The View From Prospect Hill

On September 29, 2007, in Uncategorized, by The News Staff

Prospect_hill_tower_1_3_8_2 Another local primary election come and gone, can you believe it? The election results weren’t surprising to anyone, but it would seem that some of the events leading up to and including Tuesday were.

Considering there were no ward races except in Ward 6, the turnout was higher than expected for such a snooze fest citywide. We have seen a few colorful moments here and there and without Rick Scirocco in the final, it will most likely return to the land of yawn.

It wasn’t as much of a surprise to see the mayor get as many votes as he did in Ward 6, even though he didn’t concentrate much of his overall effort there and left the vote pulling to the primary race contenders there. Had he not won by more than 75 percent of the vote against his two opponents, it would have been much less impressive.

But he did, and based on Somerville’s political history with popular mayors over the last 50 odd years, he will probably be the mayor for the foreseeable future. Quite frankly, if he continues to perform the way he has to date, we see no problem with that at all.

Which leads us back to the few moments that caused even the most bizarre of the “Pod People” to scratch his or her head over the last couple of months. Yes, even those of us who would be somehow considered “seasoned” Somerville political veterans had plenty to chuckle at especially during the last few weeks – over both stuff we haven’t seen in years and other stuff that we just didn’t think we would ever see.

Thuggish behavior isn’t a new concept in this city, but we can’t remember a sitting mayor getting a “supposed” death threat, as indirect as it may have been at the time. How about the trashing of signs – that’s an old-time favorite we haven’t seen since the Piro/Albano glory days. Then you hear about “associates” of a candidate visiting the elderly and telling them the mayor’s wife left him because he was having an affair.

How silly is that? Well, then there’s election day – and a candidate for mayor is being driven around to polling places in an early 1990s white limousine with duct-taped signs on the side of it. Someone must have said something to him about how silly that looked, because later on he was seen driving around in a monster of an SUV, again with the duct-taped signs, with a woman on a bullhorn announcing to the mostly oblivious there was an election today public that it was time to “vote for change.” Nice touch using a woman on the bullhorn, but still silly nonetheless.

 

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