Hello Hobokenites. I have received quite a few requests from bored and/or insomniac residents asking for an update on my thoughts on the eternal mayoral campaign. I’ll apologize in advance if your spam filter does not catch this.

So, my daughter comes home from school the other day (High Tech High School in North Bergen) and announces that she has been offered a major money-making opportunity via a recruitment effort by one of her friends. She can campaign door-to-door for Beth Mason! The friend seems a tad more motivated by the likely recruitment bonus than any overarching incipient ideology, but gee, 8 bucks an hour! Maybe Beth is, as her daughters relentlessly and religiously remind hapless television viewers each quarter hour, “the coolest mom ever.”

Then again, her kids don’t spend much time in Hoboken, having acquired their book learnin’ without once setting foot inside the hallowed walls of Hoboken’s varied educational institutions. As for everyone else, particularly former supporters and allies increasingly discomfited by her negative campaigning and shrill obstructionism-for-the-sake of obstructionism, the recurrent mantra seems to be: “Not cool, Beth. Not cool at all.”

Beth will undoubtedly be as unconcerned with her loss of credibility and support among unpaid adult volunteers as she has been with each bizarre misstep on her troubled climb to her rightful place as Hoboken’s Queen Of All Things Political. There are plenty of people to blame for the people’s failure to anoint her thus far, Beth agrees, but she’s certainly not one of them. In fact, the most startling aspect of Beth’s painful personal and political spiral is an introspection vacuum so conspicuous by its absence that she makes Pupie Raia look like the Dalai Lama. Maybe it’s just me, but if scores of former supporters decided I’d turned my back on them as well as my own principles and simultaneously jumped ship, I might want to spend a minute thinking about why.

But not Beth, no sirree! Not that she hasn’t made a few changes this time around. With her own campaign manager deserting her for the decidedly more pleasant environs of the Zimmer camp, she immediately engaged a replacement whose overriding qualification was the most sordid resume for campaign sleaze. While he has been unable to teach Beth how to smile naturally, he has moved her television depictions of Dawn beyond run-of-the-mill mudslinging into a genuine manifestation of good old evil incarnate. I don’t know why Beth doesn’t just photoshop some horns and cloven hooves onto Dawn’s pictures and get it over with.

The weird thing is that it’s so hard to actually differentiate policy positions between Beth and Dawn. Absent Beth’s astonishing level of paranoid selfishness, they could have been a good team along with the other members of the council majority. Combining a misplaced entitlement–fueled self-righteousness with a toddler’s petulant refusal to share, Beth has completely re-framed the town’s perspective on her “public service” to date. After spending the last half-year watching Beth’s integrity float away like dandelion spores in a summer breeze, her claims to superior experience have become irrelevant. The collective shudder is palpable when Beth’s ubiquitous heels clickety-clack around the corner on route to the next block party. On the bright side, she’s easily distracted. People have learned that a quick “hey, look, wasn’t that guy an important operative for Corzine?” or similar red herring will send her scurrying safely out of their own range.

Beth’s concentration on Dawn’s temporary crisis-predicated dual office-holding is, of course, absurd. In an equally ridiculous contradiction, Beth wants Dawn both to forfeit her ward seat and do nothing as “acting” mayor, except serve as a geisha-like placeholder for last May’s distant third-place finisher’s coronation. A Mason campaign insider recently acknowledged to me that the dual office bit hadn’t gotten “as much traction” as they would have liked, and they were thinking about “going positive.” Beth, in fact, did go more positive in the uneventful debates; although her supporter-planted question of “tell us something about yourself we don’t know”, which clearly caught the other candidates off-guard while Beth launched into the well-rehearsed Horatio Alger tale now featured as their website centerpiece, was a little much. I’m left wondering how this impoverished couple afforded commissioning the life-size painting of Ricky in cap and gown currently adorning the Mason parlor.

Granted, Dawn hasn’t efficiently diffused opposition challenges which should have been no more than annoyances come November 3. Dawn’s early attempts at a conciliatory tone were interpreted as a sign of weakness by the ever-voracious Beth “I Disagree With Everything Dawn Says, Does, Thinks Or Wears” Mason, Michael “You Know My Dad Will Eventually Pop Out Of My Stomach Like That Alien Creature” Russo, and Terry “I Meekly Handed The Keys To The City To Cousin Anthony Throughout Eight Years Of Obvious Corruption, But I’ve Got A Lot Of Bullying Questions Now” Castellano. Nino Giacchi is more of the self-preservative Richard “See Where The Power Is, Then Go There” Del Boccio school, and seems to be biding his time before a full public commitment to the opposition. Dawn has stumbled through her clipped and cranky pushback to this harassment, her comments at council meetings usually devolving into mumbles and stutters requiring a verbal save from one of her four more articulate and poised allies. In short, she doesn’t look like someone confidently in charge or sound like a convincing agenda proponent. Her gritty determination to scour every soccer field and Change That Works list in town for the most qualified candidates has been disappointing too, even if the appointees have been a upgrade from their predecessors.

And she either missed or stubbornly ignored the obvious benefits of a temporary assignment of the Council Presidency to a friendly colleague (read: Peter Cunningham). Presumably and anecdotally, Dawn performs at a higher level one-on-one than her public persona implies, inexperience notwithstanding; and the unavoidable conclusion survives that the reason she is so unsettling to so many entrenched hacks is that she alone, among the realistic candidates, will resist the inexorable inertia pull of the status quo and actually try to effect the uncomfortable reforms (particularly payroll reduction) that are desperately required.

There are other candidates that will certainly draw some support. Hoboken native son Frank “Pupie” Raia, host of the town’s best birthday party, is actually a pretty hard guy not to like. At least you know exactly what you get with Pupie. And if one wades through the likely clashes in vision about priorities, patronage, and intra/inter-governmental relationships, you’ll find actually find a few insistently simple and practical idea nuggets in the pile. So Pupie, if you can turn that Shoprite tightrope of grass into the ballpark that it should have been, maybe we’ll talk.

Kim Glatt, host of the best kids’ birthday parties in town, is personable, reasonable, smart, and looking for work. Her self-proclaimed altruism in giving up her judgeship to favor Hoboken with a mayoral run might be admirable if it weren’t for the fact that she wasn’t going to be re-appointed. Kim, long a beneficiary of the politics of friendship, slid into the municipal court as a surprisingly young replacement when a vengeful Anthony Russo unceremoniously disposed of the perfectly competent Ross London for his perceived opposition to Anthony’s dictatorial mayoralty. Hoping to cobble together a coalition of elderly family friends, soccer moms stolen from Dawn, and municipal employees adequate to squeak by in a simple plurality election, she has dusted off the Cammarano playbook (we should have continued to hide our budget irregularities and postponed the inevitable collapse) while offering absolutely nothing specific other than her thinly-veiled and telling blanket assurance of employment continuation to all the city workers whose votes she’d need to pull this off.

But Kim can simply return to private practice, and it’s unlikely that she has the consuming drive for power to sustain her effort. I wish her a good time on that alternative Disney trip we heard about during the debate.

Cammarano’s umbrella valet Patricia Waiters won’t be a factor. Everton Wilson adds entertainment value, but his “three bartenders and a dog” support core will fall a little short. I do hope that the earnest-to-the-point-of-condescension Nathan Brinkman doesn’t go the way of other “why are they doing this?” candidates and actually stays involved. He’s got some interesting thoughts, albeit unhindered by having nothing to lose. At least he can recognize a bloated city payroll when he sees one. Like most of the new young Reaganites, he cut the history classes in which trickle-down theory was disproved, and his other economic/sociologic contentions are selectively researched and narrowly considered, but he adds something to the conversation.

And what happened to my old friend, dark horse Sal DeMeo? I must have missed his withdrawal. I actually spent a stranded Thansgiving at a wonderful dinner with three generations of the lovely DeMeo family a quarter century ago. I hope all is well Sal.

So Dawn’s your best bet folks. I think she needs great help and support, and I hope she realizes that, too. As always, best of luck to my beloved and adopted Hoboken!

Regards,

Dean