Boy, when I said it was gonna be an interesting two weeks, I wasn’t kidding, was I?
Michael Nutter has become the clear front-runner in the mayoral primary. You can read some of Chris Bowers’ thoughts on that over at MyDD; Chris’s ward is one of those endorsing Nutter, so you can get a sense of the logic. Other candidates have clearly set their sights on Nutter – today Pattie and I each got two separate pieces of direct mail from Tom Knox calling Nutter a “typical politician,” and I saw a TV ad with the same theme. I gotta laugh at that. The purer-than-thou campaign might have worked before Knox held a press conference with another member of City Council to support her bid for the Council presidency. Then again, if there is a Throw All the Bums Out mentality in the city, maybe the message will stick. I tend to doubt it.
I’m actually surprised at how ineffectual other candidates have been in trying to take down Nutter. I can certainly understand the concerns over the stop-and-frisk and state-of-emergency elements of his crime plan, and I’d expect city unions and neighborhood groups to be concerned about his tax-cutting enthusiasm. But those messages aren’t getting a huge amount of play, and when someone tries to raise them, they seem to whack themselves in the foot – witness Chaka Fattah’s comments in the last TV debate where he suggested Nutter needed to remind himself he was African-American, a comment many people (including myself, but not everyone) thought was a low blow.
Ah well. They’re dropping off the voting machines on Saturday. Then the fun really begins.