Point Austin: Lessons Learned
As the dust clears, what wisdom remains from the latest council free-for-all?
By Michael King, Fri., May 20, 2005
Leffingwell, going away at 62%, was never threatened, testimony to both the success of his early campaign and the corollary that the same momentum drove his toughest potential competitors elsewhere, especially to Place 3. The big boys down at the Real Estate Council, who first showed Downtown Austin Alliance ingenue Jeff Trigger the door and then herded Gregg Knaupe over to Place 3, must now be kicking themselves twice over lost opportunities. (Reportedly, they also didn't even bother talking to Jennifer Kim, now their likely shotgun bride; that should make for some interesting conversations over the wine coolers at this month's fundraisers.)
The immediate result was that the Place 1 race was a largely dispiriting affair, during which Leffingwell endured a series of dog-and-puppy shows with candidates whose most visible characteristic was how little they knew about the actual work of city government, or its relationships with other official bodies or jurisdictions. At one forum, the collected Lilliputians took turns inveighing against high property taxes as though City Hall were Scrooge McDuck levying and hoarding billions; only Leffingwell knew the actual city portion of property taxes (less than 17%) and the recent history of actual taxing and valuations.
Memo to future would-be candidates: This ain't as easy as it looks.
Golden Rules
The lessons in Place 4 were not so clear cut, and the last-day entry of both Wes Benedict, fleeing the crowded Place 3 field, and Elysium bar owner John Wickham, looking for a smoking-ban villain, at least made the run-up to Betty Dunkerley's recoronation a little more interesting. Not that the final numbers reflected it – Wickham (6%) was a nonfactor, and Benedict seemed crestfallen at his 18.2%, admittedly a big comedown from the 35% he managed against Danny Thomas in 2003. (If nothing else, the comparison should make it clear that, whatever anybody says, just like in the rest of Texas, there is still a Caucasian bonus in Austin politics.)
But even amidst Benedict's campaign-finance sniping, Dunkerley stayed invulnerable to 63.5%, which may say something about the relative value of "going negative" in a municipal election. But it would be a shame if her victory also means that attention to campaign filing irregularities disappears for another electoral season. Dunkerley's books need balancing, and it would seem at a minimum that the hysterical frenzy up in business class to defeat Beverly Griffith three years ago made contributors and accountants more than a little dizzy with financial zeal. Dunkerley should issue publicly a clear and updated accounting of her campaign finances over the last two cycles, with the goal of making certain that all candidates get a lesson in following all the rules.
As Mike Clark-Madison demonstrated last week, despite Wickham's poor showing, Dunkerley was the candidate most strongly pummeled by the anti-smoking-ban vote (a swing of nearly 12%), perhaps simply because Wickham was there. On the stump, Dunkerley in fact was lukewarm on the subject, but incumbency (even though all the council did was duly place on the ballot a citizens' referendum) also has its costs. Henceforth, it appears the smokers will have to vent their nicotine-starved rage only in "Postmarks."
Round Two
Curiously, as Clark-Madison also showed, the candidate apparently least hurt by the coffin-nail vote was Place 3's Margot Clarke, although she was also the most vocal in supporting the ban and pointing to her 2003 loss to Brewster McCracken as the original source of so much public aggravation ("Had I won, I would not have voted to overturn the original ban, and we'd all be over this by now"). Clarke's support was geographically broad, at least in part because her Toll Party endorsement served to neutralize suburban suspicions of her as a tree-hugger. She hails from the enviro wing of the toll road opposition, but outflanked her opponents by refusing contributions from the "toll-road lobby." As our Editor Louis Black likes to say, that's just the current disguise of Our Old Friend the Highway Lobby, but it's a distinction largely lost on the Toll Partiers, and it may well enable Clarke – in fact closer to SOS than ATP – to slide past Kim in the run-off.
Kim, despite her surprising defeat of Knaupe (the firefighters apparently saw something their public safety brethren didn't recognize), is still looking for a constituency, and she will likely spend the next few weeks welcoming (but not too eagerly) the embrace of Knaupe's forlorn supporters, still stinging from their well-heeled defeat. It would be pretty if the election came down to a battle between the "old and new Austin politics," as the Kim camp has lately been spinning the difference between her and Clarke. But it is more likely to come down to a difference between Fair Campaign funding (which Clarke gets because, unlike her opponent, she agreed to abide by funding limits) and the Miraculous Moolah of RECA and its many friends, which will flow to Kim because it has nowhere else to go. Goaded by misleading Statesman coverage, the latest tactic is to suggest that Clarke's earned windfall of "taxpayer dollars" (actually, lobbyist and candidate filing fees) is somehow illegitimate, instead of the logical outcome of a rational election finance system. To her credit, Kim hasn't yet taken that bait.
And it's also refreshing to say: May the better woman win. 
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