Mayor Fred Eisenberger has registered and his re-election campaign has begun. He quietly registered last week and it is officially shown on the city website. At this moment, the race is his to lose. Without a known and credible candidate, he should easily win.
Unfortunately, Mahesh Butani may not get too far. His confrontational relationship with the local print media will not help him and it remains to be seen if he will be on any of the talk radio stations, CHML or CHAM. He hasn't been deemed to be serious candidate from the get-go which is too bad, but made worse by his compulsions in calling out the media for mocking his candidacy. Can we blame him? No. I have someone better to blame.
His name is Michael Baldassaro. Because of him, there won't be a single candidate taken seriously, unless the person can truly convince our friends on Frid that he or she ought to be taken seriously. He has polluted the mayoral race to the point that the city was pondering a charge for registering to run. They just wanted some way to make sure that whoever is running is actually sincere about it. Perhaps Baldassaro is sincere, but he seems to have trouble understanding what the city can and can't do. They can't make marijuana legal. They can't make publicly smoking it legal either. And any moves to do so will be vigourously opposed by the city council and they don't have the money or the stomach to fight the feds either.
Now as far as Andrew Haines, he is also a marijuana activist, according to Metroland newspaper managing editor, Mark Cripps. Yeah, just what we needed. He still has yet to roll out his platform, but perhaps we'll have to wait until he's finished doing some rolling of his own if the news is true. For the time being, he will be looked at the same way Baldassaro has been looked at, but in a lower sense.
With that in mind, it looks to me like Mahesh Butani will not be taken seriously at all, which is really awful. He's simply been crowded out by two marijuana activists and now the incumbent. To say the least, I am really disappointed.
The mayoral race needs a credible candidate to step up and run. The question is who will do that? There are at least two hopefuls that haven't registered yet. Terry Whitehead hasn't registered and neither has Tom Jackson. So what direction will these gentlemen take? Only time will tell.
Thank you for your comments, Rene! I do appreciate your observation. However what at times looks to be a crowded playing field - will in the coming days appear to be quite bare in my opinion - as the platforms start being presented.
ReplyDeleteWith regards to appearing to be confrontational, I agree with your observation. It does come across as such, does it not? It is the price often paid to bring real change. Do you really think Gandhi would have succeeded by sending out polite letters to the media?
http://www.raisethehammer.org/blog/1753/rth_removes_letter#comment-41627
In fact I am writing a new article/blog post called "I am no Gandhi" :-) You may catch it later at RTH.
We make much of what a leader should look and feel like - and yet history nor science has been able to come up with a manual that has conclusively established the traits required to be a leader who can bring change.
This could be because every generation faces unique challenges quite distinct from the previous - In our times leaders have a shelf-life of three to four years - before the very game changes.
The role of any media in an election year, is to help make the voters understand this notion of political "shelf-life" - and not pander to notions that hurt, delays or destroy the conditions for change to occur in society -(popularly known as the CRIPPS factor), which naively or apologetically promotes the familiar -- be it with unmeasurable terms such as 'community leader', or with abstract notions such as 'experience'.
Look forward to sharing more in the coming days!
Best,
Mahesh P. Butani
"Not much else to tell you"
- courtesy the CRIPPS factor