The Candidate

(Editor's note: The profile of Matt O'Malley, campaign manager for Suffolk County Sheriff Andrea J. Cabral, in today's Globe magazine went to press before O'Malley officially launched a bid for an at-large seat on the Boston City Council yesterday.)

The Christmas holidays are just beginning to pick up steam, and there is a sparkle to the joint in the middle of the afternoon. Once the dark haunt of alternative folk singers, Doyle's Cafe has expanded and gentrified as Jamaica Plain has around it, until now it's a living museum to the city's old Irish political culture, in which every other person at the bar looks like either a state senator or a prosecutor about to indict one. And from all corners of the room, Matt O'Malley is getting what used to be called "the big hello."

He's got the red hair, and he's got both the smile and the handshake down - Jim Curley would have hired him on sight - and these are only the smallest of the moves that are instinctive in him. At 25, O'Malley already has run strongly for a seat on the City Council, and he's lining himself up for another run. Most impressive, though, O'Malley masterminded the successful campaign of Suffolk County sheriff Andrea Cabral, who crushed Councilor Stephen Murphy by 20 points in September's Democratic primary. In helping Cabral win, O'Malley, the son of Irish Catholic liberal parents from Roslindale, and the grandson of men who worked with Jack Kennedy, provided a vivid measure of how Boston politics is changing as the city does. End of the day, as they say, Cabral needed a pol, and in O'Malley she found a campaign manager ready to redefine what that means in an evolving political culture.

"You know," says O'Malley, "a lot has been written about `the new Boston,' but I don't really buy that. I think Boston is a lot smarter and a lot more tolerant than we're given credit for. I mean, I'm a white Irish Catholic kid from a labor family, lived in Rozzie my whole life, so I would be your typical Steve Murphy supporter, but I'm smarter than that. I recognized that, in this particular race, there were vast differences between the two candidates, and it made it easy for me to support the more qualified candidate."

"You can't judge a book by its cover," says Cabral (she was unopposed in the November general election). "While [O'Malley] may have a comprehensive knowledge of traditional politics, his thinking is not encumbered by it. Progress is a big thing with him - how you make progress and how you make it in a way that's inclusive."

Cabral knew O'Malley from the latter's audacious 2003 campaign for an at-large seat on the City Council, in which O'Malley finished sixth in a field in which the top four finishers were elected. O'Malley's campaign ran purely on the candidate's energy. Short on money and with virtually no organization, O'Malley spent six months on his feet, getting up at dawn, shaking hands at MBTA stops and in coffee shops, working 80-hour weeks. At the end of the campaign, even though O'Malley lost, Cabral hired him to run her campaign largely in order to tap into that kind of energy.

"I knew," recalls Cabral, "that I was not going to be jumping out of my shoes to be standing at Dunkin' Donuts at 7 in the morning, so I knew I needed to hire someone who could tell me that this is what you need to do, because he had done it."

From the start, O'Malley and Cabral campaigned everywhere, outworking Murphy, whose field organization was formidable, and ceding to him no neighborhoods simply because they appeared too white, too Irish, or too traditional. They campaigned in Mattapan and Roxbury, but they also campaigned just as hard at places like the K Club in Dorchester, where the elderly ladies who were playing bingo found themselves charmed by the notion of a lady sheriff. It was pure retail politics, one door at a time, and it employed all the old techniques while recognizing none of the old boundaries.

"I think," O'Malley says, "that `the new Boston' is more marketing than it is political reality."

He is of the old neighborhood tradition. His father, George, a home-improvement contractor, remembers growing up amid backyard parties for John Powers, twice an unsuccessful candidate for mayor of Boston in the 1950s, defeated the first time by someone named John Hynes and the second time by someone named John Collins. Those were the days when Boston politics was an Irish Dog-patch, full of incestuous grudges and ancient feuds, a tradition calcifying from within until it cracked completely during the busing crisis of the 1970s, when being a "pol" became synonymous with entrenched patronage and racial reaction. While all the O'Malleys grew up steeped in politics, because politics was everywhere around them, the family remained outside of the city's reflexive, poisonous tribalism. They were Irish Catholic liberals, a rare enough breed, and Matt O'Malley's godmother, Carolyn Grant, is an African-American. Nevertheless, O'Malley was struck early on by the romance of it all, the one part of the old Boston politics that endures. It baffled his two older sisters, and it delighted his parents, with whom he still lives.

"He was playing Little League and reading the editorial pages," his father recalls.

He went to the rallies with his father, and as a 12-year-old, he worked a polling place on behalf of Bill Clinton. He graduated from Boston Latin School and from George Washington University; his apartment building in D.C. was evacuated on September 11, 2001, because of its proximity to the State Department. O'Malley worked for Councilor Peggy Davis-Mullen off and on through high school and college; it was shortly after graduating from George Washington that O'Malley decided on what is only the first of his tries for public office. "I love the human drama of it," he says. "It's a sport. It's not brain surgery." It looks as though he will be lining up for the council again this year - this time, ironically, against Stephen Murphy, among others. This is the old drama reworked for a new and different audience. Always a role for the pol here. Always.

Charles P. Pierce is a member of the Globe Magazine staff. His e-mail address is CPierce@globe.com.