Wedding Bell Blues

Today’s ruling by the California Supreme Court upholding the constitutionality of gay marriage throws yet another twist into the 2008 Presidential campaign. A similar ruling by the Massachusetts Supreme Court in 2004 helped to mobilize social conservatives-especially in the swing state of Ohio—to come out in election-winning droves to vote for George W. Bush. Bush and the GOP enticed conservative voters by dangling the prospects pushing through a marriage protection constitutional amendment banning gay marriage in the second Bush term.

Alas, like many campaign promises, this one went unfulfilled. Disappointing, to be sure, for social conservatives but lack of action on Bush’s part meant the anti—gay marriage drum could be kept to beat on in the 2008 campaign (much as much touted anti-abortion, term limit and balanced budget constitutional amendments have been dangled by the GOP in front of conservative voters for decades.)

I wrote in April of 2004 that the Massachusetts gay marriage decision had probably handed the fall election to the GOP on a silver wedding platter. Turned out I was correct. This time, however, the impact of the California decision of the fall election will be more complicated. That’s because, of course, GOP standard bearer St. John The Moderate broke with his party in 2004 to vote against the Marriage Protection amendment. The California decision will agitate and invigorate social conservatives but, with McCain leading the GOP ticket, they have nowhere to electorally go. Sure, there may be a big proposition fight in California over a proposed anti-gay marriage state constitutional amendment that may or may not make the November ballot. But this brouhaha will hurt McCain more than it helps him as it will soak up state and national political money that otherwise might have found its way into his campaign pockets. It won’t provide him with anything approaching the pro-Bush push the gay marriage issue provided the GOP in 2004.

Hillary Clinton supporters are increasingly saying they’d vote for John McCain over Barack Obama (up to almost 30% of the pro-Hillary voters in West Virginia, for instance.) If that happens Obama’s electability drops significantly.

Meanwhile conservatives are expressing increasing doubts about John McCain–especially after his remarks on global warming. (just listen to the talking heads of conservative talk radio lambast the fellow. You’d think McCain was Jimmy Carter’s long lost brother.) If McCain doesn’t come out against the California gay marriage decision (which he can’t do without looking like he’s doing what he’d be doing if he did it—pandering too the grossest extreme) social conservatives are liable to stay home come in election-losing droves. Worse for McCain, social conservative might vault the GOP to vote in protest for third party candidates yet unnamed, like former Republican representative and bane to Bill Clinton’s existence Bob Barr who’s trying to secure the Libertarian party nomination. Losing conservative voters makes McCain’s electability drops significantly.

Which leads to the interesting conclusion that, come November, neither Obama, McCain or anyone else can win! Constitutional Monarchy, anyone?

And the Beat Goes On

Sorry I’ve been off line for a bit, my frequent reader. I’ve been battling migraines which leaves precious little time except to get my day job (which often extends into nights and weekends) done. I’ll try and post a few before the all important, probably won’t change much June Primary.

Change much like City Hall’s reaction to the latest shoe/minor atomic bombshell whichno-one seemed to notice dropped last month by the SEC. A month ago the SEC charged five former San Diego officials, including “Former-by-virtue-of-having-been-defenestrated-by-then-mayor-Dick-the-Murph-Murphy” Michael Uberuaga, for fraud in misleading Wall Street investors over the City’s finances while raising a quarter billion in bonds. Gee, isn’t that what Mike Aguirre’s been saying since the beginning of time: That a City the size of San Diego doesn’t go down the financial tubes merely due to incompetence, good intentions gone awry or lousy breaks? That it takes the determined, deliberate effort of a large number of people more willing to break laws and violate ethics than risk their jobs and careers by telling people the truth about how badly they’d screwed things up? Aguirre has been saying there is a culture of such corruption at the top reaches of San Diego government for years. And been pilloried for it. Usually by those in the top reaches of San Diego government—and those who benefit from them being there.

I’ve waited for the last month to see City leaders—on the Council, in the Mayor’s office—express the sort of outrage they should over these SEC charges. What the SEC is telling San Diego is that its body Bureaucracy and Politics is infected, diseased, corrupt. And the City has, in the last month, done nothing to bleed any of these noxious humours from its municipal blood, or even acknowledged just how damning the SEC action is.

Of course, this is the same City that has seen three councilmembers indicted for corruption, two convicted, and a Mayor resigning in failure and responded with a “business as usual,” put a nice, former cop in the figurehead position and life goes on.

Is it any wonder the City is still out of the bonds markets, months after Jerry Sanders announced he saw the light at the end of the bondless tunnel?

A Tale of Two Cities

Let me tell you about two cities lying across the American border from each other. You guess what towns they are.

The first is a relatively affluent place. Not everyone is living great but most people at least have reasonably decent houses in safe, clean neighborhoods. People can park their cars with out undoing worry they’ll be stolen or broken in to and walk the streets and parks without fear of crime. The town is a thriving tourist destination, with travelers from around the world coming to see and experience the local sights. There are numerous upscale hotels and more moderate motels, plenty of good restaurants and even a few nice casinos for visitors and locals to enjoy. There is a good medical system in place and enough business and industry to provide a decent leaving for most. Unemployment and poverty are low. The local and national governments, while not universally beloved, have done a good job over the years of maintaining infrastructure and helping their people to achieve a globally high quality of life.

The other town is, to be polite, a total mess. Unemployment is in double digits with large number of residents living in poverty. Drugs, crime, gangs and violence are rampant. The government has cracked down on the large crime cartels but they still have great sway. One drives with the doors locked and avoids driving through large swaths of the town if at all possible. Walking, even in the public parks, can be dangerous at certain times of day. Housing is in disrepair, with the number of boarded up windows rivaling the number with pane glass still intact. While the town has the same opportunities to attract tourists as it’s neighbor across the border, fear of violence, urban squalor, the general disrepair of roads and neighborhoods has greatly diminished the number of visitors willing to cross the international line. Government is seen as corrupt and incompetent. A general feeling of hopelessness pervades the population.

Okay, what two towns am I describing? San Diego and Tijuana you might think? Not in this case. I’m talking about a tale of two Niagaras: Niagara Falls, Ontario and Niagara Falls, New York, both of which I just returned from.

I was called back to the Luna ancestral homeland (both my parents are from Niagara Falls, NY and I have second, third, fourth and thirty-eight cousins, most of which I haven’t seen in years if ever, on both sides of the border) unexpectedly last Tuesday. My mother’s 87 year old sister (my Aunt and godmother) had a massive stroke and was on life support. I flew out with my wife to be with her and her son in her final hours. For those of you who have been through it, you know the drill. Lots of grief followed by a whirlwind of funeral homes, relatives, dinners, shared memories, more grief, some laughter, the melancholy of life slipped away, a few new memories and then the journey home. Life goes on.

The most vivid memory I take back with me is just how bad–economically, socially, politically, culturally—things had gotten in Niagara Falls. Back in the sixties and seventies, when my family lived in Pittsburgh, we used to make the journey home a couple of times a year. Even then Niagara was a town in decline, part of the rusting bucket of east coast industrial America. Downtown was looking shabby, the chemical and manufacturing companies that had formed the backbone of the local economy were scaling back.

Now it looks like a throwback to the inner city poverty I remember seeing in the worst areas of Pittsburgh back in the ‘60s. Only it’s the 21st century and it’s pretty much the whole town of Niagara. Block after block of formerly tidy, working and middle class homes now reduced to ruin, residents mired in intractable poverty and unemployment. Good news: you can buy a three story brick house in Niagara within easy walking distance of one of the world’s great natural wonders for around seventeen thousand dollars. Bad news: the house will probably have a boarded-up house on one side from which drugs are being sold and an empty, trash filled lot on the other where the old house had been burned for the insurance money. Given that the median income in the area is less than twenty-thousand dollars, not many locals can even scrape up the seventeen k anymore, anyway.

Oh, and more bad news: if you did try to walk to one of the world’s greatest natural wonders you’d run a good chance of being mugged. That’s what happened to my elderly uncle a few years back when he went to take the same walk around the Falls he’d been doing for eighty years. He seldom leaves his apartment, now.

Industry has largely left the region leaving nothing behind except rotting factory shells, unemployment and toxic wastes from decades of chemical industry carelessness. (It is the land of Love Canal, after all.) The only thriving business is the Indian casino in the middle of downtown (or what’s left of it, Main Street being eight blocks of shuttered, abandoned buildings). Located in what had been the Convention Center, conventioneers long since having given up on the decaying former honeymoon capital of the nation and defecting to the Canadian side or Vegas, the casino’s clientele consists mostly of locals, disproportionately old, spending their welfare, social security and disability checks for the hope of winning a big enough jackpot to maybe get out of Dodge.

My wife and I stayed, meanwhile, on the Canadian side of the Falls, traveling back and forth across the Rainbow Bridge to spend time with my cousin and attend to the funeral preparation and consummation. The Canadian side is not a paradise—there are some ratty areas, particularly where my Great-Grandmother used to live off Ferry drive. But most of the town is in reasonably good shape and the tourist areas are thriving, the hotels beautiful and reasonably priced, even with the weakness of the US dollar, and the casinos are filled with well-healed international tourists. (And, of course, the place is also filled with Canadians, a people so polite that if you ran one of them over with your car they would apologize for having smeared

Barack Obama got into a flap while I was away for having said that small town America is “bitter,” clinging to religion and guns. Senator Obama is wrong. No-one I met in Niagara Falls seemed particularly bitter about the unfortunate circumstances they now found themselves. Depressed and melancholy, yes. Depressed over how plain depressing it was to live in such a depressing, declining place. Melancholy over how much things had changed for the worst over the course of lives that spanned decades. But bitter, no. The one word that best captures the zeitgeist of Niagara is “sad.” Everyone is sad over how bad things are. Everyone wonders how things came to this.

The last time we drove back into Niagara Falls, USA across the Rainbow bridge we chatted with the young INS agent manning a border control booth. After talking briefly about life in San Diego (you mention you are from San Diego to anybody who’s not from San Diego and they tend to have yearning tales of how they’ve been to San Diego once and want to go back that they want to share with you…) we remarked on just how sad things had become in the town. She said, “You know, it’s been down hill ever since they drove the mob out.”

Niagara Falls was actually better managed when the mob ran the place. How does it come to that?

Hillary Clinton said it takes a village to raise a child. I say it takes the determined effort of many people – corrupt and/or negligent government, short-sighted business, rapacious criminals—to ruin a once vibrant town filled with hard working, god-fearing, country-loving people.

How you bring back communities like Niagara Falls and all the Niagara Falls across this nation is the most important and least discussed elephant in the national living room of this Presidential campaign. Given the economic storm that is forming, perhaps the candidates for our nation’s highest office—and we, the nation as a whole—ought start fretting more actively over the plight of our Niagara’s, for what happened to them can easily happen to the rest of the villages, towns and cities of this proud Republic.

(And yes, I’ve used the title of this piece before but whaddahey.)

Lucky Star

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Mike Aguirre must have been born under a lucky star. Which will serve him well through June though it might go into eclipse by November.

The City Council doesn’t like him, the entrenched city bureaucrats don’t like him, the city labor unions don’t like him, the cops don’t like him, the Chargers want him to fall in the bay (right in front of where they’d like that new, downtown stadium, if possible, the Union Trib loathes him, the Mayor is sticking pins into his little Mikey voodoo doll and the public has become progressively less enamored with him. (Rumors that his dog has declared “undecided” in a recent poll appear unfounded—I don’t think he has a dog. I do hear that his fish is looking at him with suspicion, however….)

And a recent Competitive Edge poll (the local gold standard on the public pulse) shows Mike Agonistes losing to all three of his major competitors: Judge Jan, President Peters and, well, Brian Maienschein—a guy so blandly nice that its hard to even come up with a handle for him. (Note to self: Call W on this one. He’s always got a good nickname or two…) Goldsmith beats him by 23 points, the other two by less than half that.

Conventional wisdom has Agonizing Mike surviving the June primary with maybe 25% of the vote, enough to win in a field divided between Aguirre and everybody running as “Not Aguirre.” But then he goes bye-bye come the November big show.

Not so fast. The assumption here is that those who will vote for different candidates to replace Aguirre June will rally around the second place winner in the fall—which, according to the CE poll, seems to be how likely voters are currently thinking.

But likely voters are still seeing June as a race between Aguirre and his competitors. It’s not. The race is now between Goldsmith, Peters and Maienschein. And, according to the CE poll, Goldsmith is in the lead in the race for second—but not so far out in front (17.6% to Peters 14.2% to Maienschein’s 9.5%) that he’s a juggernaut. With attorney Dan Coffey dropping out of the race and endorsing Peters, if his 2.1% of supporters throw in with Prez Peters he and Goldsmith are almost tied.

Had Jan Goldsmith been allowed to challenge Mike Aguirre Mano-a-Mano without the other wanna-be Mike whackers piling on Aguirre’s plight would have been dire indeed. Given the abysmally low voter-turnout likely in June—consequence of the early March Prez Primary—which would favor a more conservative candidate like Goldsmith, Aguirre might have been turned into a lame duck before the June Gloom had cleared.

But it’s not. Peters and Maienschein, both realizing their paycheck ends this year, decided a) they didn’t like Aguirre enough to run; and b) they might be able to beat him. (And, if either was the only candidate against Aguirre in June, they might have—though Peters was and is clearly the more logical City Council candidate to take vengeance on Menacing Mikey.)

So now if either hopes to advance to the title bout in November they have one job: convince the anti-Aguirre voters that “Mr. Ferret” (as a Republican assemblyman Goldsmith’s major accomplishment was to unsuccessfully push a bill to legalize the private ownership of the furry little rodents) is not the guy to take on Mauling Mike. That means they have to aim their energies at making Goldsmith look bad.

For both Peters and Maienschein this means showing San Diego voters that Goldsmith is a) an outsider originally from Poway (where he was Mayor) and who had to move his residency from Coronado to Little Italy so as not to appear the carpet-bagger he is); b) that Goldsmith is an outsider from Poway (where he was Mayor) and who had to move his residency from Coronado to Little Italy so as not to appear the carpet-bagger he is) who has had almost no experience in local San Diego City politics; and c) that Goldsmith is an outsider from Poway (where he was Mayor) and who had to move his residency from Coronado to Little Italy so as not to appear the carpet-bagger he is) has the worst hair in San Diego politics. Peters can also throw in that, being a Democrat, he is the safe Democratic alternative to Aguirre compared to the other two Republicans.

Goldsmith, meanwhile, is taking the high road of running against Aguirre as the generic establishment candidate. But if he doesn’t pay attention he could well be pulled down by the hounds of ambition nipping at his heels. Which could yield the unusual result of having two Democrats running in a City-wide general election for a higher office—Peters and Aguirre. Which, also, could also be the best chance for anti-Aguirreistas to remove him from office.

Come fall the political landscape changes dramatically. Especially if Barrack Obama is the candidate. Come November the combination of an energized Democratic base (and the city is now majority Democratic in registration) and depressed Republicans base (at least conservatives, of which San Diego has more than its share) uninspired by their party nominee could translate into a surge of voters more inclined to go Mikey should he be running against establishment Republican Goldsmith. If Peters is the opponent it becomes much murkier.

And, probably, nastier, as all the city’s dirty political laundry gets recycled yet again.

My money (all $7.39—don’t let my kids know or they’ll raid Dad’s wallet…) is that Aguirre survives into a second term by another narrow margin.

Duh!

Duh

My two big “Duhs” of the week. (Part of my award-winning series of insightful journalistic excellence entitled “Duh!”):

First, the front page  article in the NY Times yesterday  morning on how the bonds markets has been gouging cities and states on bonds fees due to the significantly lower credit ratings Wall Street gives City Hall than Corporate Headquarters.

Duh.

Of course the Bonds Industry sticks it to local governments.  They do it for the same reason the best and the brightest of the Wharton School and the Harvard School of Business gave us the S&L debacle of the 1980s, the Dot.Com debacle of the 1990s and the Sub Prime Debacle of the 2000s.  They did it because they can.  Wall Street is all about money, of course, but it is all about short term money, with every bonds trader and fund manager dreaming of one thing:  hitting the big bonuses for moving the most paper, worthless or otherwise and getting to retire as a modern feudal lord to a summer house in the Hamptons.  If you can get there quicker by screwing Main Street USA, be it consumers with jumbo, “yeah you’re going to default on this sucker someday but by then I’ll be promoted and it won’t be my problem” loans or City Halls from east to west with higher borrowing costs on bonds.

Funny thing about that.  The free market says credit ratings and the cost of borrowing money should be a function of risk.  So who is more likely to default on a loan – a municipal government or a corporation?  That’s right, corporations.  So why do they get charged less for loans?  Because the Bonds markets figured out years ago that municipal politicians, playing with taxpayer money, would be less likely to kick up a fuss about being gauged at the Bonds spigot than corporate leaders held accountable by irate share holders.

They screwed the cities and states for the simplest of all reasons: they could.  And they did.

Duh.

And then comes this from the Center for Policy Initiatives report on campaign contributions to local political races.  Brace yourselves:  Real Estate developers ponied up around 20% of the million plus dollars contributed in 2007 to the 2008 Mayoral and council district races.

Who’d a thunk it?  Real Estate developers want to curry favor with the people who, if elected, would craft the ordinances and policies dictating how real estate can be developed in San Diego.

Duh.

The surprising thing to me in the CPI report is actually what a small percentage of the total  contributions the development industry constitutes.  I mean, come on developers.  You stand to make tens of millions of dollars by turning Otay factory lands into compacted housing developments and cramming in  thousands of additional  residential units into the I-15 & I-54 corridors.  At least have the good manners to contribute real money to the political campaigns and not a paltry few hundred Gs.

I mean,  I’d like to think that if San Diego government is for sale, it at least goes for a good, hefty price….

Duh.

Word Games

What do you get when you combine the millionaire Republicanism of Mitt Romney and the hot-tempered progressive populism of Mike Aguirre? That would be local self-made millionaire running his own multi-million dollar “I’m already a millionaire and now want to be a mayor, too” Steve Francis.

Francis has hit the media board running with an unprecedentedly early and expensive mayoral primary media blitz. His platform is to the social progressive left of Sanders and the fiscal conservative right – no mean feat. But if Dick Nixon and Pete Wilson could do it in the 1970s, maybe Francis has a shot at it in 2008.

Francis makes great political hay out of the fact that he’s self-funding his own campaign. There’s a political equivalent to the old saying that “a lawyer who defends himself has a fool for a client.” It’s “a man who finances his own campaign has proven he has only one supporter – himself. At least, that is the conventional wisdom on such matters. Self-funded candidates have, on the whole, done worse in elections than those who do the dirty work of digging in the muck for political moola.

And Francis’ claim that self-funding his campaign will keep him independent of influence from all those nefarious special interests out there. Should he be elected he’ll owe something to the groups that banded together to vote in into office—at least if he wants to be reelected down the pike. Of course Francis also says he doesn’t care if he wins reelection—and that may be true.

Four years in the morass of city government may be enough for anyone. Francis could have the advantage of a one-term shaker-and-a-changer. But, then again, becoming a self-admitted lame-duck from the moment he is sworn in can work against him. Long-term municipal interests (the kind who plan to be around more than four years—or four decades) will figure they can just hunker down and wait Chango Stevo out.

But even then Francis will have to deal with those downtown interests—municipal employees, cops and firefighters, developers and financiers and the rest of the cast of characters who have been a part of city politics for decades. And he will have to do favors here, end up with IOUs there, if he is going to get his agenda for streamlining and making transparent city government.

In short, if Francis is going to win the election and, more importantly, successfully deliver on his campaign promises, he’s going to have to become something of the very specious he deigns himself above: a politician.

But Francis’ rebranding of himself from the arch-conservative choice in 2005 to the people’s rational choice in 2008 makes sense. The Democrats still have yet to pony up a candidate to challenge Gentleman Jerry from the social progressive left, leaving Francis free to adopt rhetoric more usually the turf of Mike Aguirres and Donna Fryes. And Francis’ self-funding may matter less in San Diego, where contributions to mayoral races still tend to come from a few thousand people—usually members of organized interests—and not from grass-roots Barack Obama/Ron Paul/Dennis Kucinich style e-campaigns. So the amount of money Jerry raises for June will be less representative of deep popular support.

And, as Francis keeps hammering on the simple and true message that Sanders has delivered on almost none of his significant campaign promises from 2005 against a backdrop of what promises to be a grisly budget season with tough cuts called for, Sanders veneer of Teflon may well start to wear thin.

After all, what do you get when you mix the jovial ineptness of Jerry Ford with the ineffective administration of Jimmy Carter?

That would, of course, be Jerry Sanders.

And so far Steve Francis is the only—and, therefore, best—alternative to four more years of the same: the City treading water as it slowly drifts towards fiscal shoals again.

Go for it, Stevo. Show ‘em the money.

And the Winner Is?

Well, not my homies in the California Community Colleges. We saw our ballot Prop 92 go down to a 3:2 defeat tonight proving that in politics, like in comedy, it’s all in the timing. Had the prop cutting tuition fees and raising funding for the Cal Comms been on the ballot in November 2006 my bet is it would have passed by 55% or more. Such is life. The pity is, of course, it is in the economic hard times that funding for higher ed — especially Community Colleges–is even more of a public need. You can send people to colleges or prisons when the economy heads south. Colleges cost less and yield a heck of a lot more.

Californians proved they’d rather lose their money to Indian Casinos than the tax man approving all four casino compacts. And Californias also proved they don’t like their legislators but they also know the current system of term limits doesn’t work that well–notice the narrow 4% points the prop lost by is much narrower than the 16% (58% to 42%) Governor Gray’s term limit proposal was defeated by in 2002. Most striking, both the liberal Bay Area and conservative San Diego and Imperial Counties voted for the measure while liberal LA and the conservative Central Valley voted against it. Go figure.

Oh, and there was something about presidential primaries going on tonight too, as I reccall. Romney is a dead man walking. I expect him to pull a John Edwards sometime in the next fortnight and drop out of the race even as he insisted tonight he was in it to the convention. And Huckabee has VP, not P, written all over his primary showings.

Meanwhile the Hillary and Barack dance continues though her heir-apparentness’ large victory in California has got to give the party pause. Given the size of her victory and the distribution across the state, I figure she wins 260+ of the 441 state delegates which will put her clearly in the delegate lead. Clinton won New York, New Jersey, Florida and California — exactly the big states Dem’s have to win to triumph come November. Barack (like Romney) did best in the smaller state caucuses where turnout is skewed to the party left (or right, in Mitt’s case.) I’m still betting that post-Super T day the double big Mo’s — momentum and money-swing back to Clinton. Then Obama will have to decided how long he wants to draw out the Democratic contest to the Republican’s benefit.

OK, time to pack it in. Just spent 4 1/2 hours in the studios of KGTV with Hal Clement (yes, he’s as nice in person as he seems on TV) doing election pontificating. Tomorrow it’s These Days with Tom Fudge and Gloria Penner (9a-10a on KPBS 89.5) and then a keynote speech tomorrow night to the San Diego and Imperial Counties Community College Association’s annual Trustees dinner at USD. Topic: today’s election, of course.

And if you have a chance, check out my article in this week’s print edition of City Beat.

On to the Conventions.

The Man Who Would Be Kingmaker

Or, better yet as a title, Mitt Romney –You’re terminated. For the last year-most recently just eleven days ago—his Schwarzeneggerness was declaring that he wouldn’t endorse a GOP contender prior to the Fab Feb Five primary. Oh what a difference a fortnight makes. Or clear indications from South Carolina and Florida as to whom the GOP nominee will probably be.

The Terminator’s endorsement will play a strong role in helping John McCain win the state Tuesday. The core of the California Republican party sees McCain as a RINO at best, an outright liberal at worst (of course the right wing of the California GOP thinks Ghengis Khan was too progressive). But GOP moderates who voted for Arnold will be more than happy to darken an oval for the Gubenator’s new best political bud. Given McCain’s momentum coming into the Golden State and the increasing national perception of McCain as a politically dead man walking, Gentleman John Mc probably wins the state by a comfortable margin.

Smart move by our Barbarian Governor. Also a move I said he’d need to take last February. Principle and keeping to one’s word is one thing and doing the politically expedient thing can often be quite another. But ingratiating himself with McCain Schwarzenegger can take credit for delivering California if McCain wins the state. And if California puts McCain’s campaign over the top as the clear front runner of the party, Arnold can also claim the mantle of presidential king maker.

If McCain wins next November (unlikely) then Arnold has a pal in the White House whose IOU Arnold holds in his pocket. Or humidor, as the case may be. A McCain loss next November leaves Schwarzenegger the de facto power in the GOP as governor of the nation’s larger state. Either way, Arnold comes out of this a paramount national figure in the GOP. Which won’t hurt him come his run in 2010 against Barbara Boxer.

As Mel Brooks said, “It’s good to be the king.”

Stirring

Stirring

In the end-of-semester grading rush, I completely overlooked blogging on the Mayor’s State of the City address two weeks back. You remember, the one where Gentleman Jerry gave a rousing speech on how peachy-keen things were going in San Diego and how even more peachy-keener they would be this year? And then the next day announced just how deep that pool of red ink the city was drowning in would be this year?

Let me say this about Jerry’s speech: Yawn.

Between the State of the City and the State of the Union addresses (the one where the Obama snub of Clinton was the most substantive thing to happen), all I can say is wake me up when it’s 2009.

Oh, and St. Francis of the City, take heart—Sanders continues to be so awe-inspiringly uninspired and you just might have a chance to win this thing come June.

Maienschein Steamroller

Maienschein? Councilman Maienschein? The kind of competent but blends into the City Council crowd Maienschein? That’s the one who’s now joined the dogpile on Mike Aguirre?

OK. Wonders never cease.

Now, if you’d said Peters, that would be a different story. While I’ve disagreed with Councilman P repeatedly over the years he a) has the gravitast; and b) has the high profile to run against Aguirre — something many have thought and continue to think he should do. Peters is probably the only municipal figure of note that could give Aguirre the Avenger a run for his political money.

But Maienschein? Nice enough guy, but here’s what his candidacy will do: he’ll split the anti-Aguirre vote with Judge Jan, Disgruntled Dan and whomever else hops on the pile. If Alan B. decides to sit this one out, Maienschein, with his built in voter constituency, is best positioned to come in second to Aguirre in the June primary. And Mike mauls him come November for being a member of the very City Council that got San Diego into the mess Mike’s been railing against for the last four year.

Jeez, Aguirre. How lucky can you get?