IF ERIN MURPHY feels a bit cheated this morning, it’s hard to blame her.
The at-large Boston city councilor apparently decided earlier this year that she’d had enough of the bickering with colleagues and the mayor over this city policy or that. Ditto for the endless stream of evening neighborhood meetings and weekend events that councilors are expected to show up at.
At 54, she wasn’t quite ready to retire, but it sure looked like she had found the next best thing.
With the announcement earlier this year by Maura Doyle, the estimable long-time clerk of the Supreme Judicial Court for Suffolk County, that she planned to give up the post she has held for nearly 30 years, Murphy announced that she was ready to turn her public-service focus to the elected court job.
That voters are tasked with choosing someone for the SJC job is a quirk of mid-19th century history. It’s hard to fashion much of a campaign platform for the administrative job overseeing those cases heard by single justices of the SJC. But Murphy was off and running, and seemed poised to follow a well-worn path into what wags once referred to as “the velvet coffin.”
The term came to be used for a set of secure, but obscure, administrative county positions that pay well – the SJC clerk’s job brings nearly $190,000 a year – and whose only formal requirements are collecting more votes than anyone else in elections few voters pay attention to, which blissfully only occur every six years.
That profile has been an irresistible draw for a steady stream of politicians over the years, who have sought the greener pastures of these positions, either after tiring of more visible, lower paid, elected posts or getting turned out of office.
Once safely ensconced in these positions, pols who may have once harbored ambitions of higher office often find themselves content to ride out the remainder of their careers far from public view, before turning to the generous public-sector pensions awaiting them at retirement.
For examples, look no farther than the other spots on yesterday’s Democratic primary ballot in Suffolk County. There, along with the candidates for SJC clerk, were the names of two washed-up local pols, largely forgotten but not entirely gone.
One-time Boston city councilor Maura Hennigan, who gave up her council seat eons ago to mount a longshot bid for mayor, appeared unopposed for reelection as clerk of the Superior Court for criminal business, while Steve Murphy, sent packing by voters nearly a decade ago from his council seat, was unopposed for reelection to the Suffolk County register of deeds job he sought refuge in.
It was easy to see why Erin Murphy, a former Boston school teacher, thought she would soon join them in offices that are rarely contested and where name recognition is often the main determinant of election outcomes.
But her road to the cushy pre-retirement landing spot ran into bumps not often encountered in the races for these seats: an opponent making a case based on qualifications for the job and, more significantly, a political climate in which prominent elected officials decided to use the race as a proxy for a bigger battle playing out to reshape Boston politics.
When it was over, Murphy was defeated by Allison Cartwright, a first-time candidate who started the campaign with no name recognition, but was fueled to victory by a high-octane bevy of big-name progressive politicos, who used the race to put down a marker declaring their dominance on local political scene.
A veteran public defender, Cartwright argued that, as a lawyer, she was more qualified than Murphy for the administrative court job. But what made the real difference was the line-up of prominent pols that got behind her, including Mayor Michelle Wu, Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, and state Sen. Lydia Edwards.
Murphy had her own slate of prominent backers, led by Congressman Steve Lynch, state Sen. Nick Collins, and City Councilor Ed Flynn.
But the stronger political tailwinds in Boston today are behind Wu and the progressive agenda she rode into office three years ago. Once they decided to flex their muscles in a race that usually would garner little attention, it changed the longstanding calculus that Murphy had been banking on.
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