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Louis Black sounds off on the Chronicle endorsement process.
By Louis Black, Fri., April 28, 2000
For the most part, I've stopped attending endorsement meetings. Unfortunately, Chronicle endorsements have become important. They have impact. Candidates are very careful about what they say to us. Most shape their message so it will be what we want to hear. On the surface, in discussion, there is usually not much difference between the candidates. One exception to this was a stirring interview with Eric Mitchell, when he ran for re-election, that was confrontational, honest, and stimulating. Almost immediately, Mitchell went out, and, to my mind, misrepresented the meeting. Thus, in a short time, Mitchell's strengths and weaknesses were illuminated.
The irony is that the differences between candidates usually isn't that great anymore. The old environmental/developer civil war mutated into something else -- everyone shares concerns about growth, traffic, and the environment. Well, at least everyone offers lip service. Approaches often differ, but these subtleties are perhaps the most difficult to discern in a limited endorsement interview.
Most interviews aren't that revealing. We limit endorsement meetings to a half-hour. We invite all the candidates to come together. They are each given a limited time to speak (the length varies with the question). Longer meetings reveal nothing more; they just drag on.
Lately, I've felt that most of the Chronicle choices were preordained. Week in and week out we cover this city and our Politics staff's likes and dislikes are not hard to discern. The political camps they feel aligned with in the city become apparent to any reader. I say this without embarrassment. This paper does have a political agenda. We don't simply report the news -- we hope to have an impact on it. Given the pedigree of certain candidates, their favorite status should be apparent. My experience is that an unusually inarticulate favorite can lose the endorsement while an outstanding performance can gain one. If you regularly read this paper, however, there aren't often major surprises. I'm not even arguing against this pattern. I'm just beginning to really question whether it is of the most use to our readers.
We also have certain endorsement etiquette. We try to stay away from double endorsements, especially in two-person races. Most of the really negative stuff we say about candidates is kept private. We endorse by consensus, though if the consensus is split -- leading to a multiple or non-endorsement -- we keep on going. Sometimes we are deadlocked, but usually we achieve agreement. We take this process very seriously.
All these contradictions came together at our most recent endorsement meeting. Although I participated in the discussion, I had decided to recuse myself from both the mayoral and Place 5 races. I had worked with both Will Wynn and the mayor on the Austin Film Society's ongoing project to turn some hangars at Mueller Airport into sound stages. When I read over the endorsements, I recused myself from the whole process. It wasn't that I faulted these particular endorsements, reprinted in full this issue. I felt the whole process was designed so that we ended up sharing more information about the candidates with each other than with our readers. Thinking about it over the last week, I've become convinced the problem is the endorsement process and style, a process and style I helped engineer.
The conversation on Kirk Watson was revealing. Only one or two of the seven people present really disliked what the mayor had done. Most were more concerned about what he might do over the course of his next term. Especially if he won by accolade. Watson likes to move fast, and moving fast is often antithetical to the democratic process. Watson likes to spring an idea when it's near completion -- not at inception. Politically gifted, he has welded council and staff into an uneasy but sleek coalition that moves swiftly forward and isn't often slowed by the political restraints which we've become used to over the years.
Despite -- or perhaps somewhat because of -- this, I think Watson is the best mayor Austin has had in the past 20 years, and I'm voting for him. Politics is an inherently ugly process. Any accomplishment can be criticized from every direction. The heart of politics is compromise, and even a great compromise leaves everyone unsatisfied. During the course of our endorsement discussion, I commented on two mayors of Portland, Oregon, always cited as dynamic visionaries who brought together the environmental and business communities to lay the groundwork for the Portland that thrives today. I pointed out that if we were covering those mayors at the time we probably wouldn't have liked them. Now, moving with speed and being visionary about the future are not necessarily complementary. One can head in the wrong direction at great speed. Even with my enthusiasm for this council, I think they have become addicted to often brilliant, sometimes foolish action steps, but still haven't moved forward enough on a vision of this city over the next half century.
This is not to discredit what the Chronicle wrote last week. By any standard we offered legitimate concerns about Watson. By the nature of the Chronicle's mandate, it is our responsibility to champion these concerns. But the endorsement form doesn't allow for enough discussion on the many points made by our staff. Just maybe, as we enter the new decade living in the new Austin, maybe it is time to rethink endorsements. Wouldn't more of a dialogue and less of an authoritative ranking be better? Or is that abandoning our responsibility to you?
All of this was really brought home during the Place 5 discussion. At one point, we talked about doing a split four-way endorsement (everyone liked Chip Howe, but his views didn't stand out). The split front-runners were obviously Clare Barry and Will Wynn, but there was serious consideration given to Linda Curtis and Amy Babich. Accepting the concern that an unrestrained Watson council was a danger to the future of the city, obstructiveness itself was not seen as a bad thing. If to every possible city action, Babich brought up pedestrian and bicyclist concerns, it couldn't hurt. Big-picture theorizing would become daily implementation if the Council were forced to regularly consider not just alternative forms of energy but different ways of seeing how the city could function. Curtis almost became the default endorsee because her advocacy would be so sophisticated. Here is a politician with a degree in upsetting apple carts. If only she had more concern for the content of the carts. Think of the Curtis and Watson confrontations. Dramatic but ultimately counterproductive. So the most serious discussion was split between Barry and Wynn. Barry is probably the best-known and most admired by the group. I think in any circumstances, because of her ideology and her record, she would have gotten the endorsement. But, given space limitations, the discussion was so much better than the endorsement. There were limited concerns raised about Barry's political effectiveness as a council member. Wynn seemed fine for the council, a voice that could continue to bring together the environmental and development communities, but the questions were about his functioning with Watson as mayor. Wynn would be a team player, which, given the construction of the council, would amp up even the mayor's steamroller. Wynn would be an accomplished candidate for more of the same. This is just some of the discussion. The dialogue, stretched over days, was intense and informative. Each of the four candidates had eloquent advocates, and we shifted round and round, but Barry was always the leader. The end result was to endorse her but the form was necessarily concise. This suited our editorial concerns, but I'm not sure it fulfilled the needs of you, our readers. I think it may be time to rethink the design.
Since we have often offered unkind words on Comptroller Carole Keeton Rylander, we have to say that it looks like her evaluation of the Austin Independent School District's finances is, in many ways, a valuable map for Superintendant Pat Forgione in the sure-to-be-troubled times ahead.
Only doom and gloom are the leaves on the Chronicle's volleyball league playoff tree. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. 
