7 May 2005
Peyton Randolph
The Minor Leagues
God help us all, but this mayoral election makes me ask: Where’s Jimmy Griffin?There isn’t a major leaguer in the crowd. If this were a pro football draft, season ticket holders would be storming 1 Bills Drive looking for the heads of the scouts, the coaches and the team president.
There may be some other cowards considering running now that Tony Masiello has formally escaped. But, if they are really strong candidates, why wait until Big Tony says he won’t run again?
You have to look at the situation and consider Senator Byron Brown the leading candidate if for no other reason than that he was willing to come out and run with Masiello on the pending ballot.
That’s based on one supposition and one use of a defective cliché. The supposition is that all Black voters are going to turn out AND vote for the former councilmember. That may or may not be true but it’s tricky to assume both of those. Remember former New York City Mayor David Dinkins and his inability to turn out his base vote when he lost to Rudy Giuliani in their second match?
The defective cliché is from those who say the city is majority minority and that means Brown can win. But if you look at the enrollment figures in city schools, they suggest a significant percentage of minority residents in the city are under voting age.
A further significant percentage is 18-30 and that group of any race doesn’t vote. What all of that means is that Brown not only has to persuade White voters to pull the lever for him, something he has been able to do in past races, but he has to persuade the city’s African-American voters to turn out for him.I suspect Council Majority Leader Marc Coppola is running second without an announcement that he’s running because he inherits much of Masiello’s ethnic base and has a base of his own in North Buffalo.
Gadfly Kevin Gaughan? He has to overcome two problems, one is that he’s intelligent and that’s not always an asset in city political races, and the other that he just moved into town and has no discernible base. On the other hand, he doesn’t have any of the negative aspects of being a city political hack.
Once the Democrats finish bloodying themselves in September, it’s off to the general election in November. You have to figure the leading Republican will be Kevin Helfer, now stashed running the city’s parking spaces. The biggest problem he has is his history in Joel Giambra’s county administration as a backroom operative and then a short stint as social services commissioner (if you blinked, you missed it). Picture the campaign ads showing Helfer and Giambra, again and again.
All four of those candidates share one common factor: none has ever really run anything. We have had a series of mayors who have left the city suffering through on-the-job training, frequently badly.
Some people say that doesn’t matter now because the control board runs everything. But that’s not really true. The Masiello Administration has been beset with a series of horrible, awful managers, like inspections czar Ray McGurn, who has been the target of attacks from the control board, the Andrew Rudnick Partnership and most members of the business community, since his operation doesn’t work and won’t reform. There are a number of other examples of bad personnel choices who have branches of city government either not working well or not working at all. Even in a time of fiscal austerity, it makes a lot of difference who runs departments and programs. The Masiello administration has had huge problems because good people weren’t rewarded and bad people weren’t punished. Even in times of no money, it makes a lot of difference how limited dollars are spent.
That’s why it matters who is mayor and it would be nice if someone running for the job had some some experience running something beside an office staff.
Restaurateur Steve Calvaneso has actually run some successful gin mills and that at least qualifies as managing and meeting a payroll, although he hasn’t actually announced his candidacy. That leaves us Jimmy Griffin, a proven manager and administrator who has the political and social graces of an elephant in mating season. We don’t get along, but you have to ask: Should Bullethead Griffin be the once and future mayor?
Copyright 2005 by Buffalo Report, Inc.