The front page of yesterday’s Post-Dispatch features an over-the-top, admiring portrait of Mayor Francis G. Slay’s reelection campaign.
The story carries the sports headline “GOING FOR A THREEPEAT” and strings together a running metaphor comparing what Post reporter Jake Wagman regards as the mayor’s tenacity as a public official to his soccer playing.
Here is another image for the mayor’s campaign. It depends upon something else in his personal background – his South Side Catholicism, rather than his soccer chops.
On Sunday, January 25, a Catholic parish in Slay’s home 23rd Ward, St. Joan of Arc, celebrated the beginning of Catholic Schools Week. After Mass, worshippers headed downstairs for coffee and a donut, as usual.
On this Sunday in campaign season, however, a large black man in a suit – apparently, a police escort on duty – directed churchgoers away from the direct path to the donuts.
“We were told to make a turn and go down this wall, so we had to come up the middle of the cafeteria – and there was the mayor standing there in the way,” said one churchgoer, who did not appreciate the interjection of partisan politics at a church event.
“You literally had to talk to the mayor to get your donuts.”
This churchgoer said the mayor was accompanied at St. Joan of Arc by a campaign staffer, who was busily taking notes.
Wagman faithfully reports the Slay campaign’s claim that the mayor has been pounding the pavement and plans to knock on doors in all 28 Wards. One online reader of the Post expressed doubt in a comment that Slay would do much door-knocking in North St. Louis.
Four years ago, black voters in North St. Louis heavily favored Irene J. Smith, who received more than 30 percent of the votes cast citywide in the mayoral primary, despite running with almost no campaign funds.
Smith faces Slay again in the March 3 primary. Though the Post is right that Slay has outraised Smith by a devastating margin, it presents no polling or any other evidence to back up the claim that runs throughout the story that Smith has no momentum or political support. Smith is not quoted in the story.
Also utterly lacking from the Post report about the mayor “going door-to-door to talk to potential voters” is an awareness of crass Slay campaign stunts like the one he pulled during Catholic Schools Week at St. Joan of Arc. On that day, some Catholics in the mayor’s South Side home ward had to shake the campaigning mayor’s hand before they could buy a donut for a buck.
Afraid of what?
The timing of Catholic Schools Week for a Slay campaign stunt is no accident. As Irene J. Smith points out, the mayor raised $239,000 from PACs associated with Rex Sinquefield between December 2007 and December 2008 alone.
Sinquefield pushes aggressively for charter schools, school vouchers and other forms of privatized education. Slay has campaigned aggressively for the same education agenda, which would benefit private Catholic schools. The conservative Catholic newspaper the St. Louis Review has reported Slay and his campaign manager/chief of staff Jeff Rainford campaigning for their education agenda in Catholic churches and imploring priests to encourage their parishioners to get involved in the fight.
Maida Coleman, who plans to file for mayor as an independent in the April 7 general election, told the American she has met with Sinquefield and heard his pitch for privatized education and charter schools.
“I asked him, ‘What about the kids who don’t go to charter schools?’ And he said, ‘They’re not my problem,’” Coleman said.
“I told him, ‘That’s what I have a problem with. We need to be concerned about all of the kids in this city.’”
Though no mention of this is made in the Post article, Smith has been warmly received throughout the city when she claims Slay is trying to destroy the city’s public school system.
Though a number of North City aldermen have hosted forums about the public schools, there has been no open, sustained objection to the mayor’s education agenda – or any aspect of his agenda – from Aldermanic President Lewis Reed or the city’s 12 African-American alderpersons.
“I really can’t figure out what these people are afraid of,” said Smith, who counts two terms as 1st Ward alderwoman on a long resume of public service in the city and St. Louis County.
“I have opposed the mayor on many of his initiatives, including Ballpark Village, and he has never been able to stop one thing I wanted to do in my ward.”
Smith is campaigning for mayor on a platform that rebukes the mayor’s leadership of the city in many areas, not only education.
She thinks the Mayor’s Office should offer more support for small businesses. Slay’s huge campaign war chest reflects his close ties to big business, including many St. Louis County Republicans.
She also says the city has an affordable housing crisis and that the mayor should be addressing it, rather than pushing for the taxpayer-subsidized development of expensive lofts Downtown.
Smith also is baffled that the mayor serves as the only elected official on the St. Louis Board of Police Commissioners, yet has taken no responsibility nor offered any explanation for the many scandals that beset the police department under the leadership of former Police Chief Joe Mokwa.
Mokwa and Slay supported one another’s political careers right up until Mokwa’s forced resignation from the police department. The two men are married to sisters.
“The mayor hasn’t even addressed the issue of crime that is plaguing our city,” Smith said. “All I hear is Jeff Rainford on the radio saying his neighborhood is safe enough to jog in at night.”
Smith said that Rainford, a former television reporter, sets the tone for Slay’s leadership of the city.
“With them, everything is a spin thing, a hookup thing,” Smith said.
“Francis Slay isn’t even running the City, Jeff Rainford is – and he’s running it into the ground.”
