The Buddy System

Politics in Cambridge is a team sport.

One set of fans--those who sit in the expensive box seats along Brattle St. and the low-rent bleachers around the rest of the city--root for the Cambridge Civic Association (CCA) squad, the New York Yankees of Cambridge hardball politics.

Others, including many who have held Cambridge season tickets all their lives, cheer on the Cambridge Homeowners and Taxpayers (CHT) and the Cambridge Property Owners Association (CPOA) teams--groups that boomed in the past but seem, Oakland Athletics style, to be losing a little bit of their clout.

And this season, there's an expansion team--the Concerned Cambridge Citizens--which shows no sign of winning the pennant, instead serving notice that after next spring training it may emerge a stronger squad.

With the World Series of city politics--the biennial municipal elections--hours away, all three slates are winding up frenetic campaigns.

For the CCA, it's been largely business as usual. The 40-year-old "progressive party" endorsed its slate in a well-attended summer convention. Many of the names were the same as two years ago, and the tactics are similar-city-wide mailings, printed slate cards which volunteers will hand to voters as they enter the polls, and a superb fundraising machine.

Smooth as the process seems on the outside, there have been a few internal struggles for the CCA this year--some members of a rival liberal group, CPPAX, felt they were being left out of the endorsement and campaign process. As a result, "some of us haven't given as much time as we might have to the campaign," one disgruntled CPPAX member proclaimed.

Among the candidates themselves, only an intricate arrangement for billings and credits prevents squabbles. For example: each candidate's literature also lists the entire slate. But not in alphabetical order, presumably because that would aid Francis Duehay and hurt David Wylie. So candidates begin the list with the name closest after theirs in the alphabet and work through it to the beginning.

Despite its minor problems, though, the CCA appears to be the most cohesive, professionally run and effective of the city's political teams. Perhaps the best measure of the respect it engenders around the league is the nasty reaction it provokes from other politicos, who tend to snarl about machines and elitists when the CCA is mentioned.

Currently, CCA candidates hold four of the nine city council seats and three of the seven school committee slots. They stand for liberal policy--rent control, limited condominium conversion and professional city management." And chances are, they will stand as strong after tomorrow's election as they do today.

Addressing only tenant issues, the equally liberal Rent Control Task Force endorsed a slate of candidates but raised only $100 through October 20 for its campaign.

The CHT and CPOA are the other side of the CCA coin--they draw their support from parts of the city not dissected by Brattle St., and from people who collect rent, not pay it. Virulently anti-rent control, with almost a messianic attachment to condominiums, the CHT leaders a few weeks ago endorsed a slate of candidates all their own. But although the group will mail out leaflets and help work at the polls, their presence isn't felt in the same way as the CCA's, mainly because their candidates are of a different breed. Instead of the team players on the CCA, they tend toward individual stardom--Walter Sullivan for example has a network of buddies and relatives built up since he broke into the major leagues more than two decades ago--he doesn't need the CHT card file to help his effort. It's a little hard to gauge the strength of the CHT campaign effort--the group as of Friday hadn't filed the campaign finance report due a week earlier. Group president Richard Fraiman says the final tally will be somewhere in the several thousands of dollars. And although Cambridge political folk wisdom conventionally holds that there are more tenants than landlords, hence more CCA than CHT votes, the conservatives have a whole new constituency to appeal to this year--the more than 2,000 condominium owners who moved to Cambridge since the last election.

Another group that appeals to the condo owners, albeit more mysteriously, is the CCC. In what became one of the biggest controversies of the election, the CCC endorsed a slate of 13 candidates, but did not vote on a platform. Instead of issues, its leaders say, they are interested in "moderation." Chiding the city council for unproductive infighting, the CCC nonetheless endorsed most of the incumbents, including Wylie and Duehay, two very surprised members of the liberal CCA slate. They were surprised at the endorsements because the CCC seemed (though its leaders deny the charge) to have more links with conservative than liberal leaders. If the CCC slate won, rent control would likely die, and the majority of the group's officers are definitely condominium owners. Duehay and Wylie were perhaps equally surprised at the nasty reaction of many of their own supporters. The Rent Control Task Force reportedly scheduled a meeting to consider unendorsing the pair, who quickly demanded instead that the CCC remove its blessing. It did, and now representing an overwhelmingly conservative bias, the CCC marches on, dead set on finding middle ground in this battle of confusing initialed organizations.

Now you may still be wondering why slates are important in the city, why many candidates feel it is helpful to ally with others of similar (or in the case of the CCC, somewhat similar) views. The reason is proportional representation, Cambridge's fruitcake balloting system. Because ballots can count for a voter's second or third choice candidate if his first preference wins big or is eliminated from the running, it pays to give voters a list of identifiable candidates. It has also served as a useful way for Cantabrigians to clearly define the issues facing the city--CCA candidates, for example, are in favor of rent controls, and voters have little to fear in the way of defections.

So when the seventh game is played Tuesday, there's one ground rule to remember--as baseball mentors have said for a century, "This is a team effort."