Boston Wins by a Landslide

By KURT ANDERSEN

A black takes the mayoral primary in a racially scarred city

Each of the two candidates lives with his large family in the rough Boston neighborhood where he was born and raised. Both started their political careers at the grass roots, and spent most of the past decade serving in the Massachusetts state legislature. And in this year's keenly contested election for mayor, the two men were politically the most leftward in the race, both running on a promise to shift money and urban-planning energies away from glamorous downtown and harbor-front development toward rebuilding Boston's neglected working-class neighborhoods. Their populist appeals proved so evenly matched, in fact, that when voters in last week's nonpartisan primary picked them as the two mayoral finalists out of an eight-candidate field, Melvin King got just 98 more votes (out of a record 165,688 cast) than City Councilman Raymond Flynn. So will the general election, four weeks from now, be a blah choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledee? Only if one overlooks the fact that Ray Flynn is white and Mel King is black.

It seemed a difference that was, for an encouraging number of voters, secondary, if not quite overlooked. Nearly a third of King voters were white, Flynn was endorsed by the minister of one of the city's largest black congregations, and the only charge of racism that figured in the exceptionally polite primary campaign was made by one white candidate against an1 other. In all, a decade of ugly racial confrontation overs court-ordered busing was symbolically fading. "We are making history!" shouted King at his victory party at the downtown Parker House. "History! History! History!" Flynn was saying almost the same thing at his rally: "Tonight marks a fundamental change in Boston politics."

Indeed, King, 54, is the first black ever to make it so far in Boston politics. Practically everyone seemed pleased and proud. Mayor Kevin'White, whose withdrawal from contention after 16 years in office made the race wide open, exulted in the apparent racial reconciliation. "If I had to leave being mayor," White said of King's showing, "man, am I glad to see that, along with the tall skyscrapers."

Both King and Flynn, 44, were underdogs when the campaign got under way last March. The early front runner, former Radio Personality David Finnegan, as handsome and glib as he was generously financed and politically well connected, looked unbeatable once White was out of the way. Yet Finnegan, 42, who spent more than twice as much on the campaign as King and Flynn combined, acquired a reputation for arrogance and for being the too smooth "downtown candidate" run by the Boston Establishment. He finished third, with 25% of the vote, 4 percentage points behind the leaders.

At the start of the campaign, King's candidacy seemed hopeless. He had been fond of wearing dashikis and jumpsuits to sessions of the state legislature, and was considered a shoot-from-the-hip radical. Four years ago, he finished third in a six-way mayoral primary. Even in Boston's relatively small (22% of the population) black community, feelings about King were mixed.

Although he tempered his nonconformist style considerably when he entered this year's race, always appearing publicly in suit and bow tie, King did not exactly turn conservative. On a radio talk show he said that he admired Cuba's Fidel Castro more than he did Ronald Reagan. But in general, King conveyed a sense of thoughtfulness. He talked relentlessly about the multiracial "rainbow coalition" that supported his candidacy. Says John Marttila, a Boston political analyst: "The most important element was the tone of Mel's campaign. It is a far more unifying tone than when he ran in 1979." In the end, King won the votes of 95% of blacks and 15% of whites, and carried half of the city's wards, including mostly white Allston and upscale Back Bay and Beacon Hill.

King's chances of becoming mayor, however, are not good, even though he is a far more articulate, rousing speaker than Flynn. To win he would need to sweep the black vote again and pick up at least 30% of the city's white vote, which is 12% more than Harold Washington took when he won the mayoral race in Chicago. Flynn, meanwhile, is expected to attract the bulk of Finnegan's votes as well as maintain his overwhelming support among fellow working-class Irish Americans in neighborhoods like his South Boston home district.

A few years ago, no one called Flynn a progressive. The overriding local issue during the mid-1970s was court-ordered school busing, and the poor white residents of Flynn's "Southie" were often viciously opposed. Flynn shares their basic opposition, but he was never allied with the most demagogic and plainly racist of the antibusing politicians, most of whom have been voted out of office. In 1980, Flynn was the only white politician at the funeral of a black teen-ager shot by Boston police.

Like King, Flynn has moved toward the center, reversing both his onetime opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment and his support for the death penalty. Also, like his opponent, he is an unbudging advocate of rent control. Flynn, a former probation officer, who was a star basketball player at Providence College, says that in Boston the gravest inequality is economic, not racial. Accordingly, he tries not to pander to conventional white prejudices. His mother and tubercular father were on the dole for several years, he says, and so loose talk about " 'welfare chiselers' and 'welfare cheats' makes my stomach turn."

Boston has chronic illnesses that a brief burst of high spirits will not cure. Of the 30 largest U.S. cities, according to the Census Bureau, Boston is among the poorest, ranking 26th in median household income. The housing stock has deteriorated badly, and rent control, whatever its virtues, does not encourage renovation. Next year's municipal budget deficit is estimated at $40 million. Yet there are King and Flynn: with both men and their constituencies earnestly committed to solving those problems, happier days may be here again.

With reporting by Joelle Attinger This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.