Tip O’Neill, the fabled Boston pol, only lost one election in his life: his 1935 campaign for Cambridge City Council.
As he recounts in his autobiography, after the ballots were counted O’Neill’s dad pointed out that, perhaps, he had taken his own neighbourhood’s support for granted.
O’Neill had to agree: he had received plenty of votes in other parts of Cambridge, but hadn’t worked hard enough in his own backyard.
At this point I imagine the father clasping his hands on his son’s shoulders and looking him right in the eye.
“'Let me tell you something I learned years ago,' he said, in words now emblazoned on the brain of every operative in every subsequent campaign. “All politics is local.”
The pair were talking from the perspective of the candidate. But I think the reason those words still matter all these years later is that their meaning resonates outside of the political backrooms: they are as true for the voter as they are for the politician.
And never more so than on Oct. 17, when most of our towns and regional municipalities elect their councillors and mayors, the folks who have real impact on our day-to-day life.
Oh sure, an MP, particularly if they sit around the cabinet table, can help deliver a big government procurement project or ensure that your region is not forgotten about when new federal legislation is being drafted.
But that is the high-level, big-issue, macro stuff.
Your member of the legislative assembly will fight for you to keep a school, ferry or mill open. If they are part of the government, they will go to bat to ensure that when the budgetary cuts come, the pain is softened in your region.
In a perfect world, your MLA, like your MP, will reflect the collective will of their riding on a whole range of issues.
Except do you want to get the potholes in your street filled, ensure that the garbage truck goes all the way down to the end of your block, and that your street gets ploughed?
Want the water coming out of your tap to lose its brown hue, and the skateboarders in the schoolyard next door to stop keeping you up at night?
Dearly need someone to investigate all the traffic going in and out of your neighbour’s home at funny hours of the day or night?
Need help getting a permit to build an extension on your house, to hold a fundraiser at the local community centre, to erect some lights in a dark corner of a walking trail?
Need to deal with an issue that falls under provincial or federal authority, but no idea how to deal with the folks in Halifax, or faraway Parliament Hill?
That’s where the folks on the ballots on Oct. 17 come in.
“Mayors and councillors deal with people on a day-to-day level on stuff that really matters to their lives,” Don Downe told me Friday.
As a longtime MLA for Lunenburg West, and Liberal cabinet minister who served eight years as the mayor of the municipality of the District of Lunenburg, he knows of what he speaks.
So does Cecil Clarke, now running for his third term as mayor of the Cape Breton Regional Municipality, who, as a Conservative, represented Cape Breton North in the Nova Scotia House of Assembly, where he sat at the provincial cabinet table.
“As an MLA and cabinet minister the focus was always on what we could bring in terms of big announcements,” Clarke said Friday during a break from the campaign trail.
“In municipal government you get to see the curbside realities that those announcements deliver.”
In other words, municipal politics is visceral and real. The issues are close to people. That is why those who choose to tackle them can have such an impact.
They solve your problems. They look after your interests. When need be, they even act as your link to the faraway MLAs in Halifax, and MPs on Parliament Hill.
Graham Steele, the author and former provincial cabinet minister in Darrell Dexter’s NDP government, has written that “a good councillor is gold. A good mayor can lift a whole town.”
There is nothing distant about these people. You run into them at the coffee shop and filling up at the service station, because, unlike those in the more rareified levels of politics, councilors and mayors seldom stray far from home.
“You can always get a hold of them,” said Downe. “You just call them at home.”
So get out and vote on the 17th in person in Halifax, or before then electronically or by telephone. It’s like O’Neill senior said, all politics is local, particularly the local kind.
