Monday, April 16, 2018

Josh Zakim in Menotomy...

The Boston City Councilor is running for the democratic nomination for Secretary of State, "primarying" the longservinf incombent Billy Galvin.
Zakim is young (and appears much younger as well), reasonably personable, reasonably articulate, his spiel wisely centers on the voting rights a topic guaranteed to fire up the liberals in the state democratic party (voting by mail, early voting, election security being his big applause lines), on most other issues as best he can, Zakim is positioning himself to the left of Galvin.
The vibe I get here, is that Zakim much like Jimmy Tingle intuits that 2018 isn't gonna be a year where he can run the board so he may be making the race chiefly to build up useful contacts and beef up his fundraising against a future run for some other glittering electoral bauble.
All that may be worth incurring Galvin's wrath to someone with a twenty year time horizon in state politics.
Galvin would be wise to take this Zakim seriously, The City Councilor is not some twitchy ambitious weirdo trying to bootstrap themselves out of Acton Town Meeting.  And indeed Galvin has been making the rounds of the city & town committees reintroducing himself and his touting his various accomplishments.
I've always been ambivalent about Billy Galvin, I don't accord with all his views, but he has a faction of some weight behind him within the party so I tend to see him as a sacrifice I must make on the altar of party unity.  If he falls short of our ideals, well then so do we all, sooner or later.
All the same, I'm gonna try and keep an eye on this race as best I can....

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