Kevin Cavanaugh Will Stand Up for the People of Manchester as Mayor
OPINION
MANCHESTER, NH — Six years ago, the late Bill Cashin submitted a petition to the Board of Mayor and Alderman, asking it to convene a conduct board to investigate then-Mayor Ted Gatsas’ cover-up of the West High School rape during the 2015 mayoral election. I wrote the petition for Cashin — the man Rich Girard called “The Kingmaker” — who served as an alderman for 32 straight years. Cashin and I subsequently were hit with a libel suit by Gatsas that was later dismissed by the court, the judge all but calling the former mayor a liar.
The cost of that petition to the Cashin family and myself was considerable. Respecting their privacy, I will not speak for the Cashin family, but as for myself, I wound up in Eliot Hospital for five days, due to stress; the doctors thought I had had a stroke. Part of the stress derived from the fact that aside from a mere handful of people, the citizens of Manchester turned their backs on us, which in the case of someone as respected as Bill Cashin, was incredible. When that lawsuit was filed, criticism of Gatsas and the coverup by John and Jane Q. Public ceased, and public support for Cashin and myself was largely non-existent.
The people of Manchester were scared. Amd their courage in the face of Ted Gatsas’ bullying was lacking.
I can count the number of private citizens who supported us on the fingers of one hand, minus my thumb and my index finger: Jim O’Connell, Dave Scannell (whose letter to the Union Leader criticizing Gatsas’ lawsuit was never published), and Matt Connarton.
But first, there was the actions of the Board of of Mayor Aldermen.
The BMA Votes
I was there the night of the vote. The meeting was held in the Health Department building, not City Hall, which was being refurbished, as Ted Gatsas’ contribution to the 2015 Craig-Long budge that overrode the tax cap by 3.9% in order to better fund the police department was money to fix up City Hall. I watched the debate with increasing dismay, as I saw the aldermen knuckle-down to the gale force of Gatsas-brand bully bluster. Daniel P. O’Neil, the Chairman of the Board, fought back, telling Gatsas in response to a Gatsonian verbal assault that the rape cover up had become a national story.
I am a cynic whose Irish blood finds comfort in Eugene O’Neil’s admonition, “Damn the optimists, they are so pessimistic!” Yet even I wound up in shock by what I witnessed, the near total capitulation of the Board to Gatsas, in the wake of what, as Danny O’Neil pointed out, was a national scandal.
Only two of 14 Board members voted for the petition that night: Danny O’Neil and the new alderman from Ward 1, Kevin Cavanaugh. When it was time for the votes to be counted, Danny and Kevin were the only two of the fourteen to vote yeah on the petition calling for Gatsas to be held accountable for his actions.
Ted Gatsas’ Political Limbo Dance
This occurred during the ramp up to the city election of 2017. When news broke that the Manchester School District had not informed parents of a rape at West High School two years earlier, the less-than-lithe Ted Gatsas did a political limbo dance. It was a dance move as startling as the invention of the limbo dance itself, brought into being by legendary skinflint Jack Benny, when confronted by a pay toilet at the Hollywood Bowl. (Note to those under a certain age: Yes, you once had to pay to use a public toilet, even in the subterranean pissoirs under Veterans Park. That practice was brought to an end in service of gender equity, as it was pointed out that females used the “Ladies Room” more then males used the “Men’s Room” in those less-than-enlightened times.)
A brief digression: The limbo was a phenomenon that afflicted the G.I Generation, one witnessed by countless early Baby Boomers, standing by in their PJs, peering through a haze of cigarette smoke at the adult antics that were part of boozy parties in the 1950s and the first two-thirds of the ’60s, dumbfounded by the dumbassedness of their parents, who had survived a depression as kids and a world war when barely out of their teens. This was many many years before they were rebranded “The Greatest Generation” to sell Tom Brokaw’s book. For later Baby Boomers like myself, now that the parents had reached their 40s and morphed into a generation of Archies and Edith Bunkers, more content to entertain themselves with their broadening backsides glued to the seats of rump-sprung easy chairs parked in front of the boob tube, our knowledge of the limbo dance craze came when fingering through our parents unbelievably gauche record albums. (The Beatles were upstairs in Big Sister’s room, with the portable record player.) The evidence could be foynd somewhere between the soundtrack for Doctor Zhivago (with the ubiquitous “Lara’s Theme”) and Mantovani easy listening records that perched in the side bay of the radio-stereo console that was nearly chest high to a kid (“It’s not just a record player it’s part of the furniture” LIFE Magazine blurted) and the few remaining shellacked 78s like Artie Shaw’s “Flight of the Bumblebee” bringing up the back. (This was an album pulled out for a Last Hurrah during the Batman/Green Hornet TV craze of the mid-60s…. And there it was. A “party album” featuring as cover art, a heavily lipsticked and mascara-ed woman in a compromising pose circa 1959, crab-like and almost on her back, parallel to the floor, shimmying under a broomstick, with the provocative question How Low Can You Go? emblazoned on the cover.
How Low Can You Go?
In politics, quite low indeed. The political limbo seems to be a skill developed during a career in politics, in which the career politician begins to exist in a kind of political limbo, half way from Hell but far from Heaven. We are lucky to have candidates who don’t limbo.
Though the then-Mayor Gatsas was of elephantine proportions, he was a aster at the political limbo.
Why I Am Voting for Kevin Cavanaugh
Why am I voting for Kevin Cavanaugh come Tuesday, November, 7th. One word: COURAGE.
Granted, this is a word from the past, and one that challenges the professionally politically pure at heart, with its overtones of toxic masculinity, but courage is a real thing. And I am basing my vote for mayor on it.
In my satirical takes on “Gatsasland” in the past, I sometimes portrayed Manchester as a less-than-wonderful land of Oz, the political winds set a blowing by the outrageous bluster of Ted Gatsas. I sometimes portrayed Ted as the Wicked Witch of the East Side.
When one hears the word “Courage” in this time where the movie Barbie is the cultural barometer of our land, the concept of courage might seem like a joke. The Cowardly Lion, when Dorothy first meets him, is all Gatsasian gasbag bluster, with no real courage at all.
Let me tell you, Ted Gatsas’ bully bluster was no joke. He was no cartoon figure. When he went after you, and after you he would go if you angered him, it was one heavy trip. He was more Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, threatening to hand you your head, than a fun figure in a children’s fantasy.
Insiders told Bill Cashin that before the debate on the petition for a conduct board to investigate his seeming cover up of the West High rape, Gatsas came down heavily on all the Board members whose votes he didn’t already own. (Let me explain. Ted Gatsas was a wealthy man, and had many powerful friends and business/political acquaintances. He had power, and used it. He could make things happen for you, or happen against you. And he did.)
Bill Cashin had expected that the vote for a conduct board would fail, but he wanted the Board of Aldermen on record on the issue. Cashin wanted Gatsas held to account, and even a failed vote of say six for and eight against, or a seven-seven split, a tie that Gatsas would have to break, would put the Board on record as having criticized Gatsas’ behavior. Cashin had been a master of parliamentary procedure when he was on the Board, many years serving as Chairman of the Board. This was one of the ways to keep a mayor in check.
Another digression: Structurally, inside the Board of Mayor and Alderman, when one reads the City Charter as carefully as I did under Cashin’ tutelage, there exists a Board of Alderman that seemingly is separate from the BMA, whose chair is the mayor; the Chairman of the Board is an alderman (at the time of the vote on the petition, it was Danny O’Neil). This paradox arises from the amalgamation of the old City Charter with new language brought about by the 1990s Charter Commission, which made the office of the mayor more powerful. Also, this paradox manifests itself due to the tension between the Aldermen, who have their own Chairman, and the Mayor, who chairs the BMA, when it comes to both parties exerting their power when their interests are not in sync.
What Cashin did not expect was that the members of the Board of Alderman would fold, collapsing like a poorly built house of cards. And when the house of cards collapsed, there were only two cards that remained upright: Daniel P. O’Neil, Chairman of the Board, and Kevin Cavanaugh, the first term alderman from Ward 1.
To take nothing away from Danny O’Neil, we must remember that he was a long-time board member, a long-time Chairman of the Board, and a veteran alderman who used his Chairman of the Board position to constantly fight Mayor Ted Gatsas. Danny had guts and he had accumulated power, and he fought Gatsas over many issues, such as the budget, and he fought Gatsas the night of the conduct board vote. A night Gatsas reportedly was pulling out all the stops to stop the petition.
Unknown to the public that night, Gatsas had already filed his libel lawsuit against Bill Casino and myself. Officially, he had withheld that information from the Board, though BMA members knew. As I said, Gatsas was pulling out all the stops. The pressure on the aldermen was intense, and many who would be expected to have voted for the petition failed to do so.
Of the Aldermen, Chairman of the Board Danny O’Neil was steadfast.
Of the other 13, Kevin Cavanaugh was the lone alderman to vote to convene a conduct board to investigate whether Ted Gatsas did indeed, as mayor, cover up the West High Rape.
That took courage. Kevin Cavanaugh’s vote in the face of the gale force winds of Gatsas Bully Bluster took genuine courage.
In his first years as alderman, Cavanaugh also faced tough votes over employee contracts and overriding the tax cap in times when those issues were more charged than they have been since Joyce Craig became mayor. Gatsas and his attack dogs on public TV and radio savaged certain aldermen over contract votes, attacking them on the basis of conflict of interest charges. One alderman backed down and another eventually retired, but all aldermen were aware of the political backlash that faced them in the last days of the Gatsas regime.
Aside from the current period with the debate over the homeless initiatives department, there hasn’t been any time in Joyce Craig’s mayoralty (with a caveat we’ll come to) that was as fraught as the votes in the time when Ted Gatsas was mayor and Kevin Cavanaugh was first on the Board.
A Mayor’s First Term
There was a struggle for power among BMA members during Mayor Craig’s first term, as there is during the first term of any mayor. As I have pointed out, there is a paradox in the City Charter that illustrates not just faulty drafting by the Charter Commission, but the very real fault line between the mayor, as chief executive and chief operating officer of the business of Queen City government, and the aldermen, who act as the board of directors.
Despite having been one of them (and their hardest working member, and — aside from then Chairman of the Board O’Neil — their most influential member), the Board of Alderman gave Mayor Craig a hard time in her first term, as it exerted itself and pushed its sphere of influence into areas that had been won by Ted Gatsas while he served as mayor. Freed from the spell of the Wicked Witch of the East Side (doused with the cold bucket of water that was a 2,000 vote loss to Joyce Craig), the Board of Aldermen felt emboldened, now that it was free of the tyranny of an imperious mayor. It decided to exert its own power, and unleash a little of its own tyranny, denying Mayor Craig her first significant appointment.
Mayor Craig by the end of her first term did establish herself and began exerting her own power as mayor. The breakthrough was when she got her own pick for Airport Director through the Board, and what a pick it was, the new director turning Manchester’s airport into a nationally renowned success.
Is this a story of bad alderman versus virtuous mayor? No, it is a story of aldermen and the rump Board of Aldermen that exists within the framework of the Board of Mayor and Alderman, and its tensions with a mayor made more powerful since the reforms of the 1997 Charter Commission. Like children testing their parents, or enlisted men their new sergeant, limits are going to be determined by trial of combat.
The next mayor will face a Board of Aldermen chaired by either Pat Long or Danny O’Neil, who should have a lock on being elected once again to the BMA, where he functioned effectively and powerfully for many years. Both are seasoned veterans of city politics and both will exert the power of the aldermen in demarcating their territory when exerting their power over the wishes and actions of the new mayor.
Which candidate is most likely to survive that battle? Joyce Craig, as Joe Kelly Levasseur has pointed out, is a tough as nails negotiator behind closed doors. As Bill Cashin once told me, all power is exerted behind closed doors. What you see during meetings generally is for show. Deals and votes are hammered out before the BMA meeting.
After experiencing the strong mayoralty of Joyce Craig’s last term, where she exerted her own agenda — and won — the Board of Aldermen likely will want to take some territory back, with the opportunities offered by the changing of the guard. They will test, if not haze, the new mayor unmercifully during their first term. As the new mayor’s term evolves, the struggles between mayor and aldermen will initially create, if not a battlefield, then a no man’s land eventually evolving into a demilitarized zone and then a zone of occupation, depending on how able the the mayor is and if they are able to hack it.
Republican Jay Ruais, in the unlikely instance of winning the general election, will be toast. A resident of Manchester for less than two years, and with few real allies (the Manchester Republicans, in the hands of people I view as something a little short of fanatics and kooks, don’t seem to like him much as he is a reasonable person), would be eaten alive.
It is my belief that Kevin Cavanaugh will have the easiest time dealing with the Board of Aldermen lurking inside the Board of Mayor and Alderman. When I say ”easiest” I am not saying his transition from alderman to mayor will be easy; he will face what Joyce Craig did in her first term. It wasn’t easy on Joyce, but she did prevail due to her inner qualities of strength and courage, and her knowledge of the system and how it is played, and because of her ability to build coalitions with city power brokers.
It won’t be easy for Kevin Cavanaugh, either. However, his experience as an alderman, his personal connections with Board members including the powerhouses of the board (past and present and likely soon-to-be future, in the cast of Danny O’Neil) will give him an edge in establishing himself as a functioning mayor by exerting the prerogatives of mayoral power. I believe that he will be able to accomplish this more quickly than the other two Democrats.
The Quality of Courage
Along with that advantage, Kevin Cavanaugh has the quality of courage that I saw during the vote on calling Mayor Gatsas to account.
I’m a late Baby Boomer, and I remember John F. Kennedy. As a kid, he was kind of like a second father (those were different times). And being part of those times, the first book I read that could be classified as “political science” was JFK’s Profiles in Courage.
That book was written more than 65 years ago, just before I was born. Written by and for the generation that survived the Great Depression and World War II as youngsters and young adults, for which courage was a real concept with real meaning.
Courage was the real thing before our advertising-addled public sphere made Coke the Real Thing in the late 1960s, via the TV commercial.
I believe courage still has meaning in 2023. Just look at the Black Lives Matter, and the changes it has brought about.
JFK’s book is not about the courage found in numbers. The courage in JFK’s book is not about the courage found in the crowd, but in the individual. And I have seen that courage in Kevin Cavanaugh, and let me tell you: In the hard times Bill Cashin and I went through, when upon being sued, we were abandoned publicly by all but a handful of people, most Queen City citizens standing mute and afraid while the gale of the Gatsas Bully Bluster raged, the example of Kevin Cavanaugh’s courage meant a great deal to us.
Cavanaugh stood up for us, and as mayor, he will stand up for you.
That’s why I’m voting for Kevin Cavanaugh for mayor.
