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- Sunday, July 10, 2011
Part soap opera, part game show, part Reality TV, this year's election campaigns have turned into a strangely entertaining whirl of Fortuna (goddess of chance). Perhaps Dancing With the Stars is more like it.
Early voting has already begun so all that's left for Solares Hill is to judge the candidate's campaign routines. This year The Key West Citizen has decided not to endorse candidates. What follows are my own personal observations and do not reflect those of The Citizen or its editorial board.
Let's start with the young guy. Mayor Morgan McPherson, at the age of 40, is four years younger than any other candidate and 27 years younger than the two oldest candidates in this week's election.
Despite his youth, McPherson has been the big spender in getting his dance across; he and Craig Cates, 56, garnered the most number of donor dollars. Since McPherson has many potential years ahead of him, we can expect to see him stepping out into the hustings again whether he wins re-election this time or not. Politics looks to be his thing now, its moves so much sweeter than what a real-estate agent's life can offer (although the audience response isn't always so great).
McPherson's campaign has been a kind of three-step twirling around a goal of carbon-neutrality, a need for alternatives to tourism and his record. But what everyone actually wanted to know was, did Gov. Crist realize it was Morgan's sister he was appointing to the board at Florida Keys Community College after the college president had demoted Morgan's brother? That became a bit of a distraction. Also distracting, to drivers anyway, has been the McPherson team's ubiquitous (meaning, in this instance, billboard-sized) campaign sign, that black-and-red blotch of race-car analogy blaring "Morgan Mayor start-2-finish."
Of this year's chorus line of candidates, all male, McPherson has had the big-gun supporters while Cates and Billy Wardlow have stolen some thunder by being Conchs (third and fourth generation respectively). The Cates performance as mayoral candidate, although modest, comes straight from central casting: He is the model mayor for a city administered by a city manager. Mayor and manager (should this scenario come to pass) would tango together just fine. Cates might not have gone to college but, hey, Sloan Bashinsky may be the highest educated of all this year's candidates by several degrees.
Let's not get to Bashinsky just yet. Let's look at the campaign performance of that other dark horse in the mayoral race, Mike (Nichol) Mongo, 44, who became a much darker horse as his campaign unfolded. Ultimately he was explaining himself by revealing that his mom married five times before he was 16. He said it was like "being raised outside a hurricane."
It's the word "outside" that's troubling here. Where, precisely, is Mongo positioning himself in that picture? And where is he at in general? His dervish dance of dithyrambic hyperbole, full of high-risk exposure, will whirl off the stage altogether in the script we're looking at.
Bashinsky, 67, was not as funny. Every melodrama has its stock villain and he is ours. Covering the candidates for mayor last Sunday, The Key West Citizen reported, accurately, that Bashinsky "has acknowledged publicly he is not likely to be elected and has urged others to vote for Cates if not him." Apparently Bashinsky felt this sentence implied he had conceded. So he then wrote, in an e-mail copied to hundreds of people in Key West and the Keys, that "I felt like going to The Citizen and wiping its editor, Tom Tuell, all over the place."
Wiping the editor all over the place. We here at Solares Hill, which is The Citizen's Sunday magazine, are necessarily going to have a tribal response to this threat and we do. A gut reaction, visceral. One hundred percent negative.
The race in District 1 between Jimmy Weekley, a commissioner for 14 years and mayor for six, and political newcomer Tom Milone has been danced in the most gainly way. Both of them agree with each other (recycling; more police) and both have been beset by personal setbacks yet soldiered on. Quite a pair: Weekley is a surprisingly debonair man for a meat-cutter and Milone is debonair, too, in a civil-servant sort of way. Despite their problems, from the insult of criminal injury to being smeared with that $13-million duck bill, these campaigners have been good to watch, to hear and to get to know again.
May we say the same about Clayton Lopez, 56, and Jim Marquardt, 51, in District 6? Hmm. Lopez is inherently a performer, so he does put on a good show even when he's hesitating. (Picture Nijinsky, breathtakingly suspended in mid-air -- will he glide on or fall back?) But the Bahama Conch Community Land Trust turned into the only issue in this district and we must say that the rhythm of both candidates' campaigns has become increasingly repetitive and slightly off. For the latest twists and turns (we always did love the Twist), go straight to Scott Fraser's blog at realitycheck-kw.blogspot.com or The Crabby Hermit at thecrabbyhermit.blogspot.com and take your own measure of what's really going on. Unsettling stuff. "When the sound of the music changes," said Plato, "the walls of the city shake." (Or was that the Fugs?)
Here's another quote: "The only fame worth having is local." It was said by local author Annie Dillard, famous all over the world for her 1974 Pulitzer prizewinner, "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek," and shared personally with us by her husband Bob Richardson, also a local writer.
We know what she means. Big fame can simply be a matter of mass identification and become a powerless thing compared to the local. To the person you really do know, getting a job done that you can see.
Examples of this are the two candidates for commissioner of District 3. In their wholly different ways, Billy Wardlow, 55, and Tom Lavender, 67, represent two varieties of local.
Wardlow is a matter-of-fact fellow surrounded by family who's declared that the first thing he'll do is get every parking meter removed from Smathers Beach. He'll even try for "resident-friendly" parking meters in the downtown area. Winning suggestions, both of them, totally local in spirit.
So, Mr. Former Fire Chief, we know you can put out a fire. Keep true to yourself and our guess is you'll keep on making all the right moves.
Tom Lavender, meanwhile, is that other kind of local, the true Key Wester at heart whose job on the mainland just happened to be running a dive shop in Iowa. That's not a line by Dave Barry, it's a line from Lavender's bio. He's a former banker with a cosy way about him in retirement, a person who'll not step on your shoes in a foxtrot.
The reason we've been characterizing this year's campaign whirligig as a dance is that a striking number of opponents have been shaking hands and refusing to argue with each other. More than one of them put it directly: "Everyone wants to work together."
How much more agreeable that is -- not to say more musical -- than yesteryear's moan for mankind, "When will anybody ever want to work together again?"
Good show, everybody.
Don't forget to vote!
mhowell@keysnews.com