Mayor’s action raises endorsement questions
I picked up a March 5 edition of the Leader, and my attention was
immediately drawn to the front-page story with the headline, “Mayor
withdraws support for City Council candidate.”
I began to read this story expecting to gain some insight from
Mayor David Laurell. What I found was that he had “personally made
the decision that, while Brain [Malone’s] dedication to our community
is in no way to be questioned, I have weighed his ideas, opinions,
experience and knowledge of issues and can no longer support his
candidacy for a seat on the City Council.”
I had to run and find the last “Brian Malone for Council” flier
that I received, just to make sure my memory of Laurell placed in a
prominent position on it served me correctly. Now, after the primary
election, I am finding out that Laurell can no longer support this
candidate. Huh?
I think that a safe assumption can be made here. Laurell had hopes
that his endorsement would help Malone win a council seat in the
primary election. If that had occurred, would Laurell have come clean
to the voters and admitted that he had endorsed a candidate without
first finding out his opinions, ideas or knowledge?
My intention here is neither to support nor detract from the
candidacy of Malone; it’s a question of the reliability of a mayor’s
endorsement that is the real point. Thinking back over the past few
years, I really should not be at all surprised that Laurell would
either seek to deceive voters through his most recent endorsement or,
at the least, simply not bother to find out any facts before
endorsing a candidate for City Council. It would seem to me that
questions about the ideas, knowledge and experience are rather
fundamental to an endorsement. So what was really behind the
endorsement in the first place? Now that Laurell has done his
endorsement flip-flop, there is one burning question in my mind: Will
the remaining candidates run from a mayor’s endorsement like the
plague it has become, or will they all seek it, knowing full well
that their ideas, knowledge and opinions really don’t matter at all?
DAVID PIROLI
Burbank