Hizzoner....

Da Mayor of Boston, Thomas Menino, is running the city from a hospital bed owing to variety of complaints. He has been hospitalized since October, with no discharge date promulgated as yet. *** So let me go srtaight there and suggest the Mayor's health is about to become a major political issue in the City of Boston in the lead up to the 2013 Mayoral Election. I don't think anyone wants to articulate it yet, but it is definitely the 800 lb anthropoid in the room. If Menino declines to run, that sets off a free-for-all scramble for office...if he does run the questions about his health will be right out there for all to see and hear. It is an interesting prospect for a blogger at a serious remove from Boston politics...but then I gotta work with what I got... My own thinking is, I cannot imagine Menino "going out on his stool" so to speak even if it necessitated campaigning from an ambulance stretcher. But then again, there is a point beyond which mere willpower cannot work it's dark magic. Y'know, its funny after a generation of treating state democrats as pesky supplicants, it may well be that Tom Menino's last great political accomplishment lay in the elevation of a liberal Harvard Law Professor to the US Senate....