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When it comes to deciding which dot on the mayor’s ballot to poke with that stylus Tuesday, it mostly comes down to differences in the candidates’ styles.
CityBeat has already parsed the respective platforms of State Sen. Mark Mallory (D-West End) and Councilman David Pepper (see stories at citybeat.com/mayor). So has every other news outlet in the city.
Still, it’s been hard to discern substantive differences between the two Democrats. There are two possible explanations for this: One, there aren’t all that many, and two, Mallory hasn’t offered nearly as many specific proposals as Pepper.
Pepper’s five main plans total 141 pages. Mallory’s Web site outlines a more general approach and links to public safety and neighborhood plans that are each just one page long.
Mallory says his lack of detail is intentional.
“The difference is that my approach is a leadership approach,” he says. “(Pepper’s) approach is a policy-based approach.
We need leadership — that’s what’s been lacking. There’s no shortage of plans.”
Pepper agrees that after a certain point all the plans in the city become ineffectual.
“If the mayor doesn’t have a plan, yes,” he says. “You need a top leader to have one.”
Differences do exist
Pepper says a major difference in the campaigns is that he’s taken time to lay out a comprehensive agenda.
“Our sound bites sound the same,” Pepper says, “but I think one of us has dug deeper on real solutions and the other hasn’t.”
Take the issue of public transportation. Pepper often talks about a “21st century transportation system” such as a trolley or light rail to connect the Banks through the center city and up to Findlay Market or Broadway Commons. Mallory simply calls for the city to upgrade its transportation system.
“David talks about a trolley system that connects the downtown entertainment venues, and that’s the extent of his transportation plan,” Mallory says. “My plan is much more broad and comprehensive.”
Mallory says his plan encompasses Pepper’s targets as well as the institutions in the uptown area. But he wants to leave the details to the experts.
“I’m not a micromanager like David is,” Mallory says. “It’s whatever the transportation experts say it needs to be, whether it’s a trolley, a rail, a bus. Leaders need to have broad, visionary thinking, and you leave the details to the experts. I’m not going to be hired as mayor to actually sit down and design a transportation system.”
Mallory often mentions that he’s a trained manager, having received a degree in Administrative Management from the University of Cincinnati. Pepper, in turn, had extensive experience researching and developing ideas at Yale Law School.
Part of the difference is also that, after a decade in the state legislature, Mallory simply isn’t as well-acquainted with the city’s minutiae as Pepper, who’s spent the last four years on city council. So both play up their respective insider/outsider roles in Cincinnati politics.
Mallory says someone needs to come in from outside to clean up the “chaos” in City Hall, and Pepper can’t be that someone because he’s been part of the system. In turn, Pepper says the city needs an insider who already understands the ins and outs and can lead the city “from day one.”
There are a handful of substantive policy differences between the candidates. One is Pepper’s plan for reforming city government — for some city services he’s talked about implementing “managed competition,” the buzz word that replaced the buzz word “privatization.” That’s something Mallory flatly rejects, which is presumably one reason Mallory won the endorsements of three major local labor unions.
That’s another difference Mallory has liberally played: his bevy of endorsements. He might back off that angle now that Pepper has been endorsed by the local police and firefighters unions and the city’s two daily papers, though those endorsing organizations are widely considered conservative.
That’s consistent with Pepper’s base. There are a fair number of people voting for Pepper because he’s perceived to be more moderate, maybe because the Republican candidate, the Rev. Charlie Winburn, got knocked out in the mayoral primary or because Winburn was never palatable in the first place and Mallory is just too indiscernible or old-school Democrat for them to swallow.
Hard-core liberals and artists seem to lean toward Mallory. He makes a bigger deal of the arts — whenever the issue of population loss comes up, he talks up the “creative class” theory of attracting and retaining young people while Pepper says middle-class families are actually leaving in higher numbers.
But tucked into Pepper’s 35-page economic plan is a page on “Arts, Culture and Tourism” that says many of the same things about arts support and marketing that Mallory suggests.
Problems and questions
One unlikely fulcrum on which their mayoral campaigns have recently moved is Mallory’s endorsement by the Black Fist. Here’s where the mayor’s race devolves into examinations of another kind of race.
The Black Fist is a small group of local black activists who often use over-the-top antics such swearing at public officials and police and making anti-Semitic statements to emphasize their points about civil rights issues in the city.
Mallory has refused to reject the Black Fist endorsement, though it did eventually disappear from his Web site. Part of being a consensus-building leader is allowing other people the opportunity to express their views, Mallory says.
Pepper makes no bones about publicly censuring and shutting out the Black Fist.
“When you start bringing hate groups into the fold, I think you divide more than you unite,” he says. “At a certain point leadership is knowing when a group is so over the line that to bring them in won’t get you anywhere.”
Mallory, an African American, accuses Pepper of using the Black Fist endorsement as a wedge to scare white voters into Pepper’s camp.
“I firmly believe that, after the primary, David’s consultants looked at the results and said, ‘The only way that Pepper can win is to use race in this contest,’ ” Mallory says.
Pepper rejects charges of race-baiting and says he’s worked hard to earn the black vote.
“I have campaigned very carefully and very aggressively across the city,” he says. “To me, (the Black Fist issue) is about one particular quote-unquote hate group.”
Both candidates are politically savvy and expedient, for which they’ve each run into some trouble with elections commissions.
Pepper got slapped for wording on some campaign literature and TV ads that implied he’s already mayor. Meanwhile, the Ohio Elections Commission has yet to rule if a Service Employees International Union expenditure of more than $100,000 on mailers and phone calls in support of Mallory breaks city campaign finance laws limiting contributions from political action committees to $2,500.
But all these political analyses are just so much speculation and word count. Pepper has clearly laid out what he wants to do. The question for the policy wonk is, can he pull it off?
Mallory appears more polished, but his plans are more indistinct. The question for the consummate manager is, can good management inspire the creation and implementation of solid plans?
Really, there are no clear villains in this race. It mostly comes down to style. ©
This article appears in Nov 2-8, 2005.
