E-Mail This Article to a Friend Linda Dorcena Forry A landslide vote carries a ‘New Boston’ candidate into Finneran’s former seat BY ADAM REILLY

THE FIRST GOOD sign for Linda Dorcena Forry came at 8:35 p.m., when a young man sporting a MassEquality sticker on his T-shirt began jumping up and down in the lobby of the Milton-Hoosic Club. When he was done, though, he refused to identify what he’d been celebrating. "I can’t," he insisted. "I don’t want to get in trouble."

Less cryptic signs soon followed. At a quarter to nine, Charlotte Golar Richie — the City Hall operative who’s mentored Dorcena Forry throughout her political career — walked through the front door with a big smile on her face. Thus began a flood of politicians, most of whom looked equally jovial: City Councilors Maureen Feeney and John Tobin, council hopeful Patricia White, State Senator Dianne Wilkerson, Suffolk County sheriff Andrea Cabral. State Senator Brian Joyce, who endorsed Dorcena Forry late in the campaign, drifted over to talk up the vote totals from Milton, where Dorcena Forry pulled in 61 percent of the vote. "See, I came out for her," Joyce explained. "We worked for her in Milton!" Everyone, it seemed, wanted to lay claim to some of Dorcena Forry’s magic.

At 9:01 p.m., Dorcena Forry’s campaign manager, Stu Rosenberg, stood at the podium and made it official: with 2770 votes — almost twice as many as her nearest competitor — Dorcena Forry had won a five-way race to replace Tom Finneran as the state representative for the 12th Suffolk District. It was an unexpectedly lopsided outcome, and one rife with symbolism: Dorcena Forry, a liberal Haitian-American woman, would succeed Finneran, a conservative Irish-American man who, as Speaker, ran the Massachusetts House with an iron fist.

The woman herself finally materialized at a quarter after. Dorcena Forry’s speech — when she finally reached the stage to give it — was a lengthy affair that included thank-yous to her manifold endorsers; references to the "new partnership" that she had repeatedly invoked on the campaign trail; a moving tribute to her recently deceased mother-in-law, Mary Casey Forry; and frequent pauses to wipe away tears or stifle laughter. Throughout, Dorcena Forry demonstrated one of her greatest talents: making people feel good about themselves. "This is such a wonderful crowd!" she exclaimed. "This city’s about all of us, whether we’re black or white, whether we’re from the Caribbean or Boston or the States. It doesn’t matter if you’re from Europe or whatever. We all just have to come together to talk about the issues!"

In the coming weeks, Dorcena Forry’s win will be touted as another sign of the arrival of a "New Boston" — and justifiably so. But afterward, when asked to expound on the significance of her victory, she refused to take much credit. "I don’t think it’s a particular racial group or whatever," she said of the "New Boston" notion. "It’s the direction the city is moving in ... just standing up on the podium and seeing everyone in that room was beautiful: you had people from Milton, from Dorchester, from Mattapan, from Hyde Park. Because they feel the energy. They want to come together. People want to be involved. They want to feel like they’re part of something."

So they do. And that, in large part, is why Dorcena Forry won.

Adam Reilly can be reached at areilly[a]phx.com