LIght dig on Ayanna Pressley

While Pressley’s membership in the bomb-tossing quartet is serving as her introduction to a national audience, those who followed her career in Boston would probably characterize her quite differently — as the consummate inside player. She spent more than a decade as a congressional staffer, first for Rep. Joseph Kennedy II and then for Sen. John Kerry. During her decade on the Boston City Council, Pressley was never known for high-profile tangles with Mayor Tom Menino or, following his retirement, Mayor Marty Walsh.

“There are real distinctions between them,” Attorney General Maura Healey says of Pressley and her three congressional colleagues in an interview with Globe columnist Adrian Walker, pointing to Pressley’s long track record in politics.

“I don’t think she had the option to throw bombs in the same way until she was surrounded by other like-minded individuals,” UMass Boston political science professor Erin O’Brien told the Globe. But that seems to ignore the years when she served with outspoken progressive councilors such as Tito Jackson, Michelle Wu, and Andrea Campbell.

Former congressman Barney Frank said Pressley has stood out from the other three Squad members by not offering the same sort of charged rhetoric, making him wonder why she’s joined up with them in their challenge to party leaders.

“My puzzlement about Pressley is that I haven’t seen her do anything that seemed to me mistaken the way the other three have, but then she joins them, and apparently agrees with their approach, and I think their approach is very wrong,” Frank told the Globe.

Critics say that more measured approach is not what Pressley displayed at a Netroots Nation conference on Saturday. “We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be brown voice. We don’t need any black faces that don’t want to be a black voice,” she told the crowd, comments that a Herald editorial slammed as a threat against anyone who would stray “from the progressive playbook.”

If Pressley’s split political personality as veteran inside player now pushing change sometimes seems hard to square, perhaps it also positions her as someone who can bridge the emerging intra-party divide and help Democrats avoid the sort of squad the party is more known for — the armed one that forms in a circle.

https://commonwealthmagazine.org/politics/ayanna-pressley-measured-bomb-thrower-2/