And, in the intervening time period, everybody in the world hits that hot bloggy item that I’d been saving for 5pm. The one from the Journal about the Globe only being worth $20 million.

Most everybody in the world doubts the $20 million valuation Barclays saddled Marty’s kids with. But here’s two reasons why, when the Times Co. does unload the broadsheet, the sale price will be much closer to the Barclays figure than the one Jack Connors offered up two years ago.

First off, the paper is reportedly hemorrhaging cash. If the widely circulated figure of $1 million in red ink a week is even close to accurate, the Globe comes at a huge premium. Any buyer will either have to eat those catastrophic losses, make severe cuts, or sell off unused office furniture or something – all options that decrease the paper’s real short-term value to any buyer.

Which leads into number two: Not sure if you’d noticed, but money isn’t cheap anymore. Borrowing tons of cash to pay grossly inflated prices for assets because they make you feel warm inside, or because you think you can flip them, hasn’t really worked out well lately. The era of dumb rich men buying dumb things with Monopoly money is over. Especially when the earnings of the things dumb rich men wish banks would let them buy remain in a steady, if terrifying, freefall.

Patrick tells the News Service, “I’m running,” adding, “I fully expect there are going to be challengers, and that’s all right. Keeps my game sharp.” What about having to maybe pull a Dukakis and fend off a Democratic primary challenger? “Doesn’t matter to me,” a smiling Patrick shrugged.

The Guv’s response: “I am so sick of that question… Let me be absolutely clear. I’m not going… The best thing in the world for me is to stay right where I am, and to have, while I’m governor, a partner in a president Obama, as aligned as he is with our agenda around clean and alternative energy, public education and infrastructure investment, honoring the dignity of work and working people. I can’t think of anything better than an Obama administration that is working towards the same goals, in the same direction, and with the same urgency.” Nicely put. Not that it’ll quiet the speculative din any.

Patrick, who’s heading out to Chicago for tonight’s wicked bash, also said he plans to “take a ride out to my old neighborhood and just sit on the stoop for a little while and just take all this in.”

Last week’s Hill and the Hall detailed how Mike Ross was able to wrap up the City Council presidency so early. But it’s the other side to that discussion — the why — that should really shake up city politics.

Mayor Tom Menino rode the council presidency to Kevin White’s doorstep. And, balky limbs and dust bowls permitting, he’ll ride it beyond. Michael Flaherty used the presidency to become Menino’s heir apparent. His five-year run atop the rostrum raised his public profile and expand his fundraising base so successfully that the mayor’s people decided they had to destroy the monster they’d created.

This year’s council president race looked to be so competitive because observers thought the prize—a spot second in line behind Menino at a time when Hizzoner’s future was uncertain—was great enough that no councilor with an outside shot at the mayor’s office (roughly half of them) would ever put a potential rival inches away from the very thing they themselves coveted.

The potential was great enough that ambitious councilors would avoid elevating a potential rival at all costs. Why let somebody else pull the trick Flaherty had already pulled?

Ross is young and has broad citywide appeal. He’s the type of politician that any councilor should want to keep out of the public eye—assuming that those councilors see futures for themselves beyond the council’s awful concrete walls. But Ross is about to step closer to the mayor’s office than any of his colleagues, and he’s doing it with their help and unanimous support.

He can thank Maureen Feeney.

The two-year term limits Feeney placed on the presidency didn’t just change the timing of the vote-wrangling and arm-twisting that surrounds the position. It also caused a fundamental shift in councilors’ perceptions of the presidency as a zero-sum position.

The councilors wanted to dump Flaherty two years ago because they felt they were “Enabling him to become mayor,” one says. That’s no longer the case. “It felt different this year,” this person says. Most people figured, “never in a million years would the young guys pick another young guy to be the leader.”

Some of the younger faces on the council were different five yeas ago, but the dynamic is the same. The body then was largely split along generational lines with the young members, backing Flaherty, cooperating and running the show.

Steve Murphy called the arrangement “a house of cards.” He predicted that competing ambitions would eventually turn councilors against each other. “It’s all bound to come down,” he promised the Globe. And he was right.

Some, frustrated by a lack of advancement, left city politics. Others backed Feeney in a bid to take Flaherty down a notch. But then Feeney changed the rules of the game.

Term limits have weakened the political potential inherent in the council presidency, and that means that councilors aren’t giving away their own futures by backing an equally ambitious colleague. It’s a bit like SALT treaties for small-time politics. Nobody is gaining an extraordinary advantage, so everybody’s free to trust each other again.

Because now, all the new council president is guaranteed is two years of reaction quotes in the dailies, and then a swift return to the back bench.

Barack Obama warned supporters yesterday against getting cocky in the final weeks before Election Day. “We don’t take anything for granted,” David Axelrod told the Times.

Seems like a perfect time to begin speculating about what will happen when Obama wins, taps John Kerry for a spot in the State Department or Defense or anything else that’ll save the 2004 presidential loser from worrying about Uxbridge, and Massachusetts finally gets the bloody Senate race we’ve been drooling after for four years now. That wouldn’t jinx the whole thing for everybody, would it?

So, hypothetically and not at all lustily speaking, if Kerry moves up and out, who jumps in?

Attorney General Martha Coakley would seem to be a sure entrant. She’s smart, effective and very well liked by both sides of the Democratic party. But with just over $115,000 in her campaign account, she has less cash on hand than the head of the RMV. That’s a hurdle that needs to be addressed.

War chest-wise, Treasurer Tim Cahill is in better shape—for somebody still schlubbing around Beacon Hill. He’s sitting on top of $312,000, and he’s widely believed to be interested in moving up.

The question is whether he guns for Kerry’s seat, or Deval Patrick’s. We reported back in July that Cahill was feeling bearish about his chances in an open Senate race and might be hedging his bets, beating up on Patrick and waiting for the governor to flub any response to a possible economic collapse.

Well, the damn thing went and collapsed on us, and thus far, Patrick is still standing. Cahill’s strategy may change if the governor continues to refuse to fall on his face for everybody to see. A run for Senate would vaporize the war chest Cahill has worked so hard to amass, but the streets of this town are lined with the bodies of pols who didn’t take the first shot that came their way.

Still, Cahill and Coakley would be fighting any Senate race uphill. The state’s Congressional delegation mobilized for Kerry’s imminent departure once before. They didn’t get to slaughter each other then, so they’re sure to be ready this time around.

There are two fewer contenders now: Marty Meehan took his $4.8 million in campaign cash and decamped to UMass-Lowell, while Barney Frank has ridden the Democrats  majority in the House to a plum committee chairmanship, and all the perks that come with that office.

But that just means that the remaining Reps see the numbers breaking in their favor. Most are well armed for the fight.

Bill Delahunt has $1.28 million on hand. Steve Lynch has $1.3 million. John Tierney: $1.3 million. Richard Neal: $2.1 million. Ed Markey, the delegation’s dean, is sitting on $2.6 million.

Then there are the Congressmen in the poor house. John Olver only has $157,000 to his name. Jim McGovern isn’t too much better off, with $333,000. And Mike Capuano, though sitting on top of a district overflowing with good votes, has just $887,000. Just $887,000.

Yeah, this is the same state where Deval Patrick shocked the political establishment and proved that grassroots blah blah blah. Coakley and Cahill should still get busy getting busy. They may soon find that a couple hundred grand—or even a million or two—doesn’t buy what it used to.

tk

(Cross-posted from Boston Daily)

(Cross-posted from Boston Daily)

This city is dying for a great political race. What we’re getting instead is a race about race. And it’s going to be filthy.

Dianne Wilkerson is scrambling to retain her Senate seat. She lost last week’s Democratic primary to Sonia Chang-Diaz, and responded in familiar fashion: Surrounded by adoring supporters, she spoke defiantly, blamed her misfortunes on outside forces, and vowed to fight on.

Three years ago, the AG was suing her for campaign finance violations; she countered with a farcically exploitative rally in a Mattapan church. The setting was different this time around – a Grove Hall lodge – but the message no less subtle. When Dianne Wilkerson is in a corner, her troubles cease being her own. They’re shared by anybody whose skin looks like hers.

If Tuesday’s rally was any indication, here’s Wilkerson’s strategy for November: Divide an already divided district, cast Chang-Diaz as a white (white enough) interloper, and hope that Barack Obama pulls more votes in Roxbury than he does in JP.

Tuesday’s rhetoric had aggressive racial overtones. Wilkerson’s staff cried fraud and disenfranchisement and Florida. Bob Marshall put Chang-Diaz among “the wine-and-brie crowd.” Chuck Turner said Wilkerson’s seat was “rooted in the politics of the black community.” Asked to clarify her contention that “This is the first time in a long time we will not have a senator who is a person of color,” METCO executive director Jean McGuire told the Dorchester Reporter, “There are white Hispanics and black Hispanics,” adding, “She is not a person of color.”

The politics of hope it ain’t. Small wonder the mayor wants nothing to do with this thing.

Mayor Menino, of course, has troubles of his own to worry about. Michael Flaherty, he can handle on his own. But next year’s mayoral race might’ve just gotten a lot messier.

On Thursday, the Globe reported that invitations to a California fundraiser cast at-large city councilor Sam Yoon as being on a “quest to become the first Asian-American mayor of Boston.”

The Hill and the Hall got on the phone and practically begged Yoon spokesman Curtis Ellis to rule his guy out of the mayor’s race. What we got was firm noncommittal.

While forcefully emphasizing that, “Absolutely, in no way were these invitations approved or designed by Sam,” Ellis said, “He has not made a decision about running. He’s thinking about it. What councilor hasn’t thought about it? He has not made a decision, and he’s not going to make a decision.” That’s a lot of words right there, and “No” wasn’t one of them.

The news caught many people inside City Hall off guard. But not all of them. These people, they can see it in Yoon’s eyes, in the way he’s been walking around City Hall lately. He thinks he can pull this thing off. Deval Patrick did it. Obama’s doing it. Why not him, too?

“It’s on,” says one person inside the Hall. “There’s no sense announcing now. You have to wait until you can get some exposure in the papers. But the cat’s out of the bag. I think he’s in.”

Asked if Yoon might be flirting with the mayor’s office one term too soon, another City Hall insider replied, “He views these things differently than conventional political wisdom. That’s appealing to some people. It definitely makes things a lot more interesting than they were the day before yesterday.”

Interesting, because three candidates means a preliminary election in September. It means a much longer campaign calendar. It means a splintered base, and more bruising exposure, for the mayor. And, with two challengers presumably in the race, it’s exponentially more likely that we’ll see other people jump into the race, too.

“The floodgates are gonna open,” the first City Hall insider predicts. “It’s going to be a nightmare” for the mayor’s people. Bruce Wall could jump in and start banging heads. Or somebody from the private sector. Or somebody from inside the State House. As the political sage Kevin Garnett says, now, anything’s possible.

The undercard to this battle might actually be worth watching, too. The council race has been sleepy thus far, but two potential at-large openings on the City Council “creates a highly competitive race, and draws in a ton of candidates,” the second City Hall insider says. The smart money has both those spots going to candidates of color. “I suspect there’ll be some candidates who might not have been considering themselves candidates until yesterday.”

All of which should make for an intrigue-filled year on the fifth floor of City Hall, as the administration squeezes its enemies from the inside. Flaherty’s already “toxic in the building,” the first insider says. “Everybody’s afraid to talk to him.” And forget about getting anything done. Right now, if the Southie councilor called in a pothole, DPW would go out and dig a bigger one right next to it.

There’s another question that needs to be asked: Who wants to be mayor right now, anyways?

New York magazine recently speculated that Wall Street’s implosion, and the government budget crises it will unleash, could resurrect “the bad old days of the seventies” and break Michael Bloomberg. Things in Boston will be even bloodier.

New York can at least fall back on meals and rooms taxes. Boston is handcuffed by home rule. It can’t raise money on its own. So it’s dependent on a shrinking, over-stressed property tax base and local aid from the state. And you can kiss the latter goodbye. Growth in the state budget has been driven by capital gains – by surges on Wall Street – not by any meaningful economic growth. As the stock market goes, so goes the budget. The legislature has been skating by for years, preferring to fund politically popular programs and earmarks and borrow against higher tax collections, rather than close the state’s structural budget deficit. That tactic won’t work this year. And it’s Boston – the largest recipient of state aid – that’ll pay.

And while revenue is dwindling, costs – driven by health care and labor contracts – continue to swell. Menino has thus far managed to plug holes with one-time cash infusions and creative borrowing. But whoever’s mayor for the next four years will, in all likelihood, have the honor of slashing the city’s budget, and presiding over school closings and labor unrest. If basic city services like trash pickup, pothole-filling and parks maintenance don’t crumble altogether, it’ll be a victory.

At least one political observer believes that these concerns will shape Menino’s thinking next year. “The economy weighs heavily on whether he runs again,” this person says. “He gives every appearance of running. But he’s had, for the most part, a good ride on the economy. With this downturn, and shitty contracts he’s given out – is it time to say, Hey, I’ve had enough of this?”

There’s a flipside to that thinking. A race dominated by the economy would force challengers to tilt at the mayor’s strengths. Yes, several people inside City Hall believe his political operation is weak and exhausted and, frankly, sick of jumping for Hizzoner whenever he comes calling. But anyone challenging Menino next year will be fighting him on his own ground: Few pols in the country, let alone in this town, have been as aggressive as Menino has in defending homeowners from the current market’s ills. That’ll be a high hurdle for anybody to clear.

(Cross-posted from Boston Daily)

A whole mess of pols in expensive suits showed up at the State House on Wednesday to witness the unveiling of a portrait of former Senate President Robert Travaglini. Headliners included former Governor Paul Cellucci, former Pike official and son of Eastie James Aloisi, Boston Mayor Tom Menino, former House Speakers Tom Finneran and Charlie Flaherty, and Travaglini’s first political boss, former AG Francis Bellotti.

The event–seemingly lightened by the unexpected absence of former Gov. Mitt Romney–provided the assembled politicians the forum for what they do best. They cracked wise and busted balls.

Gov. Deval Patrick emotionally recalled that Travaglini was the man who administered his oath of office, saying, “I’ll never forget that day.” He also recalled huddling up with Trav and Sal DiMasi after the election; Trav flatly told Patrick, “I’m out of practice cooperating with the governor.”

Menino took the podium promising to “bury” the guest of honor, “not praise him.”

“You’re finally funny!” the former president shot back. The mayor appeared ready to follow through on his vow, then spied a Senate aide clutching a tape recorder. “Awww,” he moaned, before launching into a grudging, but florid, recitation of Trav’s greatness. Then he paused, staring at the aide, a wide, open-mouthed grin on his face.

And the yuks kept on coming. Finneran speculated, “I’m the only member of the media who has ever been, or will be applauded in this room.” He added, “The mayor told me to be careful of that recorder. I have to be cautious for other reasons – I’m still on probation!” Then he expounded on the profound cultural differences between the Italian-American Senate leader and himself: Trav plied legislators with Pope Juice, while Finneran preferred Johnny Walker Blue.

It was just one of several references to getting tanked. DiMasi ventured to say that the wine they drank in the legislature was much better, “than what you and the mayor used to drink.” Trav claimed that anybody who was thinking about leaving the old neighborhoods had second thoughts once DiMasi succeeded Finneran: “East Boston and the North End? The party goes on all night!”

And Senate President Therese Murray, recalling the meticulous manner in which her predecessor arranged the knickknacks in his office, told a story about breaking into the president’s office one night and rearranging everything in sight. “We climbed out one window and then in yours,” she revealed, adding, “We put all our leftovers in there, too.” Murray also gleefully recounted Trav’s skill at “filling every open clerk and court officer position. He had a full employment office coming out of there.”

The current House Speaker had attendees roaring when he contrasted the continuity between Trav’s time in leadership and Murray’s with the recent transition in the House. Finneran, he said, had told him, “Just try not to do what I did.” DiMasi paused, then confessed, “It hasn’t been easy. You’re rubbing off on me a little too much!”

DiMasi also chided his predecessor’s verbosity. “Tom Finneran took most of my two minutes. Were you speaking for Romney, too?” He paused, setting up the punchline: “You did that during your whole tenure as speaker.”

Trav refused to be upstaged. After being regaled by several rounds of the legislature’s customary greeting for Italian-Americans – a resounding chorus of “Heyyyy! Heyyyyyyy!,” interspersed with the occasional “Woo!” – he began with, “Governor, none of those toll-takers were my guys.”

He paused for applause, then added, “But if you’re looking for an apology from me for providing employment opportunities for qualified residents from impacted communities … I offer no apology.” Then he talked about public service. Then he pulled the curtain off his portrait. It’s a rather massive thing – smaller than the monstrosities belonging to Calvin Coolidge and Horace Mann, but still large enough to put Billy Bulger’s to shame. (There are no gratuitous Abe Lincoln busts or creepy mystery hands in Trav’s portrait, either.)

In the press scrum that followed the ceremony, Trav brushed aside suggestions that, now that he’s legally allowed to lobby his former colleagues, he’ll be roaming the halls frequently. “I don’t have to come up here,” he said. “Yeah,” a reporter shot back. “You just pick up the phone.”

“That’s right!” The former president brushed aside a reporter’s suggestions that his portrait, styled after the classic Brahmin portraits hanging in the Athenaeum, was incongruous with his standing as the chamber’s first Italian-American leader. He did, however, concede one point: The artist, Tom Ouellette, “Could’ve given me a little more hair.”

Suffolk County DA Dan Conley has won a string of murder convictions recently. Does this mean he’s not the devil in a nice suit – and that he’s no longer easy prey for upwardly mobile Boston pols?

A hot rumor hit the internets this week: Governor Patrick’s chief of staff, Doug Rubin, will soon dump the administration for the Obama campaign. Hub Politics cited “unconfirmed rumors afloat” concerning Rubin’s imminent departure, and then speculated about all the great palace intrigue that will follow the resignation.

One problem, though. Rubin said Wednesday that he’s not leaving. Which just goes to show you: When trading in unsourced, unconfirmed rumors, stick to the rumor-mongers you trust. The Hill and the Hall: Your finest source for baseless speculation since, like, seven months ago.

From the Department of How Can We Miss You if You Won’t Go Away?: Mitt Romney may have skipped the ceremony honoring Travaglini, but the preceding night, he was back in Boston and in rare form. The failed presidential candidate headlined a Republican fundraiser, played to the crowd and beat up on his successor for trying to fix education by leading with his heart, not his calculator: “I’d say how much can I spend first, and then I’d design it,” Romney said.

Perennially bored rich guy William Weld was in the house too, and for some reason he called Romney “someone who is inevitably going to be, soon or late, the president of the United States of America.” Halloween’s still months away, Bill. Why try to sew terror now?

Wire services contributed to this report.

It fails, however, to ask the obvious question: With that much cash-money on hand, can Glodis now finally afford to pay for parking at the beach?

This week’s Hill and the Hall noted the uncomfortable parallels between the current intrigue roiling the House and the leadership fight that swept Speaker Sal DiMasi into leadership more than twenty years ago. Rumors persist that, after the budget has wrapped, DiMasi will bring the hammer down on members of his leadership team who are preparing to succeed him.

DiMasi’s walking a tough line. He looks weak if he doesn’t follow through on his very public threats to punish vote-wrangling. But he if he does demote one or more of his top lieutenants, he risks further destabilizing the House. It was a similar act – Speaker Tommy McGee demoting Geroge Keverian – that sparked the 1984-1985 Keverian-Flaherty uprising.

There are a few key differences between this episode of palace intrigue and Keverian’s, though. How different those differences are might make the difference between heads rolling or not.

When I profiled DiMasi for Boston magazine, he recalled McGee’s tenure as that of a “strong, do-as-I-say speaker. And he wouldn’t leave. Even though his time had come. It was all backed up. I was there six years, I wasn’t even a vice chair. There was no movement.”

McGee had also promised his members that he would vacate the speaker’s chair, and then reneged on that commitment. It was that act, combined with the autocratic nature of his rule, that prompted Keverian’s agitation and demotion. Compare that to this current round of intrigue, which hinges less on wrongs DiMasi has inflicted upon his membership than on the fears among individual reps that, if Rich Vitale brings Sal down, their own positions on Beacon Hill will suffer. They’re not plotting to overthrow Sal so much as they’re scrambling to ensure that his own possible downfall isn’t also their own.

The timing and mood in the House are also critically different. Keverian’s demotion happened in the run-up to an election. He, in turn, ran a statewide campaign against McGee. He ran a slate of anti-McGee candidates for rep, demanded House rules reform, and turned the 1984 election into a referendum on McGee’s leadership. DiMasi’s leadership, on the other hand, hasn’t been divisive. Legislation passes through a select few hands, but at the same time, the speaker has also gone to lengths to bring anti-Finneran liberals into his big-tent leadership team.

Not to mention the fact that nomination papers were due last week. If this thing does mushroom into an open revolt and statewide anti-DiMasi campaign, it’ll have to wait another two years. Which is to say, that’s not likely at all.

DiMasi is up against one factor that helped undo McGee: Unrestrained ambition. In researching the Keverian uprising for the DiMasi profile, I was told by a number of people close to the Keverian campaign that DiMasi (who was up against his last serious challenger, Sal Tecce) wouldn’t have committed to Keverian if the Everett rep hadn’t already had the votes to take the speakership. DiMasi, Finneran and Angelo Scaccia didn’t commit to Keverian until after the 1984 election, and a Keverian supporter told me that the three were less concerned about House democracy and rules reform than they were about their own careers.

“They’d decided that, by the time they worked their way through [McGee’s] system, they’d be 107 years old,” this person told me. By falling in line with Keverian, “they wound up jumping the line” to leadership.

[Image via]

Let’s start by picking on Hizzoner. Nothing gets the natives riled up like parking tickets, so Mayor Tom Menino’s $2.42 billion FY09 budget, which includes $13 million in new parking fines, is sure to be the only thing anybody in Boston ever talks about for the rest of time. Let the schools close; we demand parking amnesty now!

But seriously, the notion that the mayor is sewing great harm by balancing Boston’s budget on the backs of people who can’t manage to avoid parking in front of fire hydrants, rather than slogging through a nasty override fight, is about as dumb as the notion that kids wouldn’t be killing each other if it weren’t for these infernal T-shirts and video games. Gotta love this town.

In other City Hall news, the people who work inside City Hall still suck, just like they always have.

Are your civic outrage juices flowing? If so, please send some money to Michael Flaherty. The guy is really gonna need it. He’s not even officially in the mayor’s race yet, and it already appears that his fundraising base might be in danger of drying up.

Flaherty took in a little over $60,000 during the year’s first three months. Pocket change. He spent nearly $43,000 of it, and has around $450,000 in cash-on-hand. That’s in keeping with his 2007 fundraising patterns, when he didn’t really start raising money until May, taking in the bulk in the fall.

A look at Mayor Menino’s finances should throw a wicked scare into the Southie city councilor. The mayor has been raising money at a furious pace this year. He ended 2007 with over $973,000 in the bank, and through the end of March, had added $282,569 to that total. He has spent twice what Flaherty has – $86,000 – but has also socked away $650,000 in savings, investing in CDs and money market accounts.

Flaherty pounced on the 311 and parking ticket stories in this week’s papers, issuing a pair of press releases blasting the administration’s ineffectiveness. He has also been an outspoken (occasionally shouting and red-faced) opponent of towing. This suggests he may try to run a populist, nuts and bolts campaign, and try to out-mechanic the urban mechanic.

There’s no way Flaherty outspends Menino in this race. The mayor out-gunned him three to one last year, and that was during a City Council election. But it’s critical that he get whatever receipts he can this year, because once he is officially in this race, the pool of saps willing to cross the mayor and give money to him will only get smaller. (This is also one reason why observers believe Flaherty won’t, and can’t, declare his candidacy until after Labor Day.)

It seemed that if Dianne Wilkerson couldn’t lose last year – a year in which the powerful but embattled state senator couldn’t manage to wring 300 good signatures out of her sprawling district, and had to wage a high-wire write-in campaign against a two-headed Diaz monster and an old cop. All that self-destruction, the money troubles, the staggering sense of entitlement conveyed by the signature fiasco – and none of it seemed to matter. The woman was invincible.

Invincibility isn’t protecting her, though. Wilkerson looks to have two challengers this fall. JP’s Sonia Chang-Diaz is once again gunning for Wilkerson in September’s Democratic primary. An independent candidate, William Theodore Leonard, will sail into November’s election. That’s assuming, of course, that everyone involved can get signatures in by the end of this month. It shouldn’t be a significant hurdle, but for some reason, it is.

A third would-be challenger, Robert Patton-Spruill, pulled nomination papers for the seat but recently decided to shut down his nascent campaign and go to work for Chang-Diaz.

The Roxbury filmmaker (he shot Tim Murray’s campaign commercials, and his Public Enemy: Welcome to the Terrordome debuts this month at the Independent Film Fest) began gathering signatures and says his campaign could’ve been competitive, but backed out when he decided he’d be “better off using my skills behind the scenes.” And he maintains that, with more time to organize this time around, the Chang-Diaz campaign can do more than just throw a scare into the eight-term senator.

In Jamaica Plain, Patton-Spruill says Wilkerson “has issues.” He also insists that “We can be strongly competitive in Roxbury.” They’ll have to be; Chang-Diaz got rolled on Wilkerson’s turf two years ago, and it cost her the race. “African-Americans of my generation are looking for change,” Patton-Spruill says. “They’re upset at the current black leadership on Beacon Hill. The whole country is looking for new youthful voices.”

That’s some Deval Patrick Just Words stuff right there, and it’ll be fascinating to see if a netroots organizational machine can be deployed with any success at the ward level. Patton-Spruill will be building an online broadband channel for Chang-Diaz, and loading it with long-form videos – “on demand” campaigning to “show the real Sonia” and help fuel shoeleather politics.

For this campaign to work, Chang-Diaz has to make the conversation about youth, hope, change and the like. Because, otherwise, commentators will look to the 2006 results and frame the election as a race about skin color, class, and neighborhood division. And that’s certainly not a conversation many people are eager to have anytime soon.

Neither woman has to file paperwork with OCPF until the fall, so until then, we’ll all have to be content with trolling through their 2007 off-year campaign finance reports.

One big difference: Wilkerson blew through nearly $34,000 in a non-election year by spending on staffing, fundraising, phones, food, and airfare. Chang-Diaz spent $618.

The off-year donor lists are interesting as well. Chang-Diaz got money from big names like Barbara Lee, former Menino aide Howard Leibowitz, and Micho Spring in 2007. Wilkerson received support from a buttload of labor unions, as well as Bruce Bolling, John Nucci, Maura Hennigan, lobbyist and former House Speaker Charlie Flaherty, Angela Menino, Susan Passoni, BRA planner Muhammad Ali-Salaam, Jerry Rappaport, Jr., Chris Iannella, and two members of the troubled Winn clan.

We may be watching the balance of power tip on Beacon Hill. While Gov. Deval Patrick and House Speaker Sal DiMasi go back and forth about casinos and taxes—and whether or not they’re going back and forth at all—Senate President Therese Murray is showing herself to be both smart enough to recognize the power vacuum brought on by the bickering, and strong enough to fill that vacuum with substantive policy proposals.

The death of the governor’s casino bill should shine a spotlight on Murray’s health care reform-reform bill. That’s for the best since it does what magical slots leprechauns doesn’t, that is address the real reason cities and towns are going broke. Murray should also get serious credit for leading the effort to implement the now one-year-old Transportation Finance Commission report, especially by harpooning politically thorny MBTA health care benefits and police details.

These are weighty and decidedly un-flashy issues, but it’s going to take heavy lifting on boring issues to raise the state out of the hellward fiscal death-spiral it’s currently locked in. Interesting that it’s Murray, who just celebrated a year on the job, and not her two counterparts, who is leading the way.

A side note: This is the second time in recent months Murray has refused to leak a major policy proposal to the press before formally unveiling it. At least one major paper (blind item!) responded to this tactic by boycotting her Worcester health care presser. It was good to see everybody on board – and on a level playing field – this time around.

Ralph Martin isn’t running for mayor. Attention now turns to his maybe I will dance partner. Mike Flaherty’s got the campaign slogan: “Change is in your hands,” but does he have a campaign to match?

Well, which is it? On the same day that Patrick spiced up his “Together We Can” attitude by telling the New York Times that DiMasi’s leadership style is “part of what we ran against, and it needs to be called out,” the governor told the State House News Service, “There’s a bigger record, a vastly bigger record than the difference over casinos, and the sooner that the people and the media appreciate that, the better off we will all be.” Huh?

Idle, totally unfounded speculation: What are the chances that John Hynes’s massive, $3 billion Seaport Square development, combined with the possibly-successful mixed-use redevelopment of Fort Point, will wind up killing the Silver Line?

For anyone who has anywhere to be, at any time, the branch is a disaster. Can you imagine how slow those shiny buses masquerading as subway cars will run when there are actual people living in the neighborhood who’ll need to get around on the things?

And more to the point, can you really imagine all those international CEOs Hynes wants to bring to the neighborhood actually riding it when the T could just slap down light rail tracks and make the whole thing run three times as efficiently?

The casino game may have limped to a bloody stalemate on Beacon Hill, but, unfortunately, that doesn’t mean we can rid ourselves of these awesome slots-r-iffic good times. They’re just shifting south, where the Mashpee Wampanoag are making the long slog towards taking their land into trust.

The feds held a couple hearings on the Mashpee’s Middleboro land grab this week. They were notable for a few reasons.

First, the Mashpee appear to be either wicked hardball players with an already-in fix nobody knows about, or they’re Cubs-fan-level delusional.

The Cape Cod Times noted that the first phase of the not-yet in existence Middleboro casino would include a “600,000-square-foot casino building on two levels, with 4,000 slot machines and 200 table games, restaurants, retail shops, and an event center.” Which is hilarious (or, alternately, terrifying), because neither slots nor table games are legal in Massachusetts yet. Nor, in the aftermath of last week’s vote, do they look to be legal any time soon.

Are the Mashpee just pushing ahead and blowing all their investors’ money for whatev’s sake, or do they know something none of the rest of us do?

Second, reservation shopping will absolutely be a prime factor in whether or not the tribe gets to do anything with that pricey piece of land they’re sitting on. Consider the comments the Massachuseuk lobbed at the Mashpee this week: “There were several groups of native people that were in Middleboro, but none of them were Mashpee. It is disturbing that the Mashpee would come to the Massachuseuk territory and try to establish this as their homeland, which it is not, it has never been and, if we have something to say, it never will be.”

This one will be fun.

One other casinorama loose end to tie up: It looks like the Patrick administration handled something right during this month’s gambling debacle. The Globe recently dropped a quiet bombshell when it reported that in the run-up to last week’s vote, the Mashpee tried to cut a deal that would’ve given them a federally-recognized casino in Middleboro in exchange for 20 percent of the casino’s slot machine revenue. That deal is the same kind of stinker that Connecticut has been laboring under for decades, and the administration’s decision to say no to it shows the kind of clear, rational thinking they’ve rarely displayed during this whole saga. So, cheers!

Most people wouldn’t normally associate the City Council chamber’s glaring fluorescent lights with mood lighting. But that didn’t stop one mystery couple from whispering to each other, giggling, and canoodling through the entirety of this week’s council meeting. Flabbergasted pols’ reactions ranged from “Who are they?” to, “What are they doing?”

Backhanded comment of the week: Charles Yancey, in the most gracious terms possible, rising to “Thank the administration for providing us with the information that’s required by law.”

And a close runner-up: A councilor complimenting Mike Ross’s decision to pair a blazer and tie with a charcoal sweater with, “You look like a modern-day Mr. Rogers. Tell Mr. McFeely I say hello!”