Sometimes during the most recent presidential campaign, I had enough. Every day, 24-7, month after month, it was Obama vs. Romney. And if that wasn’t enough, there were other players inserting themselves and the political pundits calling their shots.
Just when I was near overdosing, Romney would do or say something that added another nail to his proverbial presidential coffin. By the end of the campaign, the public had real insight into Romney the candidate, the person, the businessman. And most voters didn’t like what they saw and said so on Election Day.
The Slay-Reed mayoral race is shaping up in a similar manner. Maybe there are not the titan budgets on both sides to wage ad battles, but the ground game is worth a ringside seat.
Most observers are saying they haven’t seen the incumbent campaign so hard since he first ran in 2001. Mayor Francis G. Slay is definitely feeling the pressure from his opponent Lewis Reed. And he should.
In the game of politics, you will make enemies simply because you can’t please all of the people all of the time. But Slay and his administration have made unnecessary enemies because of their arrogance, vendettas and power-grabbing antics. Now those adversaries are rising up and joining with others who suffered similar smack-downs. These aren’t always conscious, orchestrated alliances but the anger, disappointments and defiance are slowly being stitched into a latent force.
Like Romney, Slay missed opportunities to show his leadership. This has been happening so long, some feel there are no leadership qualities there. His divide-and-conquer racial tactics have been devastating to the city, resulting in St. Louis receiving such ignoble titles as “Most Segregated City” and “Most Dangerous.” The Wall Street Journal recently dubbed us as one of the 10 Worst Run Cities.
Since most comparable urban cities are struggling with the same issues, this is about leadership, vision and problem-solving. The current administration is anemic in all three.
When you look deeper at what initiatives the mayor started, most mirror his leadership in – or, more accurately, his hijacking – of local control of the police department. Since I’ve been working on this issue for decades, I know where the mayor has been on local control. Slay was against it before he was for it; he vetoed a civilian review board bill in 2006.
Then he teamed up with billionaire Rex Sinquefield this past November to push Prop A, which has so many convoluted issues it’s impossible to implement smoothly now. Yet local control is one of the successes the mayor touts on the campaign trail.
The mayor’s latest example of lackluster leadership is his get tough on black “thugs” under the guise of stopping gun violence. He’s going straight to punishment and jail time even though he’s not done one iota around jobs, recreation and other services that are part of a youth violence-prevention package. Plus, just like we knew the code language Romney used during his campaign, black folks have decoded Slay’s contemptuous terms for us.
Aside from the policy and administrative issues, there are always the colorful and interesting sidebar happenings in a contentious campaign like this. Things like videotaped destruction of Reed’s political signs. Things like the Slay campaign seeing “Ladies for Lewis (Reed)” and then doing “Sisters for Slay.” And then there’s the shockumentary on “Slayvery” by RCX Productions, Bootlicker, which will premiered February 20 at the Tivoli.
We have a couple of more weeks until the March 5 primary. There’s going to more debates, more campaign tricks and more work to do. The more desperate Slay becomes, the more his real character will be revealed.
