Last night, in one of the most remarkable upsets of this remarkable political season, Boston City Councilwoman Ayanna Pressley clobbered longtime incumbent Representative Michael Capuano in the Seventh District of Massachusetts. It made me feel old.
It made me feel old because I remember a time, before redistricting, when most of the Seventh District of Massachusetts lay in the Eighth District. And it was in the Eighth District, as a 15-year-old in 1986, that I learned lessons about American politics that turn out to no longer be true.
That year, House Speaker Tip O’Neill, who had represented the Eighth since before I was born, announced his retirement. And I began volunteering for an ardently liberal state senator named George Bachrach, who hoped to succeed him. Unfortunately for Bachrach, Joseph Kennedy II—Robert Kennedy’s son—soon entered the race, as well. Kennedy was among the least-qualified, least-impressive candidates in a crowded field. Yet in the campaign’s closing weeks, Boston’s power brokers closed ranks behind him. Kennedy won endorsements from O’Neill, Boston Mayor Ray Flynn, the Boston Herald, and The Boston Globe, and went on to win. (Gerald Sullivan and Michael Kenney tell the story in their book, The Race for the Eighth.)
The message seemed clear: At the end of the day, Bachrach—a New York transplant with Jewish roots—was an outsider. Kennedy may have been less qualified, but he was more Boston. In O’Neill’s famous dictum, all politics really was local.
But that maxim is now out of date. Capuano, Kennedy’s successor, was born in Somerville, in the heart of the Eighth (now the Seventh) District. Like generations of Massachusetts pols before him, he attended law school at Boston College. He served as an alderman in Somerville, then mayor. He garnered the endorsements of Boston’s top Democrats. In a recent profile, The New York Times described him as “talking knowingly about local issues with a range of leaders he has cultivated for years” in a “thick Boston accent.”
It didn’t matter. Yesterday, Boston, a city long known for its insularity and…
