Chronicle endorsement meetings have become more a task than a pleasure. Candidates that are leading in their races all tend to say the same thing, the Chronicle‘s attitude on most things being well known. There is very rarely a candidate, for instance, who doesn’t claim to be an environmentalist, a word that has lost most of its meaning at that point. And while it is often the candidates least likely to win any votes who prove the most interesting, this large group also proves the most tedious. Some candidates are too ideological, answering every question in basically the same way, and some offer so few ideas and so little vision, it’s hard to figure out exactly why they are running for office. The meetings tend to run together; most of the people you hear are good people with honest concerns for the city, though that doesn’t mean they will make good elected officials.
This past round of interviews for the city council election was, at first, no different. Currently, a core group of four editorial board members, plus a reporter or two, meet with all the candidates running in each race. We no longer do one-on-one endorsement interviews, time having become a big problem. But on the day we did the Place 6 meeting, Councilmember Eric Mitchell arrived about a half-hour late, just as we were wrapping up our endorsement meeting with Willie Lewis and Eric Samson. The confusion over scheduling and coordinating all these endorsement meetings seemed the likely cause for the time mix-up with Mitchell, so the board preceded to have what turned into an hour-long meeting with Mitchell, and his aide, Preston Ervin. It turned out to be the most honest and refreshing endorsement meeting we have had in years.
Councilmember Mitchell certainly did not say “what we wanted to hear,” but exactly what he wanted to say — which, not surprisingly, was often very critical of the Chronicle and our coverage of him. We were equally blunt in our questioning of Mitchell, particularly in regard to what extent he separates the personal from the political. He offered no exhilarating vision for the future of the city, but he intelligently and eloquently defended his record in front of the editorial board of a publication that had often attacked it.
It was such a mature and candid exchange that it made me want to rethink my opinion of Mitchell, but there I was confronted by his record. One of the biggest problems is how anyone who disagreed with Mitchell in any way on any issue was an enemy and/or a racist. But after our discussion, I thought that maybe he was mellowing.
During Memorial Day weekend, Ken Martin, the editor of the excellent Austin political newsletter In Fact, called me at home to ask me about a claim that Mitchell had made both in a press conference on May 22, and in a live on-air interview with Martin on KOOP-FM 91.7 on May 23.
To quote Mitchell from the May 28 issue of In Fact: “The Chronicle editorial board sat there and to my face told me that they’ve taken great pains over the last three years to paint a negative picture and a mischaracterization of me in an attempt to kill me politically so they could get rid of me. They admitted it to my face.”
This is not true, and came as something of a shock to all of us who felt as though we had engaged in a serious dialogue with the councilmember. Certainly we had our differences, but nothing remotely like that was ever said. Mitchell’s comment is the perception of someone who sees any legitimate ideological or philosophical disagreement as a personal challenge, and who is threatened by the ordinary dialogues of politics, government, and consensus.
Typically of the councilmember’s M.O., when our reporter Kayte VanScoy, who had been at the endorsement meeting, called Mitchell to ask about the In Fact quote, he first said he couldn’t recall whether he had said it — remember the “faggot” incident? — then, when VanScoy pressed further, and asked if he recalled that no such exchange had taken place, Mitchell, instead of answering, abruptly halted the interview and hung up the phone.
I don’t want to work this one over too much, except to say that our main concern with Mitchell all along has been that there cannot be any degree of disagreement without hostility. Our meeting caused us to at least question this proposition. These most recent comments, regrettably, simply reaffirmed our fears. If our readers have encountered this quote elsewhere, I want to assure them, it is not true.
This article appears in May 30 • 1997 and May 30 • 1997 (Cover).