The 23rd Middlesex special election

It never ends in Arlington, no sooner does Jim Marzilli make the jump to the state senate than another special election must be called to fill his now vacatn seat in the state house of representatives.
The democrats in the race are an interesting and diverse lot.

School committee member Jeff Thielman announced early and is perceived as the favored candidate of Jim Marzilli's fabled organization. Jeff has done yeoman work on the school committee, he is passionate, articulate and energetic. In a normal election cycle he'd be a shoo-in, however thanks to his involvement in a regrettable but unavoidable controversy attending the dismissal of the middle school principal Thielman's chances are about fifty-fifty when all is said and done.
All politics is local, sayeth O'Neill the Great, "Ah but alot of local politics is personal" adds Humble Elias.
A lot of serious local liberals and progressives are backing his candidacy is a district know for it's liberalism, but Jeff may not be able to count on the same degree of unity that Marzilli had last fall. Be that as it may, he is a very serious man with a wide experience of public life, he will run hard on primary day.
His main opponent is Sean Garballey, also a school committee member, he too is articulate and friendly, he is also exactly twenty two years old. Despite his extreme youth, Sean is the clear darling of the "townies" and town hall based organization headed by selectperson Diane Mahon. This is somewhat ironic given that he clearly sounded like a "townie friendly" version of Jim Marzilli at his campaign opener a week ago.
Sean has many friends around town including some serious liberal wattage and can be counted on to be a formidable competitor on primary day. Sean's major problem is that he renowned for his ingratiating ways, some of his supporters may be mistaking that for other virtues that as yet have not manifested themselves. Moreover at twenty two it is easy to argue he is just too young and inexperienced to swim the serious sharks in the state legislature. What is worse for Garballey is that he looks a lot younger than he is, some of this wouldn't work to his advantage in a normal election cycle but with the primary itself barely three and a half weeks away he may well win the nomination on positive name recognition alone.

The third candidate is one Andrew O'Brien whom no one in Town seems to know from a cord of wood. He is an unknown quantity, never glimpsed on the town democratic committee nor seen around in any other political capacity. Neither camp has much to say about him otherwise. Presumably we will see more of him in debate, but at the moment the man is a question mark.