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at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute into a career as a clinical team leader. “These [summer] jobs are amazing,” she told Leung. “It [gives] us hope and shows that someone cares.”
    And people ask me why I got into politics.
    So, bringing Hyde Park values to City Hall, I said yes on summer jobs. Yes on putting police cadets in station houses to free up more cops for the streets. Yes on redeploying officers to a new Youth Violence Strike Force. But to show I was tough enough to be mayor, I also had to say no.
    My pollster, Irwin “Tubby” Harrison, discovered a potential breakout issue from focus group interviews with Boston residents. Some were angry about unsafe streets and others about failing schools, parking, or trash pickup. But all of them were furious over their water bills.
    To pay for the decade-long cleanup of Boston Harbor, home owners had seen their water bills rise overnight from a nominal yearly sum to hundreds of dollars a quarter with no end in sight. The bills were sent by the Boston Water and Sewer Commission, an appointed body beyond the voters’ reach. The mayor picked the three members of the commission board. I asked one of Ray’s holdover lawyers if I could order the board to freeze the rates for a year. The law was murky, but the lawyer doubted I had the power. “Can’t do it?” I interrupted. “Want to bet?”
    I announced the freeze in the morning. On the TV news at noon, City Councilor John Nucci, until recently one of my competitors in the mayor’s race, said I lacked the authority to freeze the rates. On the six o’clock news he hailed the freeze as a relief for hard-pressed home owners paying for the wasteful, crony-laden sewer commission. Between noon and six, irate constituents had flooded his office with calls. John’s turnabout was a test of the water rates issue. It was a winner. “It’s Tommy’s week,” an anonymous councilor told the
Globe
.
    Freezing the rates became our rallying cry in the preliminary and general election campaigns. Hit again and again in television ads. Pounded home in speeches, debates, and media interviews. A textbook example of entrepreneurial politics: Find a voting issue unexploited by your opponents and make it your own. We veterans of the three Timilty-White fights, of Jimmy Carter’s ’76 and ’80 campaigns, of my ’83 and subsequent council campaigns—we old hands knew how to play this game.
    An August poll showed Rosaria falling from 22 percent to 19 percent. She was stuck on gender. Too late, she realized that her pitch—vote for me because I’m “not one of the boys”—wasn’t giving people enough reason to vote for her. She was also battling the prejudice against electing women to executive office. And she misread the mood of the voters in attacking me as “Kevin Flynn,” as if balancing downtown development with neighborhood services was somehow unprogressive. As Ray Flynn himself said, Boston had moved on from the anti-downtown politics of 1983. In a slumping economy, people wanted a “Kevin Flynn” for mayor.
    The same poll had me stuck at 14 percent. But I was confident my numbers would rise after the rate freeze. It was popular in itself. Who wants to pay a higher water bill? And it showed me acting like a mayor.
    Another mayoral moment came in September, two weeks before the preliminary. The School Committee agreed to a new teachers’ contract. I said, “Go back to the bargaining table and get a better deal for the city.”
    Dave Nyhan scored it a win for me. “Everybody used to make fun of the way you talk,” he wrote. “So you lose a few ‘g’s’ here and there. People hereabouts talk like you talk. Nothing fancy. But when you got the chance to say ‘no’ [on the teachers’ contract] you said it loud and clear. Can Menino handle the job? No question. Case