By Jim O'Sullivan
News Editor

The commute to Sam Yoon's office takes him less than 10 minutes, a few hundred yards from his Waldeck Street home across Town Field and upstairs in a Dot Ave. office building to campaign headquarters, a cramped affair with scarce elbow room for the three-person staff.

That walk brings Yoon past a renascent supermarket space, a gas station whose clerk was stabbed to death last week, a thoroughfare ripe for renewal, and a crumbling flight of 10 steps at the Park Street edge of the field.

Fixing the steps, he says, would be his first act as an at-large city councillor.

"I feel the inequities that Dorchester feels every time I walk from my house to the campaign office here," Yoon said.

Yoon is one of several challengers, and the only one from Dorchester, whom political observers regard as the upper tier of a 15-candidate field in this year's race for at-large city council seats. And, as the campaign follows the mercury into its summer simmer, political observers say "the Dorchester vote," such as it is, remains for the taking.

That's a daunting assignment in a neighborhood whose diffuse demographic and geographic faces traditionally prove challenging to campaigns looking to corral its affections.

While City Council President Michael Flaherty, four-term councillor Stephen Murphy, and two-term councillor Felix Arroyo can all flash proven records of currying Dot affection, the wannabes share a steeper challenge convincing the citizens of Wards 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, and 18 to send of four votes their way.

With an unusually strong at-large field, and a seat emptied by Councillor Maura Hennigan's challenge of Mayor Thomas M. Menino, and that race expected to jack up turnout this year, the at-large contest figures to quicken the pulses of industry junkies for the next few months.

"I think Dorchester really looms large over this whole race, because it has to find its own," said political consultant Frank Perullo. "It really doesn't have a candidate just yet that's truly its own."

While other neighborhoods such as South Boston, Roxbury, Charlestown, and East Boston - and, by extension, their powerbrokers - can proffer votes in glossy, seductive blocs, the city's largest and most diverse neighborhood present an unwieldier electoral beast. But, with an amalgam ranging from reliably high-voting, largely-white precinct and increasingly ballot-conscious mostly minority precincts, no candidate can afford to ignore Dot. The neighborhood frequently serves as a bellwether for the rest of the city; in last year's high-profile sheriff's race, Dorchester's preference for Andrea Cabral over Murphy ran roughly equivalent to the citywide split.

While Dudley Street's Althea Garrison and Fields Corner's Joseph Ureneck also share the Dorchester address, Yoon's candidacy has elicited more excitement, showing an early fundraising proclivity and distinguished as the first Asian-American run for council.

Yoon's campaign is still in the process of identifying neighborhoods where he should focus, but optimistic about capturing votes from the Asian and progressive communities. In an interview Monday, Yoon said he planned to pursue the left-of-center coalition that backed Cabral last year and Linda Dorcena Forry in this year's House race.

Yoon campaign manager Andrew Kain, a Colorado import, said the advice he received upon arriving in Boston two weeks ago amounted to: "Dorchester is so big, you've got to take it ward by ward, community by community. If you try to take it all, two things are going to happen: You're going to go crazy, or Dorchester is going to fall into someone else's hands."

Thus far, Yoon has refrained from painting himself as "the Dorchester candidate."

But, he said, "There's a really strong rationale for Dorchester pols to get behind me," and acknowledged that he would consider an appeal to traditionally unallied councillors Charles Yancey and Maureen Feeney to back a candidate living smack in the middle of the neighborhood.

But while Kain pores over voter databases and Yoon says he is concentrating on fundraising calls, other candidates are locking up precinct captains and polling-place heavyweights.

John Connolly has been scrounging for Neponset and Savin Hill votes since he launched his campaign last year, attending every Cedar Grove meeting since December. That was, he said, part of a conscious effort to prioritize Dorchester and West Roxbury.

"Dorchester and West Roxbury feel under-represented at the citywide level," the West Roxbury resident said Tuesday.

Like Connolly, Matt O'Malley has lined up key political hands, working largely from contacts he built two years ago in his first at-large bid and from the vestiges of Cabral's organization last year, which he helped build as her campaign manager. Where Connolly is running strong in Neponset - marching in the June 5 Dorchester Day Parade with the presidents of the area's two largest civic groups, John O'Toole and Phil Carver - O'Malley has locked up Fields Corner stalwarts like Ed Crowley and Richie Pacitti, and signed up many of the local progressive and gay activists.

Patricia White's campaign is about to slip into surrogate mode, with White expecting to give birth next month. But Barry Lawton, a Democratic activist from Meetinghouse Hill supporting White, said her Dorchester operation will thrive on her willingness to speak to local issues.

"When I work with candidates," Lawton said last week, "one of the prerequisites is that they campaign in my neighborhood."

On Tuesday at the Keystone Apartments, Ed Flynn handed out Irish soda bread to the seniors and talked about Dorchester as "one of the great old neighborhoods." After no fewer than nine of the roughly 50 people in the room told him how much he resembled his father, former Mayor Ray Flynn, he talked with them about "the good old days and fun days and warm memories."

The neighborhood is tough to rein in because of its size and its spread across the voter profile spectrum, a microcosm for a city whose voting patterns in the last several election cycles have eluded the prognostications of even the most studied of observers.

Still, the candidates and their advisers likely will stay zoned in on the precincts where votes are known to be rustled.

"There are pockets of Dorchester that vote, and the candidate who will win Dorchester's heart will be the one who can get the lion's share of those pockets," said Joyce Ferriabough, a longtime political consultant neutral in this race.

With all of the Irish surnames crowding the ballot, said Perullo, who is advising Flaherty and O'Malley, voters inclined to choose on ethnic grounds may need to move their criteria to other leverage points.

"It's not going to be the last name, obviously, because they're all pretty much the same," Perullo said. "It seems to be a ballot from 20 years ago."

Its size notwithstanding, Dorchester has not recently enjoyed the clout inherent in stacking an elected chamber with its own. The last at-large councillor from the neighborhood was Mickey Roache, who left in 2002 to take the Suffolk County Register of Deeds post - and Roache enjoyed citywide cachet from his tenure as police commissioner during the late '80s and early '90s. In 2002, Dorchester failed to field a candidate against state Sen. Jack Hart, despite the fact that 80 percent of Hart's newly redrawn seat lay in the neighborhood.

But that recent dry spell of consolidating the neighborhood's political power into one more potent than other sections of the city hasn't prevented this year's candidates from sounding off vocally about their eagerness to embrace Dorchester.

Flynn: "I want to be the Dorchester voice on the Boston City Council."

Connolly: "I just think there's this sense that Dorchester wants to have a booming voice at the citywide level."

And Yoon, who said he plans to start elevating his visibility at Dorchester neighborhood events, said, "We're going to hit 'em all, because this is my neighborhood."