The Boston Herald - Finegold Shines as Campaigner

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The Boston Herald

Finegold shines as campaigner: Mission is to nullify Niki

Despite new Internet technology, sophisticated voter-targeting and big bucks for ads, the crux of a campaign is still getting out and meeting voters and volunteers eye to eye.

It's a two-way street. The candidate makes his or her pitch. And the citizens get a chance to talk issues and vent.

That's what I saw the other day, observing state Rep. Barry Finegold of Andover, one of the Democrats working to overtake frontrunner Niki Tsongas in the Fifth Congressional District special election, as he visited a busy diner and a residential center for seniors.

Finegold has the redoubtable Freddy Simon, a former state Senate aide and popular Tewksbury-Lowell activist, in his corner. Simon's pal Paul Panagopoulos said, as they sat with Finegold at a table in Lowell's Owl Diner, "Freddy knows everybody in here plus 100,000 more."

Freddy introduced Finegold to some retirees, a fireman, a Lowell housing commissioner, the owner of the Lowell Spinners baseball team, a former selectman from Groton and Tommy Mulligan, a drenched ex-Mass. Electric employee just in from the rain. "I just had my car stolen," he said. "While I was at Mass."

As big an issue as Iraq is, nobody talked to Finegold about it in the diner. Instead it was the cost of housing and steep mortgage payments. Health care. The high price of gasoline. Simon asked, "How ya gonna get by if you're making $10 or $15 an hour and commuting to a job where you gotta keep filling up at 50 bucks a pop?" Or, as one man sitting at the counter implored Finegold, "You ought to do something about fairness for fathers" in divorce cases.

"I get it," Finegold said of the scuffle the middle-class faces. "My grandfather was a postal worker who scrimped to send his kids to college and my mother and father, public school teachers, worked hard so their kids could go, too."

As they left the Owl, Finegold's press secretary Nairi Tashjian told him Simon had suggested they stop by Armen Jeknavorian's Post Office Locksmith shop, since the owner is a leader in the local Armenian community.

While Finegold and the locksmith talked, Ms. Tashjian and Jeknavorian's wife, Sossy, started conversing in Armenian. They'd never met, yet soon discovered that "my mother and Sossy were grade school classmates in Lebanon," said Tashjian. Mrs. Jeknavorian was so charmed she was nudging her husband to endorse Finegold on the spot. Armen was charmed, too, but wants to wait for answers on candidate questionnaires. Still, there's pillow talk.

At the Blair House for seniors, Finegold didn't just make the usual political pitch. He went around the room, talking and listening to the seniors one by one. And he got an earful on what it means to be old but not rich.

A resident named Warren Harding ("Yeah, I'm a former president," he quipped) complained, "You have to be almost broke to go on [eligibility for] MassHealth benefits." He fears he might be sent to the kind of assisted living facility he was in once before. "It was a madhouse," he said. "I had a guy try to crawl in bed with me my very first night."

A woman diabetic told Finegold, "I have to take 10 pills in the morning and 10 at night."

How do you pay for them, he asked, and she replied, "Just scrapin' by."

As he ended his visit, Finegold told them his family legend on how they got their last name.

"When my great-grandfather immigrated to America (from Eastern Europe), they asked him for his name at Ellis Island. He thought they said, ‘why you came' and he answered, ‘Find gold.' "

And if his great-grandson keeps listening and responding to people at the grassroots and reminding them to remember the "find gold" name at the ballot box, he just might find it himself.

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