Bill Foster wasted no time in getting the Times recommendation on his website

The drumbeat that the St. Petersburg Times was considering an endorsement (errr, recommendation, as the Times will always let a candidate know its preferred term) of Bill Foster. On its surface, it seems ludicrous. After all, Foster is the same guy who wrote to the school board a few years back making a strong pitch against teaching Darwinian evolution alone in public schools, hoping it would mix in a bit of “intelligent design.”

But the lack of an emerging alternative to Foster left the Times in the inexplicable position of endorsing an anti-gay rights, anti-evolution mayor of St. Petersburg. More to the point, however, the editorial board chooses a candidate based on who will play ball with it. Which candidate will kiss the ring over on 1st Avenue S? That’s what gets you the recommendation. Disagree with the Times on a core concern at the paper — say, firing Police Chief Chuck Harmon, as Scott Wagman as vowed to do — and you are at a disadvantage, to say the least.

It is OK to disagree with the Times on social conservative issues, as long as you play your cards right, promise not to let those views play out in public policy at City Hall and generally keep your wingy-ness in the closet. After all, the Times’ former editorial chief, Phil Gailey, was totally tight with Rick Baker, who was also a social conservative who refused to recognize gay pride parades or appear in them.

From its recommendation today:

As mayor, Foster would offer comforting continuity. He recognizes Baker’s considerable efforts to improve public education and pledges to continue them. He would maintain the conservative approach to building city budgets, offering neither wild new spending plans nor drastic cutbacks but a methodical effort to make government more efficient. He has been measured and responsible on the campaign trail, avoiding the rashness of other candidates who have called for the quick removal of the police chief, the hiring of dozens of new police officers and the spending of city reserves on recurring expenses that would risk St. Petersburg’s fiscal stability.

Yet Foster would chart his own course as mayor. He recognizes there is the public perception, at least, that police do not go after drugs and nonviolent crimes in Midtown as aggressively as they would in more affluent neighborhoods. He calls for the police to pay more attention to drugs, prostitution and burglary. He would shift police resources to where they are most needed, seek a gradual return to community policing, stress crime prevention and give Chief Chuck Harmon an opportunity to embrace his priorities.

As for Foster’s right-wing bent? The Times explains it away:

At times, Foster has spoken in haste and escalated the rhetoric rather than cooling passions. We also have disagreed with his conservative social views, including those in his intemperate letter to the School Board last year promoting creationism. Those views have little to do with being mayor. Foster makes a convincing argument that he recognizes the weight his words and tone would carry if he is elected, and his campaign reflects that maturity. He has articulated a reassuring commitment to civil liberties and constitutional rights, and that would be the yard stick to measure his performance.

Next, Scott Wagman’s from last week:

Finally, Deveron Gibbons in “He Knows This City:”

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.)

The St. Petersburg Times tried to do its job; it asked each and every St. Petersburg mayoral candidate if they would supply their campaign finance information (their contributions and expenditures) so the newspaper could create a searchable database for voters to use, just like candidates for national, county or state office do. But not the city, which puts up only .pdf’s of the reports, which cannot be searched for names that contribute to different campaigns or to do other important analyses of who is funding whom.

If you’ll recall, that is one of my six ideas to fix Tampa Bay politics on a recent cover of Creative Loafing.

With one exception, however, the Times‘ request fell on deaf or uncaring or incapable ears. From A-Sharock today:

We’ve been told by computer experts that providing this data would take as little as 15 minutes of work.

The response from candidates: Silence.

Only Scott Wagman’s campaign attempted to comply with our request. Candidate Bill Foster said he didn’t think it was technically possible and candidate Larry Williams declined. The other candidates didn’t even respond to our request.

Scott Wagman gets some help in his attempt to the be the next mayor of St. Petersburg, and two council candidates — incumbent Karl Nurse, long known for his conservation efforts, and newcomer Steve Kornell — also get the nod from St. Pete Sierra Club, which endorsed in just three municipal races.

From the Sierra Club announcement:

SIERRA CLUB ANNOUNCES ST. PETE PRIMARY ENDORSEMENTS

Sierra Club in St. Petersburg is proud to announce that it has endorsed Scott Wagman for Mayor, and City Council candidates Steve Kornell for District 5, and Karl Nurse for District 6.

With over 2,300 paid members in Pinellas County and approximately 1,000 of them in St. Petersburg, the organization expects to work with its members and other environmental, conservation/preservation organizations to form a significant block of voters in a primary election which this year features some 15 candidates for only four offices, but typically very few voters.

“Local Sierra Club and its many allied organizations,individuals and their families and friends represent thousands of St. Petersburg voters who are concerned about living in a modern, well run, environmentally smart city, and are willing to work for it,” said Bill Bucolo, Chair of the Groups Political Committee.

Chair of Suncoast Group, Terrie Weeks said,”Suncoast Sierra Club is proud and delighted to support Scott Wagman, Karl Nurse and Steve Kornell in the St. Pete primary elections. When elected we are confident they will act decisively for the best environmental interests of St. Petersburg and its citizens.”

Local Sierra Club activists are playing significant roles in environmentally related legislation in the city and county. Members from the Suncoast Group serve on many local government committees including the Agency for Bay Management, a part of the Tampa Bay Regional Planning Council, and the Environmental Science Forum which is a county advisory board regarding environmental lands and parks such as Brooker Creek and Weedon Island. The Club is also part of the Alliance for a Livable Pinellas (ALP) which regularly meets with the Mayor’s Office.

Recently Sierra Club members worked with Council members writing the recent ordinance designed to reduce fertilzer runoff from local lawns and parks into Gulf waters. Nitrogen fertilizer runoff is believed to have helped grow the 14 mile long algae bloom now off Pinellas County’s shore line which is killing fish and related wildlife, and is connected to frequent Red Tide outbreaks in Tampa Bay.

From the there’s-no-such-thing-as-bad-publicity-(or-polling) files comes this pitch to Scott Wagman supporters to pony up some bucks despite a pretty rotten showing in a recent St. Petersburg Times poll that placed Wagman tied for fourth, behind Kathleen Ford, Bill Foster and Deveron Gibbons and tied with Larry Williams.

For those not studied in the art of politics, this is called spin.

But before the Wagman haters chime in, let’s give some context to the poll. More than 60 percent of the voters surveyed said they didn’t have a preference yet, meaning that this is a wide open race and the poll was only an indication of a lack of voter engagement and existing name recognition, not a legit look at who will finish in what order. I don’t say this to defend Wagman’s poor showing; but the truth is not all of the campaigns have spent little or nothing in tems of direct voter contact (direct mail, television ads, radio ads, robo-phone calls, etc.) that is what gets voters ready to make decisions. At best, some of the campaigns have been walking door to door and using some new media advertising on Facebook and the like. That’s not enough to drive serious interest to an off-election year municipal election.

But Wagman felt his placement in the poll could be spun to his advantage with supporters and sent them this e-mail today:

Dear Friend,

About the recent St. Petersburg Times poll:

We were delighted. That’s because as the other candidates made little or no significant progress we increased our percentage of decided voters (as compared with our own poll taken earlier this year).

It simply proves that, as our message of change gets out to undecided voters, we win.

With 61% of voters still undecided, our challenge is to continue on that path over the next week. We can’t do that without you.

In less than 13 days almost 60,000 ballots to elect St. Petersburg’s Mayor will arrive in mailboxes. That’s never happened before.

I believe, with the unprecedented challenges facing our city, that we must have open, fresh, strong, effective executive leadership instead of politics as usual. DONATE NOW

Help us get our message out to early voters while there’s still time. Without it, uninformed voters will decide the future of our beloved city.

Please make a contribution of $13, or $26 or whatever you can afford by midnight June 30th — our final quarterly report before the Primary. It will make a difference.

Many thanks,
signature

P.S. As mayor, I will be a strong leader for change, focused on making city government more efficient and improving public safety. In less than 13 days almost 60,000 voters will have received vote-by-mail ballots. Help me get my message of change and new leadership to those voters while there’s still time.

Disclosure time: My boss, CL Tampa Editor David Warner, is the domestic partner of one of Wagman’s political consultants, Larry Biddle. Because of this conflict, he does not partcipate in any way in CL’s coverage of the mayor’s race.

Let’s get one thing straight right off the bat: Winning a mayoral forum or debate is not the most meaningful thing in a campaign. The myriad gatherings of the 10 mayoral candidates in St. Petersburg that have already occurred and are yet to occur likely won’t alter the Sept. 1 primary outcome one iota.

Why?

Because such forums are a place that can only do a candidate harm. Stumble, or stumble badly, and the media coverage can magnify it into major damage. “Win” such a debate and not only will the MSM mostly not declare you the winner, but you have only “won” in front of a few hundred people, at most.

The way campaigns are really won are through spending campaign contributions on direct mail, television and radio advertising and through a concerted grass-roots voter contact effort.

So that brings me to reporting the “results” of Monday night’s mayoral forum held by the St. Pete Pride organizers at the King of Peace MCC. The “winners”?

Alex Haak.

The longshot mayoral candidate was not included in the Q&A period and allowed only an opening three-minute speech, which he accomplished in less than a minute and that was, for all its brevity, completely incomprehensible. Here are my actual notes, verbatim, from his stump speech: “It’s not going to take me three minutes. Best mayor. Best everything you can possibly think of. And member of the stonewall organization, for a while. I did not expect it. This is the place.” He said more stuff, but I either couldn’t understand it or keep up with his rap.

OK, joking aside, the real winners were Scott Wagman and Jamie Bennett. A close third goes to Kathleen Ford.

Here’s why.

Wagman, Bennett and Ford were the only pro-GLBT candidates in the room of about 200 straights and gays at the church on 5th Avenue N. Larry Williams and Bill Foster win admiration for sticking by their conservative guns and not agreeing to sign a St. Pete Pride proclamation or attend the parade (two things that Mayor Rick Baker has also refused to do for his entire term) but they lose the forum because it was a GLBT forum.

Wagman toned down some of his off-putting “I’m a businessman” rhetoric and was more dynamic than at most events I’ve witnessed. He was solidly pro-GLBT and had the line of the night when asked about attending the parade and inviting participants to say hi to him as he rides in it with his dogs, “Waggers for Wagman, with some of the gayest dogs you ever will see.”

For Bennett, he also touted his participation in the parade for years. “St. Pete Pride is an important event; it represents the strength of diversity. I appreciate that,” Bennett said. “I think it’s a wonderful party.”

By my count, Wagman and Ford both scored points on the next question, about police staffing. Wagman is the only candidate who said he would get a new police chief and add 100 cops (a $10 million price tag annually). Ford made her point strongly without seeming harsh: “When I left city council [in 2001] there were not enough police officers on the street. And still there are not enough officers on the street. The community policing program disappeared. Folks, there has been a lot of slippage. We saw BayWalk struggle to the point where it went into bankruptcy. Where were our leaders? Why? Why is it that any 11-year-old can tell you where the drug houses are in the city of St. Petersburg? I guarantee you there will be a change.”

Ford, Williams and Wagman all effectively played the “parental responsibility” card during a talk about how to engage bored youths and prevent bullying. Ford best articulated the need to protect teens just coming to terms with their sexual orientation or transsexuality, while Wagman had the best there’s-hope-for-our-youth anecdote, about passing some unsavory looking kids at a recent campaign stop, some “very thuggish looking teens, sitting there, pants down the whole thing…” As he passed, one of them asked Wagman, “Can you win? That wasn’t exactly the comment I was expecting. We do not demand anyting of today’s youth, other than lollygagging around and playing video games.” And we should, he said.

His answer was a Youth Corps-like emphasis on volunteering, including reviving a Tampa-esque Paint Your Heart Out home-improvement program like one ended in St. Pete because of legal liability concerns. (Yes, that might sound a bit self-serving for a guy who used to run a paint business.)

Ford, Wagman and Bennett all said they would move immediately to add domestic partnership benefits for same-sex couples, with Wagman pointing out that older straight couples need the benefits as well. Williams and Foster said they would study the costs and consider adding the benefits.

Ford was, again, perhaps the best informed of the lot but showed one of her worst political traits: getting far too wonky. In answering a question about how to get better public transportation (a query that, I am sure, was aimed at getting more and better buses to people’s neighborhoods), Ford used the opportunity to give a growth-management dissertation, talking about water shortages, Senate Bill 360’s impact and “concurrency elements.” Yikes!

Disclosure: Wagman’s campaign has hired the partner of CL Editor David Warner as a political consultant. Becuase of that inherent conflict of interest, Warner plays no role (either in editing or assigning coverage) in CL’s coverage of the St. Petersburg mayor’s race, which is entirely determined by Political Editor Wayne Garcia.

UPDATE: Fund-raising numbers for all the candidates appeared toay. As Mr. Schorsch points out in the comments, it’s not fair or balanced of me not to include the others in this post. So, after the jump you’ll now find Wagman’s press release and a rundown of all the candidates finances …

The following paragraph will appear in next week’s print edition of Creative Loafing in The Week That Was column:

Money in the bank: St. Pete’s mayoral candidates reported their first quarter fund-raising numbers last week. Per the St. Pete Times, the big winner was Deveron Gibbons, who raised $117,000 from January to March. Scott Wagman issued a press release reporting donations of $74,097.25, with 90% of the contributions coming from locals, though the Times points out he loaned himself $20,000 of that haul. Jamie Bennett’s website reports the candidate managed $30,918.47 “in cash and in-kind contributions.” Bill Foster had yet to report at press time, but he told the Times his first quarter report will show he raised between $23,000 and $24,000. Rounding out the field, Kathleen Ford reported $9,325 in donations plus another $3,242 in in-kind contributions (she blames her late entry into the race), Sharon Russ reported no activity and Paul Congemi loaned his campaign $10.

And now, the Wagman press release:

ST. PETERSBURG: Mayoral candidate Scott Wagman released his first-quarter fundraising report today with great pride and optimism about his candidacy.

“In these tough economic times, being able to receive this kind of financial support at this early stage is very encouraging,” said first-time candidate Scott Wagman. “As I have traveled the city on my ‘mission to listen’ I have heard a resounding call for change and action. Our city and its residents are hungry for strong new leadership and these early results are a great indication that our message and my candidacy are resonating with voters,” stated Wagman.

For the first financial quarter the Scott Wagman campaign will report revenue of $74,097.25 with $54,097.25 donated by 204 contributors. Of these early supporters an impressive 90% are local residents.

“In just three months we have seen our candidate go from virtually no name recognition to becoming a serious contender to be elected the next mayor of St. Petersburg,” said campaign co-manager Mitch Kates. “Think about it: In three months Scott Wagman has been able to put together a fully functioning political organization from the ground up, blow away the field with our online communication platforms, and complete door-to-door field efforts by volunteers in over 40 city precincts. All in all, we are very confident in our ability to win in November,” stated Kates.

For more information about Scott Wagman and his campaign, go to his website at www.scottwagman.com <http://www.scottwagman.com>  or follow us on Facebook and Twitter for-up-to-date information.

Listen to the entire interview with Scott Wagman here.

An excerpt from my print story about the interview:

Are street cops being constrained from doing their jobs?

I’m hearing there is a disconnect between the boots on the street, the street cop, and the upper-tier leadership. There is a difference between what the leadership is saying and from what I’m hearing from the street cop.

What is that message they hear?

As an example with the no-pursuit policy, a lot of the street cops are believing and feel that many of the tools they have at their disposal to fight crime, to not just fight it after it happens but to prevent crime, have been stripped away layer by layer from their arsenal of tools. They’re being told… — by told it may not be directly but its by supposition — that we don’t want any horrendous activity or event that could taint St. Petersburg as we had the 1996 “disturbances,” as some people like to call the riots we had, or the tent-slashing event. It’s this newsmaking headline event that is to avoided at all cost.

…In doing our job in providing for public safety for our citizens, occassionally something may be newsworthy that we can’t control, but you have to go a higher level of citizen protection.

Bracketology for Mayoral Madness

It’s a month earlier than college basketball’s March Madness, but with both Rick Kriseman and Ken Welch deciding this week not to run for mayor of St. Petersburg, political observers are now left with a much clearer “playoff picture.” The race is still in the first round, but the paths to victory for some candidates are now better defined.

In my analysis, I thought only either Deveron Gibbons or Ken Welch could move forward by consolidating the African-American vote. Although it may be passe to view the black vote in such monolithic terms, Gibbons is now the default leader of an entire voting bloc.

The other big winner this week was Jamie Bennett (disclosure: I am a volunteer on Jamie’s campaign). With Kriseman’s withdrawl, Bennett was ceded a huge swath of political geography in the south and west districts of St. Petersburg. More importantly, he is now the standard-bearer for the city’s Democrat and progressive voters. And don’t discount the fact that he is also the only candidates still in office.

As for the other match-ups, there really can only be one anti-establishment candidate, so Kathleen Ford and Bill Foster, while often on the opposite ends of the political spectrum, will have to sort things out as to who will represent the anti-Rick Baker vote.

And as far as Scott Wagman goes, I know he’s out there working. I really like his enthusiasm and the people with whom he surrounds himself.  I think his new website is top-notch.  But Wagman is still the big unknown in the race. That’s why his opponent right now is Legitimacy. If he does what he says he’s gonna do and drops some heavy coin into the race, he’ll make it easily into the second round for a showdown with Bennett for the St. Petersburg Times endorsement, Councilman Karl Nurse’s network and the support of progressive voters in the neighborhoods of Old Southeast, Kenwood, etc.

The winner of this match-up could easily end up with 24% to 28% of the primary vote and would be the front-runner out of the primary against Gibbons, Ford or Foster.

(Disclosure: I am a volunteer on the Jamie Bennett Campaign.  I previously consulted on the campaigns of Councilman Bill Dudley who ran against Bill Foster.  And, oh yeah, Deveron Gibbons and I ran track together in high school and worked together on various political campaigns.)