Fueled By Outside Money, Boston’s Mayoral Slugfest Gets Personal

Both Walsh and Connolly have taken great pains to straddle these  two worlds. They’ve each tried to graft enough of the new Boston onto the city’s  old, politically active base to cobble together a winning coalition.

Walsh is the son of Irish immigrants and a second-generation  construction laborer. He speaks with a ragged Boston accent. The 46-year old  state legislator measure the success of his days on the campaign trail by how  much his right hand aches at night, when he’s done shaking hands. He’s a former  alcoholic who has touched a vein of fervent support in the city’s recovery  community. There’s plenty of Tom Menino in Walsh: He won’t stun anyone with  oratory, but he combines a fierce work ethic with a unique ability to connect  personally with voters.

Walsh entered the mayoral race vowing to out-hustle field, and he  topped September’s 12-person preliminary election. Walsh will never out-debate  Connolly on policy minutiae, but along the way, he’s surprised skeptics. He  wowed a room full of downtown business executives recently with a riff about how  he’d never imagined, when he first ran for the State House, that he’d be a key  vote against the death  penalty, and for gay marriage, but he’d grown with the  job. “You grow and evolve,” he says. “You learn.” He argues that he has traction  in the mayor’s race because “my upbringing is resonating. I keep hearing the  theme, I’m a regular guy.”

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