home legislation on a surprisingly wide range of issues. Meanwhile, his campaign has been characterized from the start by an exhaustive recruitment of talent, reflected in his massive grassroots policy project. A counterpoint to the press’s focus on his blue-collar voter base, Walsh has shown himself an eager cultivator of fresh ideas from diverse sources.

In his six years on the City Council, Connolly has operated more like a political free agent. He has a reputation at City Hall for sweeping in toward the end of an issue’s life-cycle and directing maximum attention to his own role. But he has been successful, both as a councilor and a candidate, at both building citizen constituencies and cultivating elite opinion leaders around his chosen issue of education. His leadership recipe is to inspire popular confidence and create the pressure of good press, with less attention to building necessary political alliances or listening to dissenting voices.

Rather than delve deeper into the past, I thought it would be more interesting to consider how these distinct leadership qualities might combine with their policy priorities to produce different results in the first years of their respective administrations. These are some key questions about how these candidates would actually implement their agenda:

• What achievements will each be measured by—i.e., what are their big-ticket campaign promises, the guarantees upon which they will be elected and ultimately judged? These are the items they will be under tremendous pressure to deliver on, and accordingly will devote the most energy to.
• Which policy proposals will face major opposition from entrenched political and bureaucratic silos, or from powerful private interests? What will it take to overcome them, and how is that process likely to alter the ultimate policy?
• What items will require a major effort of political will and/or financial creativity to fund? What, by contrast, are the low-hanging fruits and how great will their effects be?
• Finally, where does “vision” come in? I.e., what will be the long-term effects of all the “cultural” (i.e. bureaucratic, process, rhetorical, and priority) changes that the new mayor puts in place?

Here’s my best guess at how these questions play out in the first years of the Walsh and Connolly administrations.

Marty Walsh in his first year as mayor folds the functions of the BRA into a new city department that answers directly to the mayor, making development more transparent and more democratic. Before the race began, this was a major progressive priority and it’s come to the fore again as news emerges of Mayor Menino’s apparent deception on the casino deal. Regarding the degree of difficulty: note that Deval Patrick successfully folded the Turnpike Authority into MassDOT, a much harder task given the Pike’s Big Dig debts and the governor’s shaky relationship with the legislature. The BRA’s days are numbered, if the next mayor wants them to be. Walsh does and has laid out his plan for doing so, and would face devastating criticism if he didn’t bring it about. In the meantime, the Walsh Administration also has success expanding early childhood education. This item requires aggressively cultivating alliances with federal and state governments, as well as undertaking a range of innovative funding strategies. Walsh’s strength building political coalitions and getting partners to take “let’s both jump together” risks should make a difference here.

John Connolly in his first year as mayor makes some progress on various strategies for improving the schools, such as reducing bureaucracy and attracting energetic principals. But Connolly has to follow through on universally extending the school day, the lead campaign promise on his defining issue. Scot Lehigh and his friends have declared it the number-one achievement gap strategy and will say his administration’s legitimacy depends on making it a reality. Connolly thus takes one of two courses: he undertakes an epic confrontation with the teachers union, cheered on by the newspapers. He declares imminent victory at various points, but the year ends in a stalemate, and talk of a work stoppage looms. National ed-reform leaders come to Boston to declare solidarity with the mayor and “the parents of Boston.” Connolly floats the idea of an end-run around the union by fast-tracking charter proposals and undertaking a “unique and unprecedented partnership” with Teach for America to help staff them. We end the year unsure of whether we are going to blow up one of the nation’s best urban school systems, or whether Connolly will take the second approach open to him: find a way to save face by backing down and looking for piecemeal funding to extend the school day at targeted schools. I.e., Marty Walsh’s plan. In the meantime, other issues get put on the back burner and little time or energy is left for instituting more democratic development processes, for example.

Is this exercise stacked too heavily in favor of my preferred candidate? Tell me why things will happen differently.

Marty Walsh’s long experience in consensus building, and the detailed, democratic approach to policy that has marked his campaign, predict he will begin by laying the deep structural foundations for steady progress on both economic development and education.

John Connolly’s skill at public positioning and his alliances with elite opinion leaders hold out the promise of bold, decisive progress on education. But given his less substantial, and even contentious, history engaging in actual processes of change, the reality is harder to predict.