Columnist Jon Ralston: City’s special election is absurd

Friday, May 28, 2004 | 3:49 a.m.

Jon Ralston hosts the news discussion program Face to Face on Las Vegas ONE and publishes the Ralston Report. He can be reached at (702) 870-7997 or at ralston@vegas.com.

WEEKEND EDITION

May 29 - 30, 2004

Political campaigns are inherently superficial as too few voters pay attention and candidates rely on banalities to woo the benighted. But even by those standards, the special election for the vacant Las Vegas City Council seat is nothing short of insane, a microcosm of all that is wrong with politics, especially in Nevada.

It's not that most of the dozen candidates are not earnest -- they are. But beginning with the council's craven decision not to appoint a caretaker, we now have a situation where in less than a month (June 22), a minuscule number of Ward 2 voters -- the winner may need fewer than 500 votes -- will elect a councilman who will not have been properly vetted and will have a leg up when the real election occurs a year hence.

It's sheer lunacy. A few hundred people elect someone who is tasked with representing a district with 35,000 registered voters and probably three times that many residents.

Ironically, this could be the anti-anointment election, one where the usual incestuous network of power brokers cannot conspire to funnel money and resources to one candidate. Not one out of the 12 can be said to be The Anointed One.

Yes, attorney Steve Wolfson (money, District Court judge wife, TV ads), Planning Commissioner Ric Truesdell (money, close to The Family Goodman, mayoral campaign aides helping out) and Planning Director Bob Genzer (lots of friends in the development community, well-liked by council, experience) may have the best connections or deepest pockets.

But other kinds of connections -- the partisan ones of GOP activist John Hambrick, the neighborhood ones of Gabe Lither or the parental ones of Nevada Stupak may prove just as potent. (Speaking of Stupak the Elder, if Bob Stupak, who has tried many times during the last two decades to get himself or his kin get elected, can't win a race where it only takes a few hundred votes to win, he never will. If you don't count his friend, Councilwoman Janet Moncrief, that is.)

Although the lack of an anointment may be a salutary development -- actually letting the democracy work unfettered by insidious influences and open to entropic results -- the opposite effect is not so healthy for the process. You have a group of generally ill-informed contenders campaigning in a remarkably short time to voters who could basically care less. And out of this, we expect to get a quality elected official? Only by luck.

So who's at fault?

First, look at the council.

This is a classic case of arriving at what looks like a fine solution -- a special election instead of an appointment -- for the wrong reasons. Mayor Oscar Goodman and his five rubber stamps did not decide to call for an election because they believed so deeply that the voters should choose the replacement for Lynette Boggs McDonald. They badly wanted to handpick her successor -- they just couldn't reach consensus and didn't want to offend their myriad pals who wanted the slot.

Did anyone notice that the appointment system was just fine when Michael Mack and Lawrence Weekly were appointed? Or, for that matter, Lynette Boggs McDonald?

Goodman could have seen to Truesdell being appointed, but the propinquity of the mayoral ethics cloud may have rained on that anointment. Appointing a caretaker would not have given anyone an advantage and would have given the council wannabes plenty of time to make the case to the voters. Now the chances of what one wag calls "The Fran Deane effect," a reference to the bizarre-behaving county recorder who was elected under the radar and now is in danger of being thrown out of office, is a real possibility.

Next, look at the candidates.

We have been doing "debates" on "Face to Face" to let voters see the candidates in action and the results have been nothing short of frightening. They want to make the proverbial difference or get involved in the community or be on our side. They want to control growth, stop air pollution and fix the traffic problems.

But beyond hollow platitudes, some more slickly delivered than others, virtually none of them have any ideas or seem to know anything about city government. Most act as if they are students preparing for a final exam by speed-reading the curriculum and then hoping they can snow the professor on the test.

I am still stunned to find that people running for office have virtually no ideas, see no need to know anything about the office they seek and can only say they will "listen to the people." Forget that most of the time we just forgot to ask which people it was they had betrothed their ears to. This crop -- for the most part -- is a dozen tabula rasas and are only too willing to have ideas etched into their minds.

Lastly, look in the mirror.

None of this would be possible without the complicity of the voters, which cycle after cycle allow candidates and their operatives to play them for fools. Nowhere will that be more evident than this Ward 2 blur of a campaign, where the promises will be wispier than usual and the courtship will be more like a one-night stand.

Maybe I am wrong and turnout will be high, voters will be engaged and the would-be council representatives will become substantive and visionary. But I doubt it.

Outcomes in many elections in Nevada are tremendously influenced by a small group of people who think they know everything. In this case, the election will be made by a small group of people who essentially know nothing.

There's got to be a better way.