Mayoral Mayhem: Running for Mayor, Running From the Law
Mayoral Mayhem: Running for Mayor, Running From the Law
10.12 p.m. ET
(0212 GMT) September 13, 1999
By Tracey Middlekauff
NEW YORK — Baltimore, Maryland, as the can of National Bohemian beer plainly states, is “The Land of Pleasant Living.”
Gail Burton/AP
Mayoral candidate Carl Stokes talks with Harlynn and Gerod Wilson before a rally in his honor
Also known as Charm City, Baltimore boasts John Waters, Barry Levinson, Edgar Allen Poe’s grave and the Orioles. People in Baltimore call you “hon,” and they eat things like crab cakes slathered with Old Bay seasoning and huge plates of fried lake trout, which isn’t actually a trout and doesn’t come from a lake.
The agreeably inexplicable — even the downright bizarre — is just part of the rhythm of life in Baltimore, and the race for mayor is no exception.
There’s a downside to the city’s perverse charm, of course: The murder rate is more than three times as high as New York City’s, one in 10 citizens (or one in eight, depending on who you ask) is a drug addict and middle-income residents are fleeing the city at a rate of 1,000 a month.
And then, of course, there’s the problem of the 27 original candidates for mayor. Of those, six have criminal arrest records, three have filed for bankruptcy, and one is, well, a convict. One candidate was spotted by police during a local news broadcast and was promptly taken into custody for burglary.
Time magazine recently published an article making Baltimore sound like the very epitome of urban blight, but Baltimoreans aren’t ones to panic about a little bad press.
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“The Time article was wildly inaccurate,” says David Dudley, associate editor at Baltimore magazine. “Most of the (criminal) candidates are fringe candidates. None of the main ones are felons or weirdos, they’re just kind of boring. Whenever an incumbent isn’t going to run, the goofballs come out.”
But all the madness should be over soon: Tuesday is the Democratic mayoral primary, and in Baltimore, a Democratic stronghold, whoever wins that primary is considered to be a shoe-in for mayor. And the three frontrunners who have emerged do seem — relatively — normal.
Take Carl Stokes, a 49-year-old former city councilman. Besides forgetting to pay taxes for the past four years, Stokes got into a little trouble when he misrepresented himself on his campaign resume. Stokes claimed to be a graduate of Loyola College. He did attend Loyola College, only it seems “graduated” is a bit of an exaggeration.
Kelley Ray, a spokesperson for the Stokes campaign, says that “a while ago it said ‘attended,’ and at some point it was changed to ‘graduated.’ (Stokes) saw it, he should have changed it immediately. It broke as we were getting ready to come forward. But he’s sent the message to the voters that it was his responsibility.”
Martin O’Malley, another frontrunner, is a 36-year-old former city councilman and federal prosecutor. He has emerged from the campaign relatively unscathed, but his status as the only white frontrunner in a predominantly African-American city has not gone unnoticed. The Rev. Frank M. Reid III of Bethel AME endorsed O’Malley, which raised eyebrows in the black community.
And then there’s City Council President Lawrence Bell.
Bell was ahead in the race until some “incidents” knocked him back into third place.
“Bell shot himself several times,” Dudley says. In August, copies of a supposed white supremacist flier emerged, endorsing candidate O’Malley. “The pamphlets were clumsy and inauthentic, and there was no record of that supremacist group even existing,” Dudley says. Two Office Depot employees later came forward with the information that members of Bell’s staff had recently been spotted making copies of the fliers. Bell denies any knowledge of the incident, but according to Dudley, “Bell denies ever knowing what anybody is doing.”
Then, during an O’Malley rally in front of city hall, held because O’Malley had picked up endorsements from state senators, members of the Bell camp came, heckling and disrupting the whole affair. “That was a ridiculous campaign tactic,” says Rick Binetti, spokesperson for the O’Malley campaign. No one from the Bell campaign could be reached for comment.
The funny thing is, O’Malley and Bell used to work closely together in the city council, earning themselves the nickname “Batman and Robin.”
According to Jim Brochin, formerly of the Stokes campaign, “Carl (Stokes) and Martin (O’Malley) are two outstanding people.” But Brochin believes that Stokes’ misinformation may have cost him the race.
But has all the brouhaha surrounding the race damaged Baltimore’s reputation? “The mayoral campaign has not been an embarrassment to the city,” Brochin believes, “it has been an embarrassment to Lawrence Bell.”
“His car was repossessed, he didn’t pay his condo fees, he spent $4,000 on clothes for the campaign,” Brochin says. “He’s going to have to find a job after this campaign and it’s not going to be easy.”
But Brochin feels outsiders looking at this race probably can’t understand what makes Baltimore so appealing, despite its flaws.
“Baltimore is a very quirky town, it has a lot of character,” he says. “Four years ago a water taxi driver threw his hat into the (mayoral) race. It’s what makes Baltimore Baltimore.”
