Council race widens beyond S. Boston base

[Ian David]

By Matt Viser, Globe Staff | March 12, 2007

They have attended Chinese New Year festivities, wooed the powerful Chinese Progressive Association, courted Boston's only Asian city councilor, and repeatedly met with an influential Chinese patriarch known as Uncle Frank. Each has learned a phrase or two in Mandarin.

As seven candidates battle for the District 2 seat on the Boston City Council, vacated earlier this year with the death of James M. Kelly, they are going to great lengths outside the district's traditional power base in South Boston. Fearing that votes in The Town will not be enough to ensure victory in a divided race, candidates have been canvassing the South End and a corner of Dorchester that falls inside the district. Nowhere has the frenzied campaigning been more evident than in Chinatown, where candidates are competing fiercely just for the few hundred votes likely to come out of the neighborhood in the special election.

"This election is going to be about who can outwork who," said Robert O'Shea, a former postal carrier and public relations consultant from South Boston who said he has campaigned almost daily in the South End and Chinatown in addition to his home neighborhood.

Winning South Boston was enough to ensure victory for much of the 23-year reign of Kelly, who held the seat since the council created it and eight other district seats in 1983. But Kelly, a standard-bearer for Irish-Catholic South Boston, was also known for the attention he devoted to Chinatown, and some candidates said they are looking to his example.

Registered voters in South Boston far outnumber those in any other part of the district. But Chinatown is growing in political influence, with voters doubling in the last 10 years to about 2,500, while the number in Southie has stayed flat.

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