Ward 5 voters square off

Ward 5 Democrats take it vote by vote, door by door
by Sandra Miller

The Ward 5 Democratic Committee is in its final days of knocking on doors and collecting information on voters to help on the big day, next Tuesday.
At its recent Candidates Forum at the Community Church of Boston, all of this November’s Democratic candidates whose districts include Boston Ward 5, were invited to seek the committee's endorsement. Attendees were state representatives Byron Rushing and Marty Walz and Sonia Chang-Diaz, a candidate for the Second Suffolk State Senate seat currently held by Dianne Wilkerson, who lost to Chang-Diaz and is now running a sticker campaign.
Rob Whitney, chair of the Ward 5 Committee, said each gave a brief statement and the committee then voted unanimously to endorse Representative Walz and Representative Rushing for re-election and endorsed Chang-Diaz for state senator for the Second Suffolk District.
In addition, the committee endorsed the following candidates: Barack Obama and Joe Biden for president and vice president, respectively; state senators Anthony Petruccelli and Steven Tolman; Representative and Speaker of the House Salvatore DiMasi; Congressman Michael Capuano and US Senator John Kerry.
On the three ballot questions, the committee voted as follows: to endorse the "No" position for Ballot Question No. 1 - to make no change in the state income tax laws; and to endorse the "Yes" position on Ballot Question No. 3 - to prohibit dog races on which betting or wagering occurs. With respect to Ballot Question No. 2, concerning replacing criminal penalties for possession of one ounce or less of marijuana with a new system of civil penalties, the committee didn’t issue any endorsement one way or the other, said Whitney.
The Ward 5 Committee is pretty busy these last few days, helping out their Democrats, especially the Obama campaign, with old-fashioned footwork and phone calls. Rob Whitney and Ania Camargo coordinate car pools along Beacon Hill, and Emily Stone is organizing the NH runs for Back Bay. “Stone is a strong volunteer,” says fellow Ward 5 member Ross Levanto.
The Ward 5 committee is composed of about 20-30 core members, with voting members elected in February.
A big factor in this year’s campaign is the committee’s increased use of the Internet to help its cause. Levanto is blogging about his choices, and notes that Ward 5 has its own Facebook page. “There are a lot of young professionals who are wired and who check out Facebook. New media has impacted this race, I’m sure,” he said.
He uses Facebook to post Ward 5 events, articles and photos. “We do not have to maintain a website,” he says. “The other thing is, the way Facebook operates, when there’s a posting on Facebook, there’s more of an impact from a viral way than posting on a blog. Whenever someone posts something, I’m told on my status page.”
Levanto prefers his blog, which he finds easier to post his opinions, tips for people going to the polls. “The most common question I get is ‘Where do I vote and how do I find out where my polling place is?’ The Ward 5 Committee is active just letting people know about events,” he says.
Levanto’s top three priorities this campaign season begins with Sonia Chang-Diaz, who is running for Dianne Wilkerson’s state senate seat. “I’ve had a lot of personal commitment to her campaign, and because that race isn’t over yet, I feel it’s unfinished business,” he says. He spends time making phone calls, canvassing, going door to door, talking to neighbors, posting blogs for her. “Last night, I was helping out a phone bank in Boston. I am taking off a day of work on Election Day to stand with her at a polling station,” he says.
Second on his priority list is supporting Barak Obama, whom he’s supported since late January. He’s volunteering in the mayor’s office on behalf of Obama, too. Third is his fight to defeat Question 1, which he says will “cripple” the state.
Levanto is busy, but his employer, Schwartz Communications in Waltham, where he is a vice president specializing in high tech public relations, is “very supportive of me. They understand people’s hobbies,” he says.
More importantly, though, he and his fellow Ward 5 members are working to ensure that people don’t just sit back and say that Obama is a done deal, my vote isn’t needed. If nothing else, their vote on the ballot questions are crucial, with such thin poll margins. He’s optimistic about seeing a high turnout this Tuesday. Now, if only that momentum could carry over into non-presidential election years.
“If you talk to Ward 5 voters, what they will tell you they care about the most, it’s generally a combination of education, cleanliness, and to some extent crime, which are issue that matters the most to local officials,” says Levanto. But conversely, it’s the municipal elections that don’t draw the voters to the polls. “I see that as a fundamental disconnect,” he says. “I’ve sat in lines at voting booths during presidential elections at my voting location, long lines that took me 20 minutes to vote. If that excitement would just carry over year to year.”
Is there a disconnect with some voters in this election? Who is Joe SixPack, anyway? “I don’t think it’s me,” says Levanto, laughing. “The thing I love about this stuff is you work hard and you think you can make a difference. Who would have thought the biggest story would be Joe the Plumber? That’s what so great about politics.”
For anyone who tells Levanto that their vote doesn’t count, he loves to tell the story of one election season in his Connecticut hometown As a teenager, he was going to vote for the first time in a race for the second congressional district. “We had five registered voters in our family, and we’d talk about who we were going to vote for. The guy won by four votes,” he says. If one person in his family hadn’t voted, the election would have turned out differently.
In related area news:
• On Election Day, the Neighborhood Association of the Back Bay (NABB) will host a membership table near one of the polls, at the Boston Public Library.
• Councillor Michael Ross will be in Florida to help with voter protection. “There’s a new law in Florida that makes it very difficult to vote if that license doesn’t identically match their name,” says Ross, who will be casting his absentee ballot before he flies out. “There is a concentrated effort, unfortunatelym to suppress votes, and so I will serve with other attorneys to make sure everyone who wants to vote will do so.” He’ll be volunteering to make sure people aren’t being turned away from the polling booth. “The reason why the vote didn’t go to somebody else the last time was because of dirty tricks,” says Ross, an Obama supporter. He’s also working with the mayor’s office to push for a vote against Question 1. “Eliminating the income tax will cripple government,” says Ross. “It’s a shortsighted law created to prey on people’s most selfish tendencies.” He’s still mulling over the other two questions.
o State Rep. Marty Walz is running uncontested, so she’ll be helping out her sister’s campaign in New Hampshire.






Are Republicans feeling blue? Absolutely not
by Sandra Miller

Members of the Ward 5 Republican Committee know they’re a minority in the Blue State, but keep up their push for Senator John McCain and Governor Sarah Palin, and Jeff Beatty, who is running for U.S. Senate against John Kerry.
“I’m so used to being in the minority politically,” said Ellen Rooney, who leads the Ward 5 GOP crew. She counts about 25 regular members and other 35 “friends” of the campaign. Longtime fellow members include Rooney’s sister, Maureen, and Glenn Fiscus, Stephen and Rogina Jeffries, Lee and George Sprague, Reid Morrison, Richard Babson, and Mary Benedict.
Any Republicans who live in the district can sit in on the meetings, but the Ward 5 officers are elected via ballot during presidential campaign years such as this one. Rooney will be on the ballot.
Rooney, who is also executive director of the Beacon Hill Business Association, said when people join a ward committee and volunteer their skills, “Then you’re linked into what’s going on. If they’re making phone calls for this candidate or that candidate, going door to door, they’re in the loop,” she said.
Marty Samuels of Massachusetts Avenue is a new Ward 5 Republican Committee member, following a divorce and a move from Newton, where he was active with that GOP committee. “If you don’t do something, then you get what you deserve,” Samuels said. He doesn’t listen to the polls that say Beatty or McCain’s numbers are down, recalling the media headlines that proclaimed Dewey the winner over Truman. “People line up wanting to shake hands with Beatty,” he said. “To talk to him for 30 seconds, you want to vote for him. I find that heartwarming.”
The Ward 5 GOPsters were meeting once a month at Lir, and when the primaries started heading up, their meetings were visited by campaign representatives from Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, and other Republican contenders, to answer questions from committee members, as also to solicit fundraising and campaign help. “That’s how they get their volunteers,” she explained. “The ward committees are really the grassroots.”
That’s how Rooney lost their secretary, when Ashley Maagero was snatched up by the McCain headquarters in New Hampshire. “It’s our loss and McCain campaign’s gain,” she said. “She’s an energetic, young, vital person. This is why the ward committees exist.”
Rooney, who moved to the Ward 5 area in the 1980s, joined the ward committee to find a few fellow Republicans in a Democrat stronghold. “When you live in Beacon Hill, most of the people you interact with are Democrats, and every so often you want to be in your own committee. I wanted to be around other people who had the same ideas, and for an exchange of ideas. I believe in being active. If you support certain candidates, you should work for them. Rather than complain about the status quo, you should work to change it,” she said.
Rooney and her sister were raised in Wisconsin by a Republican father and a mother who leaned independent. “We were raised to decide for ourselves … to weigh the issues,” Rooney said, recalling debates over the dinner table. “It’s a family that likes to talk and has lots of ideas.”
She came to Boston in the 1980s, and appreciated its love of politics. “What’s fun about this city is we love politics. There’s lots of good-natured bantering. It’s a political town -- if I didn’t like that, I wouldn’t live here,” she said.
She was elected chair since Romney first ran in 2000. Lately, it hasn’t been as much fun, she said. “This particular year, it’s such an incendiary topic. Wherever I go when I step over a threshold, someone is sure to come up to me and start talking politics. People are so emotional about it this year, I try not to engage in those situations.”
The committee is active, just not in your face. “I just say, ‘Keep your head down and just get to work.’ That’s what most people are doing. Keep on phone banking, keep making those calls, identifying the vote. All volunteer efforts are going to raising money and identifying the vote,” she said.
On Election Day, the committee organizes rides to New Hampshire, and making calls to make sure people are getting out to vote. She thanked her committee and those from wards 4, 9 and 14 for their phone bank help. “There’s some hardworking people at the McCain campaign,” she said.
These past weeks, the committee members are traveling to New Hampshire in the final days to make one last push. The McCain-Palin Boston field director, James Green led Ward 5 members and other Boston Republicans on a car pool to New Hampshire this weekend, and will go next weekend through Monday, to go door-to-door for McCain-Palin. “The big effort is calling voters and asking them, ‘Have you voted yet?’” she said.
She’s not discouraged by the polls. “We just keep goin, going, going. The polls keep changing .. We’re a small neighborhood in a Blue state, and it’s a big country. I do know there’s a lot of anger out there, a lot of emotion out there. People are worried about finances. We’re all impacted, we’re all going to see what happens,” she said.