Daily Loaf

Photo by james ostrand

[Editor's Note: Jim Harper, a former editor of the Weekly Planet (now Creative Loafing), covered St. Petersburg government, politics and racial issues from 1996 to 2000 for the St. Petersburg Times.]

I’ve been following the St. Pete mayor’s race fairly closely. Even though I don’t especially like either candidate, they are who you’ve got. And you have to make a choice.

Let me start by saying that I have never really liked Kathleen Ford. I covered her first race for City Council for the Times a dozen years ago, and caused her great grief by quoting her as saying something like “the reason the Old Northeast is important is because it provides a buffer for Snell Isle.” What Snell Isle should be buffered from, she didn’t say.

I sat in her Old Northeast living room — with a prim, severe portrait of some white woman from an earlier century glaring down from the mantel — and I listened to her talk about how tattoo parlors did not belong in downtown St. Petersburg. She also criticized retro clothing stores and anything else that might represent a messy creative revival in downtown St. Pete.

I mentioned all this in my coverage. (Well, maybe not the severe WASP ancestor portrait; I’ve got some of those in my own family, and I’m not sure what they mean.)

Her council opponent was weak. She won.

Fast-forward 10 years. I’ve read a lot about the current Ford model from sources other than the St. Petersburg Times, which seems to be  carrying my old torch in looking for ways to discredit her. And from what I can tell — despite her new, more user-friendly veneer: “Ford 2.0,” as she calls it — she seems still to be ill-tempered, snide, prone to say weird and prejudiced things when she speaks off the top of her head.

But — and this is a big but — she also has an impressive command of the details of city government  — including the balance of power that the City Charter prescribes between the mayor and the City Council. (Read her interview in last week’s Creative Loafing, where she applies that knowledge to the baseball question. Sounds like a reasonable position to me, and I’m a die-hard Rays fan. Gave my left nut to attend division and ACLS playoffs last year, and I’ve never missed an Opening Day.)

Ford also has a keen sense of what many St. Petersburg residents mistrust about their municipal government:

* Its secrecy.

* Its preoccupation with what is good for a few players downtown.

* Its haughty and misplaced self-assurance.

* And, most , its perennial habit of dealing with poorer, more disenfranchised residents through only a small network of well-placed surrogates. (Notice, I did not use the offensive acronym that got Ms. Ford into such trouble recently. But I did attend the same lecture by Cornel West at Eckerd College a decade ago, and when I was covering St. Petersburg’s black neighborhoods for several years after the 1996 riots, I became quite familiar with the concept West described. White establishments — all establishments — really do prefer to deal with a few people whose responses are predictable, rather than the messy many.)

Most persuasively to me, Kathleen Ford seems willing to talk about what she thinks, which is more than Bill Foster will do.

Foster wants you to trust him. He says he’s the steady hand on the tiller — it’s been smooth sailing so far; where we’re going isn’t as important as that the voyage continue smoothly. Let’s not worry about the details. Good people will take care of everything.

In these last few weeks of the campaign, Foster has retreated into as much silence as he can get away with. He doesn’t want to make any mistakes. He wants his image to be bland, uncontroversial — so that he can coast into the mayor’s office, where he can make decisions with as little discussion as possible.

But that’s a front-runner’s strategy, and according to recent polls, Foster is not the front-runner. That’s how self-destructively locked into their habits these members of the  “don’t-rock-the-boat” establishment can be. Howard Troxler’s column Sunday in the St. Petersburg Times offered a litany of missteps that the current City Hall establishment has blundered into. None of them happened because some obstreperous person asked a question. All occurred because somebody tried to slide something through.

I still don’t feel fondly toward Kathleen Ford. For one thing, she probably does have some residual racism inside her. But then, most of us do, whatever color we might be. It takes a lifetime to understand people whose fundamental background is different from yours, but we get to that understanding by talking frankly, not by hiding behind polite intentions. So I can’t disqualify her on this.

(I’m going to leave Foster’s conservative religious faith alone, even though I’ve never understood how some people want to make the Bible a science book, even though its profoundest value is something else entirely.)

Kathleen Ford will make a lot of noise. She’ll bother people. She’ll be wrong sometimes. She’ll probably even run off some people who are very good at their jobs.

But I think the city needs some fresh leadership. I’d vote for Kathleen Ford.

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