As the Boston Globe’s Shirley Leung smartly wrote: New Balance Chairman Jim Davis bet $495,000 on Annissa Essaibi George. Tuesday, it paid off. There is precedent for simply cutting out the middle person here and having Wu debate Davis. In 2016 Cambridge city councilor Leland Cheung challenged Senator Pat Jehlen in a Democratic primary. Cheung was underwritten by a SuperPAC funded by Democrats for Education Reform. Recognizing her true opponent, Jehlen challenged DFER chairman and hedge funder John Petry to a debate. Petry ducked it but DFER MA head Liam Kerr stood in and debated Jehlen. Not the highlight of Cheung’s career.
Ms. Leung was kind enough to interview me for the piece about Davis. Here is what I said:
“It’s terrible for democracy,” said Maurice Cunningham, a recently retired political science professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston who has followed the role of outside money. “The ability for somebody to shape a race like this, whether it be Davis in the last 10 days, or the givers to Better Boston super PAC, just the wealthiest people in the city and country having an outsized impact is just undemocratic.”
Some other thoughts . . .
Citizens scored some wins if they were paying attention to the coverage in the Globe and to the relentless reporting on SuperPACs by Dorchester Reporter editor Gintautas Dumcius. The Globe did several excellent straight news stories on SuperPAC money in the Boston mayor’s race in addition to Leung’s column. The Sunday Globe had a very good Stephanie Ebbert story Charter Schools have briefly returned to the spotlight in the Boston mayoral race. Here’s why. And the why was the $1.6 million being spent by the familiar cabal of billionaire school privatizers for their favored candidate, Councilor Andrea Campbell.
But the journalist to follow every day (sometimes minute by minute) is Mr. Dumcius. Here’s a sample, from the excellent Ex-BPD chief Gross hits trail, touts super PACs ad for Essaibi George:
. . .
As they say over in the English Department let’s deconstruct this text. The Davis SuperPAC is paying a Republican firm that worked for Donald Trump for campaign help—seems fair since Jim Davis donated to Trump and gives millions almost exclusively to Republicans. So Essaibi George is not happy with the Republican worker bees. But she isn’t unhappy with the GOP donor Davis who according to Leung “donated $396,500 to Trump Victory, a political action committee that raised money for Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee.” And we know she isn’t unhappy since she had an audience before Davis, communications consultant George Regan, and Gross to explain “What makes you qualified to be mayor.” SuperPACs must be independent so she couldn’t pitch Davis to underwrite the SuperPAC. But Regan and Gross sure could. Then we have Regan who says “The candidates always talk to us” (I’d say I wonder why but I seem to have lost my innocence).
And finally the wonderful exchange when Gross is pressed by Dumcius about Davis’s $395,000 contribution (he later gave another $100,000) and Regan jumps in. And really, why would Gross, a former police commissioner who is merely the public face and the chairman of the SuperPAC know anything about a $395,000 donation?
If Davis does debate Wu, Regan will be loaded offstage like a missile in the silo.
Then there’s the Better Boston (for Oligarchs) SuperPAC which raised over $2 million and spent $1.6 million for its favored candidate Councilor Andrea Campbell. A quarter million from billionaire Reed Hastings of the suburb of California, a quarter million from Andrew Balson of Newton (Balson gave $500,000 in dark money in the 2016 charters campaign) and massive donations from a handful of other wealthy school privatizers; all to go home in the prelims. And $45,000 from WalMart heir Jim Walton, supporter of many Massachusetts privatizer political groups and a resident of the suburb of Arkansas. So what have we learned? We’ve learned that Boston pols who take privatization positions will get a ton of money in support, and probably the Globe’s endorsement. That can help shape future fields; the privatizers set the incentives and should always be able to find a candidate to back. So far that hasn’t been enough. But big money is patient. Money never sleeps.
Most of what we know, we know because the Massachusetts Office of Campaign and Political Finance took decisive action to crack down on dark money after the tawdry dark money bacchanalia by Balson et al. in 2016. I haven’t had time to look through the groups that have given in support of other candidates that hide the real check writers (and they may not run afoul of Massachusetts law in any case). But I hope OCPF takes the time.
Is Jim Davis about to become a major issue in this race? He’s already given 495,000 reasons that he is.
It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. And the same thing applies to governors and U.S. senators and congress members. So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over. … The incumbents, Democrats and Republicans, look upon this unlimited money as a great benefit to themselves.–Jimmy Carter
“We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” –Louis Brandeis
Full disclosure: as a (retired!) educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about money, democracy, and oligarchy. My book Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization is forthcoming in October 2021 from Palgrave Macmillan].