Mayoral morass: What’s wrong with the St. Petersburg mayor’s race
August 9, 2009 at 11:21 am by Wayne Garcia
This week’s column from the print edition of Creative Loafing:
About 500-600 people are voting for a new mayor of St. Petersburg every day now, part of what has become a vote-by-mail system of absentee voting in Florida. Nearly 60,000 city residents have requested an absentee ballot, almost 40 percent of the registered voters.
That’s a big number. So why do I hear so many complaints about the 2009 race to succeed Mayor Rick Baker being a real snoozer? Polling earlier in the month showed that 61 percent of the voters didn’t have a preference among the 10 candidates running. And although nearly 7,000 people had voted by the end of last week, there is very little visible to any of the campaigns, beyond the ubiquitous yard signs. It’s impossible to time the peak of your political campaign when Election Day lasts 45 days, and no candidate has enough money to run a full-bore mass media campaign for that long.
Take the latest mayoral forum, held by St. Pete Preservation last week in front of about 100 good folks at Studio@620. I popped in to shoot a few photos and perhaps hear their stump speeches, but after almost an hour the crowd had heard only from preservationists, who got five minutes apiece to school nine candidates on why historic preservation is important. Even the hometown St. Petersburg Times didn’t staff the preservation forum. When the candidates did begin to talk, there wasn’t much separation.
How can something be anticlimactic before it’s even over?
Here are the reasons why this year’s city election is having a hard time connecting with voters:
There’s no Barack Obama running: To be sure, the field of mayoral candidates is way short on charisma and visionary dreaming. Voters (and news reporters) are a little spoiled after 2008’s rock-star-fest of an election with Obama and his adoring crowds and big ideas and cool-as-shit posters. You get no such electricity from this bunch. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t at least five or six of these candidates who could actually administer the day-to-day operations of the city, who have the political and/or administrative chops regardless of what you think of their ideologies or priorities (Kathleen Ford, Scott Wagman, Larry Williams, Bill Foster, Jamie Bennett and, perhaps, Deveron Gibbons). Ford’s trying hard not to seem bitchy; Wagman’s digital persistence and sense of humor misconnects and earned him the name “douche” in the Splog blog; Gibbons hides out from mainstream media interviews, waiting for his expected TV campaign to kick in; Foster and Williams are low-key City Hall insiders who speak the language of bureaucracy; and Bennett, given no chance to win after his Peter Schorsch-fueled meltdown (see below)
The field is too big for its own good: As a former political consultant, I can tell you that a field this big (10 total candidates, seven of which are serious contenders) creates a dynamic where nobody wants to criticize or take on their opponents and their ideas or records because they may need that opponent in the runoff election. On Sept. 1, the two top finishers go on to a Nov. 3 final contest. I always advised my clients in such a situation that they wanted to be the No. 2 choice of every one of their opponents, so suck up and be nice to them. And that is exactly what we are seeing, the politics of chummy and nice, for the most part. That all changes on Sept. 2, but for now, snoozerama.
It is a tough campaign for journlists and bloggers to cover: Ahh, the good old days of St. Petersburg politics, when the two major political powers (The Shore Acres-Snell Isle-downtown business-north of Central crowd joined with Midtown voters to take on the populist West St. Petersburg faction). Each side would anoint a champion and the battle was engaged. Black hat vs. white hat. Monied interests vs. anti-tax neighborhoods. That all changed in 2001, with the election of Mayor Rick Baker, who blew away the usual Central Avenue dividing line of St. Petersburg politics. Today’s modern St. Pete politics are very complex, with new players on the scene, empowered neighborhood associations and more players of all racial and ethnic backgrounds. Party affiliation plays a bigger role, too, even though it is a nonpartisan race. It’s not just five or six white guys in dark suits who control the city, as a recent Times column pined for. It’s no excuse for shallow reporting, though.
News coverage has been picayune: The Times has written stories about the following missteps/flubs/nonevents: Bill Foster flipped hamburgers with city cops who may or may not have been on duty, possibily violating laws against campaigning at work; Scott Wagman may or may not have violated campaign disclosure laws by not putting the usual “paid political adv” verbiage on small Google Ads; fringe candidate Paul Congemi bitched out a Kentucky Fried Chicken employee so much that the cops were called; candidate yard signs are in the right of way; and another candidate has a whole bunch of speeding tickets. It’s not that the paper hasn’t written about substantive issues. It’s just that the level of niggling and useless detail on other stories and coverage numbs readers minds.
One politico told me on background, “The coverage is just dreadful. Obvious mistakes are what gets the coverage. (And) several of the candidates are just so poorly informed that they are hard-pressed to say something.”
Peter Schorsch is a one-man election wrecking crew: Former PoHo contributing blogger Schorsch should have been nowhere near the city of St. Petersburg election. After all, his arrest a few years back on charges of ripping off some of his political consulting clients should have put the last nail in the coffin of his political work. But after a few years in the wilderness, he returned as Jamie Bennett’s campaign manager, contributing to the eventual fall of Bennett’s chances when a wide array of inappropriate city luxury box baseball ticket-giving and other unsavory ratfucking political tricks came to light when Bennett and Schorsch had a falling out. Now, Schorsch, who normally reps Democrats, has thrown his support and online poison pen to right-wing Republican Bill Foster. He pops up to question candidates at Tiger Bay Club; he files election law complaints; he snarks on his blog.
(Full Dislcosure: CL Editor David Warner’s partner, Larry Biddle, is a paid consultant to the Scott Wagman campaign. To avoid that conflict influencing our coverage, he plays no role in assigning or editing stories about the mayoral election.)
