Progressive Democrats of Cambridge - DFA

In the first of I'm sure many initiatives to open up the governing process to ordinary folks, Deval Patrick and Tim Murray have announced the website for their transition team: http://www.patrickmurraytransition.org/

Through the website, you can submit your resume or CV in order to apply for a job, or you can send a comment to one of the team's working groups. Here's what I just sent the transportation group:

Make the T cheaper, at least for low-income folks. The current T funding scheme is simply not working, and it needs to be revised so that the state takes responsibility for the T. Mass transit should be widely and cheaply available to the people who need it most.

Also, the green line expansion into Somreville and Medford should continue as speedily as possible.

Finally, here are a few relatively cheap and easy things we can do to improve the T:

- Make the charlie card machines "eat" cards once they are out of money, as the DC system does. Many people find it extremely frustrating that the machines don't do this.

- Make the map of the T, including all subway lines, bus lines, and commuter rail, available on a Google map. There are already several such maps currently maintained by volunteers, so this would be very easy to do. The system maps currently on the T's website are very hard to work with.

- Make the Trip Finder available by cell phone, so that people can easily find the quickest route to their destination.

So if you've got a gripe about something, don't just sit there - send a note to the new administration.

The good folks at the Patrick campaign are throwing a party to celebrate:

You've done the hard work--now it is time to celebrate!

You are invited to a city-wide party to thank you at the Daedalus restaurant & bar in Harvard Square on Sunday, November 12 from 4:30 to 6:30. There will be appetizers and a cash bar. The address is 45 1/2 Mt. Auburn Street.

Please RSVP by email so we have enough appetizers.

As you probably saw in the newspapers. Cambridge gave Deval an astounding 82% of the vote. Representative Alice Wolf was re-elected with nearly 90% of the vote.

Deval Patrick's 82% compares to 68% for Shannon O'Brien in 2002 and 73% for Scott Harshbarger in 1998.

The Cambridge "net contribution to victory" (Deval's vote minus Kerry-Healey's) was similarly huge--22,391. This was second only to Boston's--and higher than Worcester, Tim Murray's home city. A particularly bright spot was increased turnout in precincts with significant communities of color. In Ward 11, precinct 1, there was an amazing increase, in large part due to enthusiastic leadership within Jefferson Park and the Rindge Avenue towers, and great voter registration and Get-Out-the-Vote drives.

Email Lfield1007 (at) aol (dot) com to RSVP. See you there!

Deval Patrick crushed Kerry Healey, surprising no one. And everyone.

Patrick's win was a victory of stunning proportions. I still recall the early months of 2005, when I started to hear rumors of a progressive challenge to Reilly. Even at that early point, establishment Democrats left and right were dropping out of the race. As of the spring of 2005, it looked like Patrick and Reilly were the only contenders, with an outside chance of Galvin and Capuano running as well. Needless to say, no one in the progressive movement believed that Patrick would win the primary.

But then some seriously funky things happened:

1. In the January 2006 caucuses, Patrick swept to a landslide victory in a venue which should have been empahtically unfriendly to him. Consequently, he won the Democratic convention in June.
2. Despite a deluge of postiive Gabrieli ads over the summer, Patrick held his own, hovering at around 35% in the polls. Shortly after going on the air, Partick's support ticked up to about 45%, and he never looked back.
3. Patrick's poll numbers in the general election went from about 24% ahead, down to 13% ahead after the onslaught of LaGuer ads, and rebounded to 24% ahead or so shortly afterwards.
4. Last night, Patrick won an emphatic landslide victory, with 56% of the votes to Healey's 35%, Mihos's 7%, and Ross's 2%.

I view the first three of these events as major turning points in the campaign, and I am not sure why they happened. The first event, the caucus victory, could probably be attributed to serious on-the-ground organizing combined with John Walsh's incisive knowledge about plaing the insider Democratic game. The third event still leaves me a bit baffled. I had a brief chat with Will Hafer about it a little while ago, and he thought that maybe it was because Healey had nothing positive to offer, and so voters responded badly to the negative attacks. Simplistically speaking, if you're going to go negative, that only means people will pay attention to you. If you don't give them something to vote for, they'll get mad at you.

The real miracle, it seems to me, is what happened in the primaries. It makes sense that Patrick would pick up a good bit of support once he got on the air - although 10% is quite a lot of ground to pick up in a three-way race, which speaks to the effectiveness of the ads. What doesn't make sense to me is the 35% or so of the Democratic primary voters who were with Patrick despite the onslaught of Gabrieli and Reilly ads. The only way to explain this massive bank of support is that the 35% represented Patrick's die-hard base, the folks like me who were sticking with him come hell or high water.

I'm a bit hesitant to claim that 35% of the Democratic party fits this profile, since it seems so absurdly high to me. That's 35% of the Deemocratic party which the progressive movement and the Patrick campaign were able to reach through non-traditional media - the blogs, phone calls, and door-to-door visits - and a bit of free media. When you think about how many people voted in the primary, that is an absurd number.

Anyway, I suppose we should not be hesitant to claim our victory. To be sure, Patrick's campaign did many, many things right; they "got" the idea of engaging the netroots; they "got" the idea of grassroots organizing; they "got" the idea of values-driven messaging and substantive policy proposals. But the core of Patrick's historic landslide last night came on the back of a powerful Massachusetts progressive movement which proved that it doesn't need paid media to win statewide elections. That is a breathtaking development in our statewide politics.