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EDITORIAL
OP-ED; Columnist's errors are frozen in time
Thomas M. KEANE, Jr.

01/01/2003
Boston Herald
All Editions
027
(Copyright 2003)

Like many of you, I'm looking forward to tomorrow's inauguration of Shannon O'Brien.

Or at least that's the way things would be if you had believed my column of Nov. 1. "Odds are, Shannon O'Brien will win next Tuesday's election," I wrote.

Four days later, Mitt Romney won.

That may be the most egregious error I made over the last year, but hardly the only one.

In September I spent an entire column discussing "Jim Segel and Steve Murphy, the two leading contenders in the Democratic primary for treasurer." I thought it a great, insightful piece.

The only problem? The winner was one Tim Cahill, treasurer of Norfolk County, who stunned everyone - including seemingly, himself - with a catchy ad ("Tim for Treasurer," recited by his 10-year-old daughter) that broke through in an otherwise dull race.

New Year's Day is a traditional time for looking back at the year that just was and making some hard assessments.

The problem with being a columnist is that it's hard to escape one's mistakes. The words in the paper are in black and white. Even worse, thanks to the Internet, they are now preserved forever in online archives.

Take, for example, my Aug. 30 column, which described Warren Tolman as "the only Clean Elections candidate in the race."

Supporters of Green Party candidate Jill Stein were quick to jump, noting that she too was running under the Clean Elections banner (although she ultimately failed to qualify). My piece had been about the Democratic primary, but the point is well-taken. It's easy to forget about third-party candidates. Stein clearly had an influence on the race, eventually capturing the attention of many with her exceptional performance in the election debates.

And after the September primary, I said the results - where insiders Shannon O'Brien and Thomas Birmingham received 57 percent - proved that "we like the status quo."

Wrong. All it proved was that registered Democrats liked the status quo. As the November results showed, the rest of the electorate was far less sanguine.

I wrote about the Catholic Church's deepening sex scandals on April 12.

"It's not if, but when," I wrote, predicting that Bernard Cardinal Law would resign. I should have stopped there. Instead, I went on, trying to give a date: "Sometime soon - perhaps today, perhaps in a few weeks."

As it turns out, it was more than eight months later.

In the same column, I argued that one result of the scandal was that "for many, their faiths will be weaker than before."

One writer challenged that: "Ours is not a faith of the temporal church but that of the spiritual church."

It's a good argument: The failings of an institution and the all- too-human humans who run it should be distinct from matters of theology. But for many, sadly, it's hard to keep the two separate.

That same month I wrote about Boston's plans to rehabilitate its moribund theater district. Along the way I referred to the "late critic Elliot Norton."

Oops. It turned out that Norton was very much alive. For a moment, I thought about weaseling out of it by explaining that "late" was intended to modify "critic," in the sense that Norton is no longer actively writing as a critic of the arts. All of that seemed too Clintonesque, however, so eventually the Herald just ran a correction.

And that's not all.

Just last week, I referred to E.F. Schumacher's 1989 book "Small Is Beautiful." Actually it was 1973. I was looking at a later edition.

In March I took a passing shot at a now-closed Harvard Square dining institution, writing that "the Wursthaus was the worst." The cheapness of the pun alone calls for an apology of some sort. But one correspondent pointed out that early on - it first opened in 1917 - the Wursthaus was a AAA one-star restaurant.

In October I wrote that City Councilor Robert Consalvo represents West Roxbury. In fact, he represents adjacent Roslindale.

Roslindale, with ill-defined borders, is a bit of a stepchild to West Roxbury, so much so that real estate agents constantly make the same mistake - on purpose. Telling a homebuyer a property is in West Roxbury, they figure, will always boost the price.

In December I referred to Menino's adviser Howard Leibowitz as "Liebowitz." That's the problem with back-to-basics grammar schools: the "i before e" rule gets drilled into your head and they never bother teaching you all of the exceptions. I also called District Attorney Daniel Conley's chief of staff "John Toles." It's Towle. Spellings of last names are small things, I suppose - unless, of course, it happens to be your last name.

To all of those offended and mislead, I apologize.

And my resolution for this year? I'm never predicting O'Brien to win anything again.

Tom Keane can be reached at tomkeane.com.