Boston Mayor Wu says Josh Kraft’s marketing campaign might have thousands and thousands, however lacks ‘substance’ as pair commerce blows

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu and her primary opponent Josh Kraft continued to hammer away at one another Wednesday, with Wu saying the thousands and thousands of {dollars} of outdoor funding being poured into Kraft’s marketing campaign is a smokescreen for its lack of “substance.”

Wu was talking to the $2 million in private money Kraft, son of the billionaire New England Patriots proprietor Robert Kraft, lately put towards his personal marketing campaign; the $1.4 million an excellent PAC backing him has spent to date on adverts attacking the progressive mayor; and a few million-dollar donations from main enterprise executives which have been made towards that PAC, “Your City, Your Future,” that helps his marketing campaign.

“We have not experienced, in Boston’s history, a race of this kind before, with such sums of money pouring in from billionaires, from Trump mega donors, from people outside the city, in a flurry of negative campaign ads,” Wu stated Wednesday on GBH’s Boston Public Radio. “This is about directly trying to sow fear or confusion, or just to hammer away at Boston’s progress, to try to turn it around.”

Wu stated “most Bostonians” agree that town “has been headed in the right direction over the last few years,” whereas ticking off what she says her first-term administration has achieved within the realm of making inexpensive housing and youth summer season jobs, and enhancing public security.

“Yet we are going to have folks from the outside pouring millions of dollars in to say everything is horrible, everything is broken and messed up, because we want to ensure that someone who is more like us gets in there,” Wu stated.

The mayor, a Chicago native, additionally repeated her often-cited digs about Kraft’s current transfer to Boston, and that his rich household was making an attempt to purchase him the mayor’s job.

Wu, a former metropolis councilor, stated she’s by no means been able to place $2 million of her personal money into her marketing campaign account, or have her father, or an LLC on her father’s behalf, purchase her a $2.4 million condominium “so I could move into a city” and “run for a seat that I’ve never even voted for before.”

“It is what it is. That is the money situation in terms of politics in our country,” Wu stated. “But I would just say it is, in some ways, masking or taking the focus away from the fact that there’s no substance there either.”

Wu pointed to the race’s first mayoral discussion board, the place she asserted Kraft was unable to reply a number of the ‘yes’ or ‘no’ questions posed to the candidates due to his lack of familiarity with the problems.

Her feedback on the radio got here hours earlier than she and Kraft have been set to battle once more in a second mayoral discussion board in Dorchester.

Quickly after her remarks, the Kraft marketing campaign issued a scathing assertion accusing Wu of “advancing a dishonest campaign to convince voters of things about Josh Kraft that she knows are not true.”

“Michelle Wu’s allegations about Josh Kraft are categorically false,” the Kraft marketing campaign stated in an announcement. “Josh bought his Boston house along with his personal cash. Josh’s voting document is evident. He has voted in a number of elections as a Boston resident.

“And Josh has worked in and around the neighborhoods of Boston for 35 years — most of it for the Boys and Girls Clubs of Boston — and his work long predates when Michelle Wu arrived at Harvard.”

The Kraft marketing campaign added, “Mayor Wu’s campaign of falsehoods address her record of failures as mayor of Boston — from housing to the Boston Public Schools, from managing the budget to managing her own personnel problems inside City Hall. Josh has offered a clear and fact-based assessment of Mayor Wu’s numerous policy failures coupled with his own detailed proposed policy solutions.”