Related story: Cicilline's message is also his medium

By Scott MacKay
Journal Staff Writer

After covering politics for one or two hundred years, I've come to believe that political change follows demographic change. That certainly proved to be a good part of the case in this year's Providence Democratic mayoral primary won by state Rep. David N. Cicilline.

When I was assigned to cover the mayoral primary, the first thing I did was spend some time with the 2000 U.S. Census data, some of which I was already familiar with from a series yours truly and former Journal staffer Ariel Sabar wrote last year.

The next thing I did was take a look at the new ward boundaries and demographic data in several neighborhoods that had been crucial in past elections.

What jumped out was something I had sensed for some time both as a reporter and Providence resident -- that the old, white ethnic political Providence was fading fast.

All of the old neighborhoods -- the Mount Pleasant of former mayor Joe Doorley and former governor Joe Garrahy, the Smith Hill of longtime City Councilman Russ Boyle, the Silver Lake of the politically-active Igliozzi family, the South Providence of the late Lloyd Griffin, aka "the mayor of South Providence" -- were changing.

On the south and west sides of the city, a new generation of Latino immigrants were remaking the city.

On the East Side, home to Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design, the hip, the young and the arty were the new presence in neighborhoods once dominated by tweedy professors and traditional Ozzie and Harriet families. There was even a coffee shop called Adam and Steve's (it has since closed) on Hope Street. Aging pols lamented that there were more votes of gay rights activists from Fox Point than of people who identified with their Cape Verdean ancestry.

All of the statistics showed the city was becoming poorer. That made the economically stable neighborhoods -- i.e., the East Side -- more important politically.

So there was a whole new city out there. If these people voted, there might be a whole new administration.

It is almost a cliche among journalists that academics cannot write a clear 10-word English sentence. I've also found that among academics there is the cliche that little of journalistic work rises above the level of anecdote and the daily feeding of the monster.

Our work can only become more credible when we use census data and neighborhood research.

Then there was the unconventional political dynamics of 2002. History will record the 2002 Providence mayoral election as not only the first election of this New Providence but also as the last chapter in the saga of Vincent A. Cianci Jr., who was forced to leave office after being sentenced on a corruption charge days before the primary.

I was assigned the Cicilline profile. The profile was done in a traditional manner -- researching the bills he introduced in the General Assembly, spending time on the campaign circuit, a long interview.

Cicilline was the most unconventional candidate; he was the only serious candidate for a big elected office in the state's history to acknowledge he is gay.

Cicilline was not completely happy with the profile; he thought it focused too much on his orientation, career as a criminal lawyer and some of his lawyer father's more controversial organized-crime clients.

Political people are rarely totally pleased with any credible profile that helps the voter sort out the issues and personalities.

But Cicilline and others familiar with the city's politics acknowledged that the profile captured a changed city and pointed out how smart Cicilline's campaign had been to exploit these differences.

While Cicilline was talking about change and speaking Spanish on the South Side, another candidate, former mayor Joe Paolino, was running television commercials featuring Joe Garrahy and Julie Michaelson, the leadership of an old generation.

This is a good example of a profile that was helped by an understanding of a changed landscape.

In the end, the Cicilline-Igliozzi-Paolino-McKenna primary was a fitting coda to the Cianci years. I felt privileged to cover it and thank the writing committee for recognizing this story.