Don't You Wish Your Mayor Was Hot Like Me

With less than a month to go, the candidates are struggling to distinguish themselves, apparently by attempting to trot out the most compelling life story.

"I was raised by a single mom," Leppert said at a recent forum. "My father died when I was young."

Most people hesitate before talking about the death of a parent, but Leppert has made his father's untimely passing a regular part of his stump speech. He's casually mentioned it at forums in East Dallas and Oak Cliff; he brought it up in an interview at the West Village and used it in the first line of an ad. The best-funded candidate in the race, Leppert goes to great lengths to cast himself as anyone other than a politician, but who other than a politician would treat the death of his father as a talking point?

Let's not pick on Leppert. Everyone else seems to think that the way to be elected to a position of symbolic authority is to bask in the symbolism of folksy anecdotes, personal narratives and painfully awkward testimonials.

"I moved to Dallas in 1961. I have had a love affair with Dallas since then," said Max Wells at an East Dallas forum the night of the NCAA men's basketball championship game. "All of you here must have a love affair to be here, and to show you how much of a love affair I have, I'm an Ohio State fan."

All righty then.

It's not surprising that this sizable field can't produce a breakout candidate whom most people can isolate as being, if not superior, then at least substantially different from his competitors. This promises to be a low-turnout election that will almost certainly result in a runoff. Because of those dynamics, everyone's strategy is to play it safe, be nice and don't act too differently from everyone else lest you attract the wrong kind of attention. In other words, don't act like Laura Miller.

"This morning I saw five ducks cross a road where I live, and I thought to myself, 'That reminds me of the mayor's race,'" says Dallas City Council member Mitchell Rasansky. "Everyone is doing the same damn thing. I can't tell one duck from another."

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There are times on the campaign trail when you can tell Hill apart from the gaggle. At forums across the city, Hill often flashes the engaging, affable personality that saved his law job nearly two years ago. He loves to share credit for City Hall's triumphs—or at least his view of them—with other members of the council, including Oakley and Gary Griffith, his opponents for mayor. He doesn't try to scare prospective voters with dire warnings of crime, unlike Wells, who at one forum at an East Dallas church told voters that none of them wanted to be the last one to walk outside to their cars. Hill hasn't even made crime the centerpiece of his campaign, preferring to emphasize economic revitalization. He's focused particularly on the business opportunities that will stem from the inland port, the southern Dallas facility he helped start that will process cargo arriving from the deep-water ports of Mexico. Hill's is a platform borne more of hope than fear, based on the belief that development and job growth can do more to combat gangs, drugs and violence than any other plan.

"I know that many people—including my friends at the Morning News—feel that our No. 1 issue is crime," he said at a recent forum. "Our No. 1 responsibility is to provide you with a safe environment, but my vision is to be what this city has traditionally been—a city about business, a city about logistics.

"Yes, we can have more officers," he added. "But really it's about economic development."

Perhaps more important, Hill, unlike his competitors, has the gift of being able to deliver a clear and consistent message, no matter which group he is addressing. He says that of all the candidates, no one has played a greater role in the city's apparent good tidings—from the forests of cranes downtown to the city's dropping crime rate. You can debate his view of Dallas' fortunes—although none of his polite rivals have chosen to—but at least Hill is running for office representing something, even if it's the status quo. And no other candidate is a better emissary for the established way of doing things than Hill, a mayor pro tem who is on the winning side of just about every fight at City Hall, from defeating a referendum that would have increased the mayor's power to defeating Miller's plan to deny a tax break to oilman Ray Hunt.

"The message that I have, and the message that you have given us, is that you believe we're going in the right direction," he said at a recent forum. "I come here not representing great change but come here representing that we're going in the right direction."

But is this the best Dallas can do? A stay-the-course candidate caught in the crosshairs of a protracted FBI investigation? The problem is we don't really know, because nobody else is distinguishing himself, except perhaps for Roger Herrera. An attorney with a rap sheet, Herrera recently suggested during a debate that one way Dallas can deal with its water sustainability issues is to urge hotels to discourage their guests from throwing their towels on the bathroom floor. Still, at least the boyish-looking Herrera is willing to eschew time-worn platitudes about his love for Dallas in favor of a more desperate pledge of devotion.