Running for Mayor of Dallas

by Jeff Siegel

Texas has rarely been known for its free-wheeling, grass-roots, bottom-up political system. Voters here, for the most part, do what they’re told. It’s a very conservative state with a deep-seated mistrust of government, so politicians get elected by running against government. Hence, we are big on law and order, zoning is often just a suggestion, and gun control is something only pointy-headed liberals believe in.

For instance, there is a bill in the legislature that has been endorsed by the state attorney general to execute child molesters and another to give homeowners the right to shoot anyone on their property, no questions asked. We don’t need no gummint to take care of us, as the late Molly Ivins would have put it.

And Dallas is, most of the time, exactly like the rest of the state. We so dislike government that we have a city manager and a part-time council, and last year we thrashed a proposal to give the mayor some of the same power – hiring and firing the police chief, vetoes – that mayors have in other big cities.

Nevertheless, we are about to have one of the strangest mayoral elections in city history in May – 13 candidates, including two gay men, a transgender ex-Marine, a magazine editor, a couple of City Council types, and the usual Anglo businessmen who run for mayor. We have Hispanics and an African-American, a couple of whom actually have a chance to win. It’s not as over the top as California’s infamous 130-candidate gubernatorial cage match four years ago (no truly progressive candidates, and I’d prefer a good lefty woman was running), but it’s not the button-down kind of election the city’s establishment prefers.

So what’s going on? No one is quite sure. Dallas has many big city problems – a crime rate that is among the highest in the country, uneven city services, crummy schools. But the mayor, in the council-manager form of government, has very little authority to affect any of those. Plus, it’s not a stepping stone to higher political office. The second to last Dallas mayor ran for U.S. Senate and got pounded.

Some of it is ego, certainly. Some of it is conceit, I think, in that several establishment candidates firmly believe that the city will fall in line behind them and do exactly what they want because the candidates are quite wonderful human beings. It’s almost not even important, in their eyes, what it is that they want to do. That they want to do it is important enough for voters to elect them.

Regardless, I’m looking forward to it, and especially writing about it. With that many candidates, you know someone is going to say something silly.

(Photo of Dallas City Hall by gib_l of Plano, Texas via Flickr, using a Creative Commons license.)

Dallas
politics
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