E-Mail This Article to a Friend The hazards of good breeding Patricia White and Ed Flynn follow in their fathers’ footsteps BY ADAM REILLY

Don’t envy them.

Granted, Patricia White and Ed Flynn bring some hefty advantages to their at-large Boston City Council campaigns. When your father’s an ex-mayor, as both Kevin White (1968-1983) and Ray Flynn (1984-1993) are, you have automatic name recognition. A slice of the electorate is already inclined to vote for you. And you know, from firsthand experience, what it takes to run and win a citywide campaign.

But there are perils, too. It’s not easy for children of famous parents to carve out their own identity: look at John Henry Williams, the cartoonishly pathetic son of Ted, or George W. Bush, whose do-it-for-daddy issues gave us the Iraq war. As Flynn and White make their case to Boston voters — knocking on doors, schmoozing at ethnic festivals, listening gravely at neighborhood meetings — it’s a safe bet that, on countless occasions, their departure will be followed by pursed lips and disappointed grumbling: She’s no Kevin White. He’s no Ray Flynn.

WHITES AND WRONGS

Two years ago, Patricia White gambled that the net effect of her parentage would be positive. Kevin White was a ubiquitous presence in Patricia White’s 2003 run, joining the candidate for photo ops and smiling benevolently from her campaign brochure. To long-time observers of Boston politics, these constant nods to Kevin — a charismatic reformer who nearly landed the Democratic vice-presidential nomination in 1972 — were simply smart tactics. "It would be completely silly to not point it out," argues Suffolk County Clerk Magistrate John Nucci, a former city councilor and mayoral candidate who calls himself a White supporter.

The September 2003 preliminary election seemed to bear this out. White finished in third place, easily advancing to the November final and seemingly poised to unseat one of the council’s four at-large incumbents. The Herald, in typically breathless fashion, even anointed White a future mayoral contender.

The magic didn’t last. Come November, White finished in fifth place, 857 votes behind incumbent Steve Murphy and just short of the fourth at-large slot. Since then, she has married, had a child, and moved from tony Beacon Hill to middle-class West Roxbury. She’s also bolstered her résumé with a job at Boston Partners in Education, where she worked to bring community leaders into the city’s public schools. And — as evidenced by this year’s campaign brochure, in which Kevin White (who is struggling with Alzheimer’s) is conspicuously absent — she’s reconsidered her approach.

"I think voters in 2003 saw me as Kevin White’s daughter, and therefore assumed I was a conservative Irish-Catholic politician," White says today. "What’s so surprising to me about that is that my father was extremely liberal.... I think there was an assumption, because I was Irish-Catholic and the daughter of an older politician from a different generation, that I was somehow a conservative Irish-Catholic politician. And that was a huge misconception."

It’s hard to know, from this analysis, if White blames herself or the voters for what happened two years ago. But either way, she’s doing things differently this time around. In the current election cycle, White’s top priority seems to be convincing voters that she’s simpatico with Boston’s ongoing leftward shift. For example, she began a recent interview by noting that she’d recently met with District Seven Councilor Chuck Turner — a veteran African-American activist and the council’s lone Green-Rainbow Party member — to try to win his support. She didn’t get it. But simply by trying, she served notice that, unlike many of the council’s Irish-Catholic incumbents, she opposes any imminent return to a neighborhood-schools framework. ("I thought that she and [council president] Michael Flaherty had made an alliance, and that she was coming on to buttress his positions around a number of issues," Turner says of White. "So I was pleased to see that she wasn’t a supporter of a discriminatory policy.") And, for good measure, White also took care to point out her support of both gay marriage and abortion rights.

"In 2003, I was more moderate than two of the incumbents running for office," she acknowledges. "The truth is, I’m not as progressive as Felix Arroyo, and I’m not as progressive as Maura Hennigan. But in this election" — with Hennigan giving up her at-large seat to run for mayor — "there’s a different spectrum, and I am in fact much more progressive than a lot of the other challengers. I’m fairly confident — and I’m fairly confident that the debates will bear this out — that for the open seat, I’m the candidate that is progressive and viable."

Considering the well-documented successes of left-leaning candidates in recent elections (Felix Arroyo, Andrea Cabral, Mike Moran, Linda Dorcena Forry), this is a smart sales pitch. But can White make it work? At her best, she’s articulate and incisive, with a measure of polish that’s largely lacking on the council today. Sometimes, though, this polish is a bit too prevalent, lending White an aristocratic air that could undercut her claims of progressivism. When talk turns to the controversial Boston University biolab project — which White supports — she scoffs at the notion that things might have unfolded differently if the biolab had been slated for a white, politically connected area like West Roxbury, rather than the hardscrabble, heavily minority South End–Roxbury border. "That’s incredibly cynical," White says. "It’s bordering on dangerous to suggest that." Actually, it’s not cynical at all. It simply acknowledges that in Boston, as in numerous other cities, power isn’t distributed equitably — a key progressive insight if ever there was one.