DFA Boston in the Phoenix!

DFA Boston and its present Meetup host/general factotum, Brad Johnson (me) is featured in Boston Phoenix!

TWO YEARS AGO, a nationwide army of disgruntled lefties and idealistic twentysomethings united to make former Vermont governor Howard Dean’s presidential candidacy the most intriguing political insurgency in recent memory. Dean — now safely ensconced as chair of the Democratic National Committee — has since become part of the establishment, but his army lives on. And it has a new goal: winning grassroots races around the nation and building a movement that will give tired, unimaginative, and conventional candidates — and the special interests they cater to — something to think about.

Adam Reilly goes on to describe our May meetup:

THE POLITICAL potential of the DFA Boston meet-up (known, as all such gatherings are, by the meetup.com Web site that makes them possible) was on full display on the evening of May 4. At 6 p.m., a bevy of Boston City Council candidates — Kevin McCrea, Matt O’Malley, Joe Ready, and Sam Yoon, all of whom are running at large, and Gibran Rivera, who’s challenging incumbent John Tobin for the right to represent West Roxbury and Jamaica Plain — arrived at the United South End Settlements’ Harriet Tubman House to make their cases. Mitch Kates, the campaign manager for at-large incumbent and mayoral challenger Maura Hennigan, kept quiet but watched the proceedings intently; so did Mel Poindexter, a Democratic State Committee member who supports Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Deval Patrick. For two hours on that Wednesday night, the small, sterile room where the DFA Boston meet-up took place was one of Boston’s political hot spots.

My quote:

During a recent interview with the Phoenix, Johnson argued that DFA has, at the very least, the potential to transform the fabric of Boston politics. "There hasn’t been a very healthy participatory-politics scene in Boston," Johnson said. "You definitely, on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis, have degrees of activism and such. But if you look at the official political structure of the Democratic Party, Boston might be the only city in Massachusetts which doesn’t have a city committee that meets. So that’s one less political horse that the power brokers in Boston need to deal with." As Johnson sees it, DFA can help fill that void — by disseminating information on council candidates, say, or pressuring Menino to debate Hennigan between now and Election Day, or merely fostering what he terms a "sense of connectedness."

Read the whole article!