O’Brien Ready to Hold Steady in General

Unlike city council positions 4 and 6, where the top two candidates had pretty much been a known quantity since early July, position 8 was entirely up for grabs when Tuesday’s primary came around. So while Jessie Israel, Nick Licata, Sally Bagshaw and David Bloom were honing their general election messages, candidates in the crowded position 8 race were busy carving out their niches and hoping they might provide enough of a toehold to get them into the fall.

For Mike O’Brien and Robert Rosencrantz, it worked. But now what? According to O’Brien, it will be more of the same campaign fodder than earned him an impressive 34 percent of the vote in a highly qualified six-man field.

“I think [my message] will be consistent with a lot of what you’ve heard,” O’Brien said on the phone Thursday evening. “The problem with running a six-way race is, in a public forum you get about one minute to talk to people. Now there will be a little more detail, a little more nuance about the issues.”

Of course, the viaduct replacement tunnel is the first issue he mentioned.

“The tunnel is one of the problems that is very emblematic of the problems we have in the city with our priorities and our processes,” O’Brien said. “It’s not juts the tunnel. It’s where we choose to invest our money, and where we choose not to invest it.”

He said he would continue to emphasize public transportation over freeways, and he’s not going to stop biking everywhere – even when it’s cold and rainy in October.

“I’ve been a year-round bike commuter for eight years now.”

In other words, don’t expect O’Brien to go riding to the center now that he’s made it past round 1.