The fact that the Post-Dispatch would even use the term “threepeat” in a front-page headline to describe Mayor Francis G. Slay’s third campaign for the city’s highest office proves that it does not take seriously the current challenges facing the city of St. Louis and its need for change.
Unfortunately, the area’s only daily newspaper with the largest newsroom is playing games with the city’s future by playing footsey with Slay and his cronies.
The Post’s so-called examination of the mayor’s race could have been written by Jeff Rainford, Slay’s campaign chief, who is allowed to self-describe his personality as “focussed” and take credit for a more “focussed” Slay mayoral campaign.
Without attribution, Post reporter Jake Wagman relies on an old Political EYE item in the St. Louis American that described how Slay and Rainford personally called campaign contributors of Michael McMillan and asked them to starve McMillan of campaign funds unless he promised he would not run for mayor.
Now Slay is confirming he did this, and McMillan made a weak claim that he was not intimidated by the power play. Of course, no one who is informed believes that.
Black elected officials are rightly frustrated to serve a town where the daily paper reports the mayor’s campaign line on the front page and never poses him a pointed question.
This same newspaper requests a commentary regarding President Obama from the editor of the American, yet ignores the paper’s reporting critical of the mayor when it appears in the pages of the area’s most widely distributed African-American newspaper – but recycles that reporting months later in a way that flatters Slay and makes him look tough in the face of presumed black opposition.
Where are black politicians, black preachers and other black leaders as these games are played at the expense of black concerns? Where are the progressive white politicians and clergy? Whether co-opted or afraid of retribution, they remain largely silent.
The losers are city residents as well as private investors in the economic fortunes of the city. An antidote is more visionary, inclusive, transformational leadership.
The losers are the children of the city’s public school district. Difficult decisions and serious discussion are needed to revive the beleaguered district. Slay has poisoned the public conversation about the district and fostered a level of mistrust that makes it even more difficult.
Other losers are those who want a police department free of corruption and illegal behavior. Slay serves on the police board, yet the Post never holds him accountable for the police department’s many scandals during his 8-year tenure.
More losers are those who want to help the city turn around its decades-long relative economic lassitude, but who are forced to deal with an inbred governance establishment led by an unimaginative, obstinate Slay, Rainford and their operatives.
The only winners seem to be Slay, his cronies and a feckless bureaucracy.
The Post didn’t bother to interview anyone who could intellectually challenge Slay’s policy goals and his past performance.
No, instead the Post played its “Mayor For Life” game and seem to cheer from the sidelines as Slay rides roughshod over anyone who dares question the many scandals and disappointments he has reigned over at the expense of needed progress. There remains a compelling need for this city to ponder the consequences of an uncontested, unexamined anointing of the incumbent.