Wiping the Slate Clean

Summary Paragraph: In which Menin acknowledges a tough re-election campaign, and talks about what he believes is a significant strategic error by his fellow candidates for SC. Of course, Menin recognizes that he has a self-interest beyond the benign in the outcome of the election.

It's no secret that four of the five other people running for School Committee are running interlocking campaigns, with the goal, stated clearly during their meet and greets, that the City would be better off throwing all the bums out. When I look around, and realize that in the worst case scenario, should I be re-elected, there will still be two new members of the Committee, I believe that point of view will really need two basic assumptions to succeed.

The first is, obviously, that they need to convince people who have watched me fight for accountability for six years that I'm a bum. They need to convince the voters that my elimination from the School Committee, and the loss of six years of experience, of having worked with 3 superintendents, of ad nauseum advocacy for process transparency and accountability, full disclosure, and community involvement, is really prudent. The community knows that I've lived through two teacher contracts, helped negotiate one of them, and voted against the other for fiscal reasons. I have experience evaluating the superintendent 4 times; I've written curriculum, and grants to support curriculum, taught in the classroom and in adult education; Slate YES needs to convince more than just themselves that these assets, along with a ferocious and precocious streak of independence, a willingness to speak out to anybody any time, anywhere, lack value here in Newburyport.

Based on the feedback that I have been getting as I walk the Wards, that one is proving to be a hard sell. Maybe not hard enough, we'll see, but a lot of folks aren't buying it. And judging by the hits on my site and the feedback I'm getting, the Slate YES idea isn't getting much traction among the outer 60%, and there are a lot of folks I've spoken to who plan to make me one of their three votes, or are telling me I've got their bullet.

Which brings me to the second point. Even if you can prove the first point, something very difficult to do with anyone who has lived in this City more than six years; you have to convince Newburyport that electing three people who think alike, act alike, and have linked arms together to clog the lanes is the best thing for the schools. And you have to do that in an environment in which only one person has run for re-election to the School Committee in 10 years- me. I have articulated the problems, fought to bring all points of view to the table, insisted on more, better community dialogue and made very hard decisions on school contracts, budget cuts and reconfiguration. I have always done so thoughtfully, which is why people may disagree with me, but no one has ever suggested I was unprepared and sloughing off hard choices. Keep in mind, for reasons I understand better than anybody, my peers on the Committee for the last ten years have been four and out.

As a veteran of more than fifteen years of watching the ebb and flow of Newburyport politics, I can assert, with some degree of confidence, that this city traditionally abhors slates across a single elected body. It has always found them, when people are arrogant and ignorant enough to put them together and promote them, to be condescending and insulting. Newburyporters don't like to be told who else to vote for by candidates whose pitch is a straight line "vote for me and him and her"-- they don't like anyone assuming that they lack the judgment to make up their own minds. No self-identified, full "slate" of Council or School Committee candidates has been elected to my knowledge. I simply think in Newburyport, not only doesn't that old dog hunt, but to even try to foist such an insulting proposition on the City is like having that old dog poop on the front lawn of the people you are trying to convince you have the ability to listen to and lead.

What Newburyport does seem to understand are the occasional loose coalitions of candidates across several fields, who don't agree on every issue, but share principles by which they approach an issue and the community, and have faith that reasoned dialogue will result in consensus outcomes. That happens all the time, particularly on the progressive/populist side of the equation. A Mayoral candidate might align with a few City Councilors, a School Committee candidate. Sometimes, you can get a picture of how these loose coalitions form by looking for consistent patterns of signs on peoples' lawns; two or three candidates will seem to appear together around the city or in the Wards.

Although, it is fair to note, don't put so much stock in signs. I've spoken to folks who have Moak signs but have no intention of voting for him; the same goes for Erford Fowler.

But no group, with any respect for how Newburyport works politically, any basic understanding of how to run a campaign that doesn't divide, and any knowledge of Newburyport's political pulse, tic's and quirks would cobble a slate in a single field to throw the bums out, when there are already two seats open in the election. You'd need to present a pretty airtight case alleging high crimes, misdemeanors, or malfeasance. One doesn't exist, because the candidate you are running against isn't the person you have described to the community, and they know it; and the school system you describe is turning around as a result of the work of Kevin Lyons and the School Committee.

You might make a case against a candidate like moi because while I take the issues seriously, I try not to take myself so seriously. Maybe people really prefer pompous, self important blowhards, to irreverent, self-deprecating policy wonks. Or you might convince the community that they would be better off with an elected official who doesn't lengthen meetings by insisting on engaging the community in dialogue; that might work.

But that still fails to make the case for a slate that can be trusted by the community to grow into good, thoughtful public servants. Especially when their presumptive argument for electing themselves is y'all aren't smart enough to make up your own minds, so trust us to do that for you. Been there, done that 6 years ago.

Now, from a pure, venally strategic point of view, as someone who has watched the rise and fall of such venerable figures as Lisa Mead, Mary Anne Clancy, and Jack Pramberg, let me share an insider's analysis with Slate YES. I know my suggestions fell on deaf ears during the override, but you might want to think about this.

Let's suppose Slate Yes wins. Three new members on the School Committee, leaving Steve Coles as the most senior member of the Committee with four years. Let's suppose that the campaign message promulgated by Slate YES as recently as this Friday night, when three of them had a meet and greet together, that we need to clean house and get people who think like us, succeeds.

So we have three new members, all with learning curves that will vary from steep to steepest, who think alike, share the same views on issues, and more importantly, have run a campaign that is based on their expressed belief that the School Committee is an entity that is indecisive, marginally functional, and excruciatingly boring. I know that the majority of the sitting SC doesn't feel that way; in fact, given what we've had to do, the time we've had to do it in, and our ridiculous commitment to getting as much feedback from the community as possible, we kinda feel like we've given things the due diligence they deserve, now that we haven't had to fight tooth and nail to get the information to make good decisions.

So Slate YES begins their "reformation" of an elected body that feels like it is finally getting it's groove on.

Three votes for whatever reforms, or limitations on due diligence our impatient slate needs to see sacrificed to the illusion of efficiency. And maybe, three votes against screwing with what is not only finally working, but becoming an actual process of embedding institutional change in the schools.

Tie-breaker? The mayor. You want the Mayor to have that much power? I don't, regardless of who the Mayor is. I've already lived through that little experiment, and it accelerated the erosion of school academic programs like a match to gasoline.

I originally ran against a School Committee that was convinced it was smarter than the community and because of that, felt it didn't need to share much of what it was doing; I ran because I felt I need to get there to make a change.

I was pretty damned smart back then. I challenged a lot of assumptions, and asked a lot of questions. I played Mickey the Dunce a lot. And most of my peers never caught on that I already knew the answers to 90% of the questions I asked, and had a very reliable indicator to measure the variance between their responses and what I knew to be the facts.

I'm much dumber now. I listen more. I still get a steady stream of neat ideas about how to do things. But I've learned a lot.

I think I like the dumber me. It was very hard to keep up the appearance that I was smarter than everybody else, especially when it was never true.

So run, slate, run. See how they run. If you are right, and you are the political future of Newburyport, I will be whupped like a rented mule in this election, and will have to work for change from the outside. But even when I was on the inside, pushing for change, I was on the outside.

But if you are wrong, and only one or two of you manage to run the gauntlet of the electorate, then you start with a distinct disadvantage. You ran a campaign predicated on telling the community who was worthy of their vote and who wasn't. You were smarter than the voters, in your own minds. You didn't learn anything from the override vote. In fact, judging by the last six or so years, the smarter people may be smarter, inherently, but they sure as hell don't have a learning curve that can get them elected with much frequency.

They don't get it. That was the river; this is the sea.

And if you think the School Committee has credibility and communication problems now, wait'll you carry that baggage on board; especially after you have expressed your personal opinions of your potential peers, by name, to several people in the community. Word gets around, pretty quickly, especially among people who measure friendships and working relationships not by agreeing on everything, but by sharing common principles and having confidence that the means can be devised to reach shared outcomes.

We'll see what November brings.

But you know, the more time I spend out there talking to people, listening to them, going over where we've been (and I've been) and where we are going, the more I realize something that surprises even me.

I could get only 15 votes, and the kids have already won. In six years, I've been privileged to be part of a thousand hard decisions and solutions, but I've never had to trim my principles. I've run this campaign about the future; you've run it about the past. My campaign is idea driven, and boringly specific, yours has been personal, and requires people to choose whether to believe you or their lying eyes.

People don't like having serious decisions framed in such a simplistic format. Given enough time, and a shift of strategy, I believe a package of financial reforms and proposals, including an override, can succeed.

But Slate YES, I'm afraid you'll have to get as dumb as I am to see that.