Determination, ideas fuel Pressley’s run
Sitting on a bench in the blinding sunlight along one of Roslindale’s main thoroughfares, Boston City Councilor Ayanna Pressley credits her late mother for making sure that her only child knew what she could become if she had faith in her own talent and refused to take no for an answer. “She was guts and grace,” Pressley says of her mom, a tenants’ rights organizer who was determined that their often difficult circumstances would not hold Pressley back. “There were a lot of reasons for me to feel small and vulnerable and powerless,” Pressley remembers. But her mother’s tenacity prevailed time after time. “Every place that they told my mother she would never get me into,” Pressley says, “she got me into.”
Pressley’s own refusal to bow to conventional wisdom is proof that apples do not fall far from trees. Her Democratic primary challenge to Rep. Michael Capuano in Massachusetts’ 7th Congressional District is treated by some in the state’s political establishment as an affront. Capuano, after all, is a reliably progressive Democrat in all of the traditional respects, and there is not much policy distance between them.
But Pressley has Capuano worried, and with good reason. A dynamic campaigner with eight years as city councilor under her belt, Pressley has raised nearly a million dollars and has garnered the endorsements of both Boston’s major newspapers — first the conservative Boston Herald and now the liberal Boston Globe. She has made a strong case that as the daughter of a single mother, with a father who battled addiction, and as a survivor of sexual abuse who grew up in a neighborhood afflicted by gang violence, she knows things that most members of Congress do not, has thought about things that most members have not and views public service through a lens that most members cannot. She is positioned, she maintains, to elevate the role of public servant at a time when elevation is badly needed.
If there is a convincing rebuttal to Pressley’s argument, it is not immediately apparent.
Capuano and his supporters accuse Pressley, a black woman, of engaging in “identity politics.” She counters that her candidacy is not restricted to identity but driven by experience, fueled by a respect for people who have been excluded or forgotten — black, brown, white or some combination thereof — whose needs she has either personally experienced or has seen up close. The “identity politics” line seems a bit tinny, smacking of some concern that Pressley’s message is resonating and the hope that voters will treat her as a caricature, rather than as the nuanced individual she appears to be.
In person, Pressley’s analysis of the real-life problems facing her constituents and tens of millions of Americans like them is substantive, informed by an obviously significant degree of thought given to alleviating those problems. One example is her focus on food policy. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 17 percent of the 7th Congressional District qualifies as “food insecure,” the highest rate in Massachusetts. That translates to 133,000 people who lack consistent access to sufficient food to maintain an active, healthy life for all household members. Pressley’s eight-point “Equity Agenda,” covering issues that range from neighborhood violence to affordable housing, includes a pledge to bolster the Healthy Food Financing Initiative, an obscure farm bill program that provides financial support to food enterprises in underserved neighborhoods, including those she currently represents on the City Council and hopes to represent in Congress.
Whether it is inadequate nutrition or childhood trauma or schools that do not perform, Pressley argues that a lifetime closely aligning herself with the day-to-day concerns of people makes a difference. She is probably right. Along with the unwillingness to retreat in the face of conventional wisdom that she learned from her mother, it is probably why she has a real shot at winning the Democratic primary next Tuesday.