Nothing New - Nothing Much

Yesterday's candidate forum held during the monthly NAIOP luncheon featured all but one of the candidates (Sticky Fingers Garduño), the beleaguered Don Harris, and all the buzz words you could stomach. In fact, we now believe that the word "stakeholders" should be removed from political discourse. Blogger Mario Burgos has a pretty good description of a forum that at times seemed interminable (read it here).

Only one candidate distinguished herself in the hour long forum, the soon to be councilor from district 8 Trudy Jones; who was certainly playing on her home field and doesn't face an opponent in the seat being vacated by Craig Loy. Ms. Jones cut through the rhetoric and pointed out that many problems like affordable housing are actually caused through "hidden taxes" and attempts at "social engineering" (ABQ Journal - Subscription).

Surprisingly, Councilor Harris from district 9 was given a seat at the forum and addressed all of the questions that the other candidates were asked to answer. In his closing remarks, he spent a great deal of time bashing the Almighty Mayor and complaining that should he be recalled, the mayor would appoint his replacement. A strategy that left us scratching our head, as this group hasn't had the warmest of relations with Councilor Harris but has generally worked well with the Almighty One.

The Honey Bee (de'Pascal) made a smart strategic move during her closing statement addressing her divorce and her BS BS and MBA. Her argument is that she has been the victim of terrible attacks and that she can take the heat. The problem is she didn't do a thing to address the civil charge of embezzling $60,000 and her more recent attempt to pass off fraudulent degrees from the diploma mill Almeda University on an unwary electorate. If you haven't figured it out by now Ms. de'Pascal has problems with the truth, more specifically being truthful. Her performance at this particular event was credible, but it was just that - a performance.

Not surprisingly, most of the candidates made sacrifices on the altars of density, public transportation, affordable housing, impact fees, and "green" development. The sitting councilors generally defended the current council claiming that they were getting things done, while the challengers deplored the council's acrimony toward the Almighty Mayor and each other.

In the end, there was nothing new here (with the exception of soon-to-be Councilor Jones). The candidates generally parroted different formulations of the same answers, particularly the candidates from district 6. We wonder if this is an unintended consequence of public financing - vanilla candidates with vanilla ideas. They never had to face challenges to their ideas from potential donors so their answers to questions tended to sound uninformed or cliché. If this is what we have to look forward to in future elections, we've got nothing much to look forward to.