For some reason, I can’t get enough of the recent city council vote for a new council president. This being Boston, you know there’s a racial angle.  This being Boston, you know there’s a progressive/identity-politics angle. And this being Boston, you know there’s an old-fashioned grubby-pol pursuit of patronage jobs, committee assignments, and other perks of office. But for the life of me, I can’t quite figure out how councilor Liz Breadon came out of nowhere to win the presidency. OK, it’s clear Mayor Wu threw her last-minute political weight behind Breadon. Still, reading this morning’s Herald piece and recent columns by the Globe’s Adrian Walker and Joan Vennochi, I can’t keep track of the all the behind-the-scenes scheming, backstabbing, alliances, broken alliances, promised committee posts, references to race and gender, ‘us and them,’ ‘building bridges,’ mayoral setbacks and meddling, etc. etc. etc. 

Using a council scorecard to keep track of shifting ethnic/gender/political factions and allegiances doesn’t help. The final result – a white gay immigrant woman defeating a black male from Mattapan – doesn’t fit neatly into familiar modern Boston political paradigms. There’s no clear ethnic/gender pattern to the voting. Or as Vennochi put it: the final vote sent a “mixed message about the new Boston.” 

But maybe – just maybe – a mixed result is good. Boston has thankfully become so diverse in recent years, maybe the city is moving beyond old black-white racial fault lines and beyond standard identity politics toward something new, a blurred post-racial-gender zone of advanced progressive identity politics mixed with old-fashioned tribal ethnic/gender free-for-all fights for power and spoils of office. You know, something James Michael Curley would understand.