Mitchell outflanks both the left and right

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“Politics ain’t beanbag,” goes the cliche, and the first-year city councilors, School Committee members and several would-be members of the School Committee all got a good lesson in that, New Bedford-style this week.

In the course of a little over eight hours, Mayor Jon Mitchell managed to upend the filling of a vacant School Committee seat not once, but twice. First, around 11 a.m. on Chris McCarthy’s WBSM call-in show, he announced he was switching his key vote for the vacant seat from Henry Bousquet to Marcus Coward. That same evening, however, he ended up casting one of the key votes that made Brad Markey the actual new School Committee member.

Mitchell says he was merely following his guiding principle of doing what’s right, but there was more than a little skepticism of that assessment on both the left and right sides of the aisle. And that is from the local officials who surround this perennially moderate longtime mayor, and who are almost always outsmarted by him.

In any event, a mayor who has supposedly lost the confidence of both the majority of the School Committee and the majority of the City Council ended up getting his way with the committee appointment anyway.

Mitchell benefitted from a little luck. 

All the progressives on the committee went for Mr. Coward. All the conservatives on the City Council went for Mr. Bousquet. But neither side could get a majority of the 17-member convention. That was because Ward 5 Councilor Joe Lopes was absent from the first meeting of the joint body of the School Committee and City Council. That meant an 8-8 vote tie between Bousquet and Coward, with the mayor voting for the more conservative Bousquet.

Since all his fellow councilors felt Lopes is close to Bousquet, who is a former city councilor himself, those in the know felt it was just a matter of time before the joint convention made Bousquet the new School Committee member.

But it didn’t happen that way. 

Mitchell is a man of much ability and much ambition. At first, he didn’t seem to care a whit for voting against the more progressive candidate, even if it would hurt him in future elections when he’ll very definitely need the vote of every Democrat in the city. What was bothering him, he said publicly, was that Coward didn’t have any experience. 

As for the startling MAGA posts on Henry Bousquet’s Facebook page and his employment by Voc-Tech — a competitive school to New Bedford High School — I’m not sure the mayor had thought much about either. He didn’t think a sitting School Committee member would vote against the district he served, he later said on local AM radio. 

Well, all this was evidently before the mayor interviewed both Bousquet and Coward in the wake of the tie votes. 

The former Ward 3 councilor apparently did not impress Mitchell during his interview. The mayor said he was concerned about Bousquet’s responses to Voc-Tech’s allegedly discriminatory admission practices. 

Meanwhile, a Bousquet Facebook post last weekend had outlined how he thought some of the state funding for the New Bedford district should go to outside districts (like vocational and charter schools) when the students choose the outside district. That also disturbed Mitchell, who for all intents and purposes, is the leader of the New Bedford school district.

It’s hard to understand why Bousquet would be so candid about his beliefs while depending on the mayor’s vote. Mitchell has long complained that the local voc-tech and charter schools unfairly siphon off money from the New Bedford district. Did Bousquet not know that?

Right after Mitchell’s interview with McCarthy, my sources tell me that the conservative councilors behind Bousquet’s candidacy swung into action. It wasn’t that they had any trouble with Bousquet’s very conservative positions. No, it was that they now knew they were about to get Coward as a School Committee member. 

I’m not completely sure why Coward bothered them so much, except that many of his backers were clearly from the most progressive groups in the city, including that right-wing bugaboo, the Coalition for Social Justice. Coward himself ran as a progressive but so did the other three School Committee candidates who won this year — Melissa Ortega Costa, Rick Porter, and Von Marie Moniz.

In any event, the conservative councilors quickly decided that if they could not have their true believer conservative ideologue, they would take the moderate that the mayor had originally recommended for the position — former Ward 1 Councilor Brad Markey.

Both Council President Ryan Pereira and Ward 3 Councilor Shawn Oliver approached the mayor the afternoon after his announcement and asked him if he would return to Markey if the conservatives also switched their votes. 

Meanwhile other conservative councilors talked among themselves about whether they really wanted to go down with Bousquet’s ship. It was one thing to spend political capital for a conservative candidate who was going to win, but they thought it was quite another to spend the capital for a conservative candidate who was going to lose.

You can put the councilors with higher political ambitions in this category — Ian Abreu, Leo Choquette, and both Pereira and Oliver themselves.

I would like to have been a fly on the wall when they went to Bousquet to tell him they were no longer with him. Or made the phone call, however, they did it. 

Bousquet decided to make it easy for them. He wrote a letter withdrawing his candidacy, citing the divisive debate, and interestingly pointing out to the diversity champions, that diversity also applies to diversity of opinion. The divisive debate, of course, had grown out of the fact that the joint convention had presented the city with the most extreme candidates on both the left and right as their only choices.

Bousquet and Coward are both very nice men and are assets to the city, in my opinion. Whether you agree with them or don’t agree with them, their political positions are reflective of the actual debate that has been going on in both New Bedford and American politics for the last 50 years. 

But it was a debate that the ever moderate Mitchell, and, in truth, probably the majority of the city, is not all that interested in having, at least in a simplistic way.

The two camps were not deterred.

While the progressives thought they had won, Oliver went to City Hall and waited to see Mitchell outside his office, leaving no chance Mitchell would escape him. And by the time Oliver emerged from the corner office, he and  Pereira evidently had a compromise that the conservative councilors would migrate over to the moderate Markey.

With most of the city hearing about Mitchell’s WBSM announcement, but not knowing about the deal-making between Pereira, Oliver and Mitchell, the progressive forces were in shock that night when Mitchell abandoned them on the floor in the City Council chambers.

Shouts of “Shame!” and “Bulls—!” from the Coward backers echoed in the balcony and the hallways outside the council chamber. To his credit, Coward quickly went over to Markey and shook his hand, effectively preventing the rancor from escalating. If that is not an indication that this is a serious young man who wants to work within the mainstream of politics, I don’t know what is.

Bousquet, by withdrawing when he could have made some of the councilors walk the plank for him, should also be commended. He helped keep the temperature low in both the council chambers and the city in the aftermath.

Meanwhile, Brad Markey, also a very nice guy and a man who will take political positions in the middle of the road — and particularly on fiscal issues won’t stray too far left and too far right — had suddenly been resurrected from the political dead.

They swore in Markey quickly, almost as if they didn’t dare let any further shenanigans take place. It was left to longtime Councilor Brian Gomes to correctly complain about the way the choice had been made as terribly divisive for the city. Make no mistake about the same divisions that are plaguing the nation and state are plaguing New Bedford. Public officials no longer compromise their way out of positions on which there are significant numbers of people on both sides of an issue.

Time will tell whether the city recovers quickly from this. A lot of bad blood has been let. In the wake of the vote, freshman Councilor James Roy told the mayor to his face, and in front of the media, that he felt he had told a lie on the radio. 

Roy was among the progressives who I think didn’t realize that politics is never over and they were outsmarted at the very end. The majority of School Committee members Wednesday looked like they did not know what hit them. And in truth, the conservative forces in the city these days are far more organized, far more passionate about the political process than the progressives.

By the end of the night, conservative activist Jacob Ventura had already posted a Facebook post of Markey joining himself and Oliver and Westport School Committee member Evan Gendreau for a drink.

I don’t know what that says and what it doesn’t say — Markey says Oliver simply asked him to join them for a drink afterwards. That’s a relief. Markey’s independence is going to be important to his credibility now.

Many will speculate about how all this went down, and how it didn’t go down. All I know is it was a good lesson for the folks on both sides of the aisle about how politics work. 

And how it’s not over until it’s over.

Email Jack Spillane at jspillane@newbedfordlight.org.

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