Mayor Michelle Wu launched her long-delayed re-election marketing campaign kickoff in a State of the Metropolis speech that opponent Josh Kraft couldn’t compete towards, taking a robust swipe at President Donald Trump and Republican “bullies” for criticizing Boston’s sanctuary metropolis standing.
“This is our city. No one tells Boston how to take care of our own. Not kings, and not presidents who think they are kings,” Wu stated, referring to her testimony in Washington earlier than the Home Oversight Committee. “Boston was born facing down bullies.”
Wu held the ability of the bully pulpit Wednesday evening inside MGM Music Corridor, the place rock stars normally carry out, saying main feel-good initiatives like an reasonably priced housing plan, an power saver program and an growth of free museum Sundays for households of Boston schoolchildren.
It was an illustration of the ability of incumbency and an instance of why Boston mayors are rarely defeated.
Referring to frame czar Tom Homan’s menace to convey “hell” to Boston for harboring unlawful immigrants, Wu Wednesday retorted that “come high water or hell – no matter who threatens to bring it – Boston has stood up for the people we love and the country we built.”
Wu’s speech passed off two months later than a standard State of the Metropolis deal with as a result of she had simply given delivery to her third baby in January and took a while off.
It was her second main public look in the previous couple of weeks, coming simply two weeks after being hauled in entrance of the Home Oversight Committee by Republican leaders to testify about Boston’s sanctuary metropolis standing.
“It is because of this community – and the work we’ve done together – that I was able to raise my right hand, swear an oath and tell the nation the truth, that Boston is the greatest city on earth,” she stated Wednesday evening to loud applause from the partisan crowd of Metropolis Corridor officers and political leaders.
Her testimony earlier than Congress drew largely reward from her supporters and in addition served to provoke her re-election marketing campaign on a difficulty that might have develop into a legal responsibility.
“We are a city where the Irish coffee is strong and our opinions are stronger,” she stated within the State of the Metropolis. “We may not always agree or see eye to eye, but at the end of the day, we are a family. If you come for one of us, you will get all of us.”
The speech Wednesday evening was primarily rocket gasoline for her marketing campaign, which has but to be formally began. She was primed for this second.
It was extra like a state of the marketing campaign speech solidifying her standing on the prime of the polls over Kraft, son of billionaire Patriots’ proprietor Robert Kraft.
Wu’s State of the Metropolis and her condemnation of Trump is sure to get nationwide consideration and solidify her as one of many nation’s main political progressives, although it’s not going to assist in the case of the federal authorities’s possible punishment of Boston for being a sanctuary metropolis.
Earlier than the speech even started, she introduced a cope with the Boston academics’ union to lock them into pay raises for the following three years.
Search for Wu’s speech and the initiatives she launched to develop into speaking factors for her marketing campaign within the coming months.
Wu as anticipated throughout her speech repeated her declare that Boston is secure, regardless of information displaying different cities with much less violent crime and a significant crime downside in Downtown Crossing that’s maintaining individuals from visiting the town.
She additionally spent a part of the speech Wednesday evening highlighting progress within the faculties, although violence and previous damaged down faculty buildings proceed to plague Boston’s faculty system.
Kraft tried to blunt the influence of the speech by saying his first ever union endorsement, however that obtained only a fraction of the eye Wu bought for her televised speech.
