A black accordion file sits on a desk outside Mayor Thomas M. Menino’s empty office on the fifth floor of Boston City Hall. Most days, city employees stuff paperwork into manila folders in the compartments: One sleeve is reserved for documents Menino needs to sign, another for memos the mayor needs to read.
Normally, the bundle goes home with Menino to Readville. But for the past 25 days, the plastic file has been driven the 3½ miles from City Hall to Francis Street, where doctors at Brigham and Women’s Hospital continue to treat Menino for a variety of ailments.
Comments
Here is an open note to Mayor Menino and his staff. Ignore any distractions at this point and please continue running Boston as you have over the past successful years. This is a time when many of my neighbors are watching their other political leaders self-destruct or lose face, so please keep focused on your priorities. We wish you good health and look forward to seeing you back in your office as time allows.
Don't encourage this craziness to continue: He ought to quit while he is ahead, rather than portray a power hungry Democrat hanging onto power in his death-bed. Foolish, incompetent man has too many toadies.
The mayor is obviously not up to the job. His ongoing illnesses are most likely serious, and if he values his constituants
as much as he says ,he will do himself, his family and the people he serves a favor and retire. It is long overdue.
"He keeps two cellphones — one for city duties, one for campaign purposes — poised on a table next to his bed." This sentence (with its odd use of the word "poised" applied to cellphones) captures the principal problem with politics in our culture today: in the final analysis, politicians preach public service but practice self-service, so electoral considerations trump good government. The name of the game, in Haldeman and Erlichman's phrase (look them up, kids) is "maximize the incumbency". So it's give away the store to municipal unions and other special interests in return for votes, pad government with unnecessary and wasteful patronage jobs for inept campaign hacks, manipulate a lap-dog press by offering "access", and the taxpayer be damned. It's like this at every level of government. If the good Mayor truly had the public good in mind all these years (rather than his own incumbency), he might have stepped down long ago and given someone with fresh ideas and new energies a chance. People truly get the government they deserve.
Mayor Menino daily pace over the many years as mayor is a feat I've yet to see duplicated by anyone less one. It is no wonder the man is in the hospital recuperating. Most would never have been able to keep up for even a year, never mind twenty. That said, I have no doubt he continues doing his job from the confines of the hospital. So it has altered his style, but that doesn't mean that the work is being neglected or the machine is failing. Give the guy his well deserved chance to get back on his feet. Bush spent over 70 days working from his ranch as President and he wasn't even ill. I can only imagine what went on behind the scenes for Roosevelt and Kennedy. I suspect these naysayers exist because they can't imagine the work ethic and level of energy this man has and assumes wrongly that age and illness has taken him out of the game. They obvioiusly don't know Menino.
Mayor Menino has gone way beyond power-hungry and into the realm of foolish!
It's time for the Mayor to retire. They need some fresh air in City Hall. He is doing a disservice to city residents by staying on. Move on and enjoy your retirement.
Tom, we hope you'll be home for Christmas; the greatest gift to the City of Boston would be a complete overhaul of the Boston Public School System, an immediate and complete return to neighborhood schools by the end of 2014. We are Bostonians, we can do anything when we make a decision. We don't need a study to know that parents choose to move to Boston, or out, because of this; please explain why busing was worth $100 million per year with a statistically insignificant number of Caucasian children. Boston also needs to know more about the casino: Commercial Interests - Success Of Suffolk Downs Casino May Hinge On Menino’s Reelection - Boston Developers’ Luck May Run Out If Mayor Decides Not To Run - By Scott Van Voorhis - Banker & Tradesman Columnist - Here’s a little hint: If you are a developer with big plans for Boston, especially if they involve a casino, you had better be praying early and often for Mayor Thomas M. Menino’s swift recovery.