Tom Menino is a new man! During his inaugural address Monday, the mayor — who, to put it delicately, isn’t known for his love of collaboration — promised that a “spirit of partnership” would guide city government for the next four years. “[W]e will do things different,” Menino told a packed Faneuil Hall audience. (One example, according to the mayor: the structure of the day’s ceremony, in which Menino was sworn in with members of the city council and two school-committee appointees.) “The City of Boston is in a time of transition,” Menino added, “and the challenges of government are calling for a new approach.”
But has Menino really changed? A few moments later, the mayor inveighed against the “windy naysayers ... who read doom and gloom into every event of every day’s news.” And then, for good measure, he panned the “small-minded cynics” who see the merger-driven deaths of major Boston institutions — Filene’s, Gillette, the Boston Globe — as dire economic portents.
There’s nothing wrong with accentuating the positive. But Menino’s dismissal of those who read the headlines differently than he does suggests that one of his biggest weaknesses — a tendency to reject his critics’ arguments without doing them justice, and to throw in some ad hominem commentary for good measure — is very much with us as the mayor gears up for his fourth full term. And if Menino really wants to craft collaborative solutions to violent crime, or middle-class flight, or the entrenched achievement gap between white and non-white students in Boston’s public schools, that could be a problem. After all, if everyone who disagrees with the mayor gets mocked and dismissed, it won’t be long before the only ideas on the table are Menino’s own.
So, will there be room for healthy debate in Menino’s fourth term? “No,” he told the Phoenix afterward. “I want it to be a dictatorship.” After this quip, Menino got serious and explained his earlier barbs. “What I meant was, people say the world’s coming to an end. It’s not coming to an end. Cities everywhere are having these problems.” Fair enough — but if the mayor’s committed to making this “spirit of partnership” a reality, he might want to work on his delivery.
