Mayor Thomas M. McGee on Monday became the first Lynn mayor in 20 years to announce he would not seek reelection. As stated in this newspaper on Wednesday, the news was not exactly startling.
McGee — in the words of my most respected political observer — never entirely left the State House after being sworn in as mayor in January 2018. To put it another way, he never seemed to completely exert his dominance over City Hall, an institution unto itself populated by civil servants who have seen mayors come and go.
McGee on Monday did not say why he wasn’t running for a second term. But I suspect, in the final analysis, he lacked that ever-so-small touch of insanity his three predecessors possessed.
His years spent in the state Legislature honed McGee’s compromise and consensus-building skills. Among the three of them, Patrick J. McManus, Edward J. Clancy Jr. and Judith Flanagan Kennedy served nine terms as mayor with a collective tenure extending across three decades.
There are many ways to describe the three former mayors’ leadership styles, but consensus and compromise are not two of them.
Seated behind his desk in the mayor’s office, feet propped up and a cigar held at a rakish angle, the late McManus could veer from waxing poetic on a topic to unleashing a torrent of profanity that would make your great-uncle the longshoreman blush.
Clancy liked to tap the list he kept in his suit jacket pocket to remind you how being mayor was a people-skills job. But woe betide anyone who crossed Chipper and got on his grudge list: He could freeze you out for weeks before he talked to you again.
And Judy Kennedy? Well, Judy Kennedy is Judy Kennedy. Her strange, extremely populistic and ham-handed approach to politics succeeded because many of the worries that keep other politicians awake at night don’t faze Kennedy.
Tom McGee is a nice guy and well-liked. But he never struck me as a my-way-or-the-highway leader and he never found that trusted second-in-command capable of twisting arms and knocking heads to get done what the mayor wanted done.
With a lame-duck mayor in City Hall and municipal elections nine months away, there is absolutely no excuse for anyone with even a remote interest in Lynn’s welfare to not run for office. Everyone who has an opinion about the city, who has voiced outrage or illuminated injustice locally, should take out nomination papers and run for office.
It doesn’t matter if you love or hate politics; your opinion matters and the city needs your voice. Someone (me) once said that the two emblematically-American feats anyone can undertake are running for office and starting a business. Failing at one or both is preferable because the point isn’t that you got elected or made a million bucks, the point is that you tried.
I come from a political family that includes a wife, mother, father and grandfather who ran for public offices and I know that politics is ultimately about pragmatism, not popularity. The people who win elections are the ones who do the hard, slogging work of identifying likely voters, meeting them face to face at least twice, and then making sure those voters go to the polls.
Tom McGee knows that hard work as well as anyone: He worked dozens of campaigns and, when it came down to the soul search, he might have just decided he didn’t want to work one more.
Thor Jourgensen can be reached at [email protected].
