Muted debate fritters away televised opportunity
With the often heated mayoral campaign roaring into its final fortnight, those watching last night’s televised debate might have expected Michael F. Flaherty Jr. to go on the attack. They might also have expected high drama from Mayor Thomas M. Menino, perhaps in the form of a new policy aimed at the city’s troubled schools or violence-prone neighborhoods.
Instead, each of the candidates assumed roles that might have been scripted at the beginning of the campaign: Flaherty, the cautious challenger from South Boston, and Menino, the often inarticulate defender of an administration that has won widespread support in the neighborhoods because of the mayor’s personal attention to their concerns.
For Flaherty, the muted performance registered by both candidates was probably more harmful. With a recent Globe poll showing him 20 points behind Menino, it was Flaherty who needed a memorable night to shake up the race.
Although Flaherty appeared trimmer and perhaps younger than he has in earlier debates, while Menino appeared more worn, Flaherty failed to seize innumerable opportunities to score points by criticizing the mayor on a variety of subjects.
One prominent example: In the hours before the debate, Boston’s minority police officers announced that they had taken a no-confidence vote on Menino over the weekend, slamming City Hall for what they said is a failure on the part of Menino to diversify the upper ranks of the department. But the incendiary charge went unspoken in the debate, as Flaherty merely repeated past assertions that the city’s homicide rate is too high, while Menino defended his crime-fighting record.
Menino, never a strong debater, was also less than inspiring during the head-to-head encounter at the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum. But with commanding advantages in the polls and in campaign funds, he did not need to do anything more than offer an adequate defense of his 16 years in office. And he did that.
Most important for the incumbent, he never displayed his trademark temper and shook off each modest Flaherty parry by turning the conversation toward some mayoral accomplishment.
There were some exceptions to the debate’s plodding pace. At one point, Flaherty offered stinging criticism of Menino’s stewardship of the city’s schools, saying: “The mayor had 16 years to fix the Boston public schools. I’d say that’s enough.’’ At that point, he assigned the mayor a grade of F for his work on schools. He also offered a disturbing picture of Boston’s drug addiction problem and promised to be a champion for “treatment on demand.’’
But for the most part, Flaherty failed to put Menino on the spot by drilling home what appeared to be his predominant theme, that Menino would continue to serve only a clique of political supporters.
Menino, meanwhile, missed his chance to defend himself by offering new inspiration for the future.
Indeed, the one-hour encounter was often bogged down in the alphabet soup of city and state agencies, such as the Massachusetts GIC, or Group Insurance Commission, for those voters unfamiliar with the minutiae of health insurance plans for city and state employees.
Flaherty delivered his lackluster performance after a preliminary election campaign in which he often waged his come-from-behind insurgency as a gentleman, rarely going on the attack while presenting himself as a thoughtful critic of City Hall with a firm grasp of municipal policy in the critical areas of education, crime, and employment.
But after the Sept. 22 preliminary - when he won a mere 24 percent of the vote, compared with a formidable 50.5 percent for Menino - Flaherty stepped up his attacks on the mayor while forging an unusual alliance with another preliminary election contender, Councilor at Large Sam Yoon.
During a contentious Oct. 1 debate, for example, Flaherty pursued Menino like the prosecutor he once was, accusing him of lax enforcement of the Boston jobs policy - which requires contractors to award specific percentages of jobs to city residents, minorities, and women - while peppering him with criticism of his stewardship of the city’s perennially beleaguered schools.
By that time, Flaherty had already boosted interest in his long-shot candidacy by announcing that he would run jointly with Yoon and award him a top administrative post if they succeeded in ousting Menino from his 16-year reign at City Hall.
But last night, Flaherty mentioned Yoon only once, seeming to pass up another opportunity to say how he would change Boston’s leadership.
The omission was especially difficult to understand, given that just last week, the unofficial Flaherty-Yoon ticket - Flaherty and Menino will be the only names on the mayoral ballot - was jointly endorsed by former mayor Raymond L. Flynn and former state representative Melvin H. King, who faced off in the 1983 final election.
Back then, Boston was still reeling from racial violence spinning from the 1974 federal court order to integrate the city’s racially segregated schools.
But Flynn, a white Irish-American politician from South Boston, like Flaherty, and King, an African-American civil rights activist from the South End, campaigned for a united Boston, easing racial tensions across a deeply troubled city.
But last night Flaherty chose to pass up the chance to remind voters of that unity and present himself as the candidate best able to lead the city into a new, multiracial future.
Flaherty and Menino are scheduled to debate once more before the Nov. 3 final election, at an Oct. 27 event at Fanueil Hall, sponsored by MassVOTE, a nonprofit voting rights group. But that debate is not scheduled to be televised, which means that Flaherty will have to struggle to make the most of the 11th-hour opportunity.
Michael Rezendes can be reached at rezendes@globe.com. 
