Can the Imp Elect Stanford Mayor
We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss-- we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably we remain. By slow degrees . . . Therefore do we the most impetuously approach it. There is no passion in nature so demoniacally impatient, as that of him who, shuddering upon the edge of a precipice, thus meditates a Plunge.
Edgar Allen Poe, The Imp of the Perverse
The most powerful friend Stanford Glazer has working for him in his oddball mayoral bid is Poe's aforem entioned "Imp of the Perverse." The Imp is that inexplicable force within us all that urges us to jump off high buildings, push strangers in front of subway trains, or, in this case, cast a real, un-retractable vote for a genuine All-American rapscallion.
To envision the Imp, think back to the red-capped devil who showed up periodically on the right shoulder of your favorite cartoon character encouraging him to mayhem. To envision the Imp's counter-force on the left shoulder, think Kay Barnes, sweet-natured, cherubic, orthodox to the core, urging constancy and moderation.
Even Glazer acknowledges that Barnes is a "very nice lady." Everyone does, largely because she is. But like Glazer, many among Kay's foes deliver the phrase "nice lady" with a left-handed twist. From their perspective, nice is the opposite of strong, and lady is very nearly the opposite of woman. Has anyone ever called Katheryn Shields or Claire McCaskill or even Karen McCarthy either "nice" or "lady?" Not in their presence. Says Glazer of Barnes with damning precision, "She should be the mayor of Prairie Village or something."
No, Barnes is vulnerable because too many voters see her merely as a "nice lady," too feckless to commandeer a city that they think is being run aground by a galley of rogues and mutineers--that is, when not stuck dead in the horse latitudes. Glazer is counting on those voters to listen to their imp and vote for him. In the four way primary race, a stunning 35 percent of the city's voters did just that.
Steve Glorioso does "opposition research" on those unknowing souls who dare run against his chosen candidates like Mayor Barnes. In Kansas City, no one does such research more knowingly than Glorioso--with the possible exception of hardball consultant Pat Gray who too works for Barnes.
Stanford Glazer presents something of a challenge for Gray and Glorioso. He is just way too easy. Glorioso delights in digging through the record to find that one "silver bullet' that blows away a candidate's façade and exposes his hypocritical core. But with Glazer there is no facade. He has lived all his adult life in a veritable glass-walled arsenal of silver bullets. How to pick just one? Who would believe Glorioso if he revealed them all? And might the voters think him and his campaign hateful if they tried?
"Where do you begin," sighs Glorioso, "with a guy whose greatest claim to fame is multiple bankruptcies?" Here, Glorioso speaks with unusual discretion. Chaotic almost beyond belief, Glazer and his three sons make Ozzie Osborne's family look like Ozzie and Harriet's.
Still, one has to admire Glazer's chutzpah. Never in modern political history has a candidate dared to run in so public a race with so much baggage. A few years back, in fact, the Kansas City Star devoted four months of research just rummaging through it. The Wall Street Journal even piled on. "You want to pick on my family," Glazer says and seems to mean it, "that's life."
Indeed, Glazer's stunning indifference to political niceties is what unnerves the Barnes' camp and makes him so strangely viable a candidate. As case in point, he turned up for his first interview on KCPT-TV dressed for all the world like Nathan Detroit--black tie on black shirt, early-American gangster. On his web site, he announces as his primary self-definition, "I am not a stand-up comedian." He has the unlikely Jimmy "Dyn-o-mite" Walker out stumping for him in the central city. How, Glorioso wonders, does one run against that? The consultant's playbook has no chapter to defend against the Imp of the Perverse.
The "Glazer Plan" is the one and only thing about the Glazer candidacy that makes sense. For all of Glazer's eccentricities, the detailed plan is admirably straight-forward. It involves cutting unnecessary expenditures, collecting outstanding debts, and in general running City Hall "like a business." Glazer was also one of the very few candidates to incorporate a distinctive campaign issue--"no new Downtown arena"--into his yard signs, his primary campaign tool.
If nothing else, Glazer has also shown that a candidate can run an effective campaign on a limited budget. Had Councilman Paul Danaher run a comparable campaign, he likely could have outpolled Barnes in the primary. Instead, Danaher dropped out when he proved unable to raise the kind of money he had thought necessary to win. He shouldn't have.
As this and the last election have shown, serious people have ceased to run for mayor. There are several reasons why. For one, with the emergence of the suburbs, Kansas City matters less in the affairs of the metropolis. For another, the Kansas City Star no longer provides a forum to raise political issues to the level of universal consciousness. The readership has declined greatly and what's left has been zoned into little "homelands" of self-interest. The fact that The Star has been tilting leftward, and consciously alienating a good chunk of the politically involved in the process, does not help either. Nor does the fact that local talk radio has gone "hot" in a desperate to skew "young."
So the election comes down to the "nice lady" and Nathan Detroit. The Imp of the Perverse is stumping hard for Nathan. "Hey, he'll run the city like a business," whispers the Imp. "And if he runs it like one of his own," adds the Imp mischievously, "well, the city will get the kind of wake-up call it deserves." "Win-win." Jack Cashill is Executive Editor or has affiliated with the magazine for 23 years. He can be reached at jcashill@aol.com. The views expressed in this column are the writer's own and do not necessarily reflect those of Ingram's.
Jack Cashill is Ingram's Executive Editor and has affiliated with the magazine for 25 years. He can be reached at jcashill@aol.com. The views expressed in this column are the writer's own and do not necessarily reflect those of Ingram's.