Heeding the warning of this blog that the eleventh hour in the mayoral primary had reached its fifty-eighth minute, late Saturday night the Cincinnati Enquirer issued its endorsements.
The plural, gentle readers, is correct. Endorsements. Two of them, in an election for one mayor.
Follow the link above and you’ll see more links to (a) a courageous, far-sighted, right-thinking endorsement of SWNID-endorsed candidate Mark Mallory; (b) a follow-the-leader, follow-the-money endorsement of frontrunner and P&G CEO spawn David Pepper; (c) commendations of the alleged positives of the other two major candidates (characteristics that, SWNID insists, require laboratory instruments for detection); (d) journalistic pats on the back for the so-called minor candidates, including the one whose phone service was cut off since she filed her petitions with the Board of Elections.
What’s the justification for this? The Enquirer says that since two candidates will go through to the general election, two endorsements are in order.
SWNID says that’s nonsense. What’s really up is the Enquirer’s editorial board can’t make up its mind because it lacks any decisive sense about anything. Since David Wells took over the helm of opinion at our local paper of record, editorial flavor has transmogrified from salsa to tapioca. These guys would rather issue multiple endorsements for a single office than make any decision that could be recognized as a decision.
We offer the following analogy. One of this weekends many exciting events in the SWNID household was the match between Daughter of SWNID’s Junior High Lady Eagles Soccer Team from Walnut Hills High School and CPS rivals Clark Montessori. Daughter of SWNID was particularly pumped because a close personal friend plays for Clark. Her parents, who are close personal friends with the parents of the close personal friend, were likewise pumped. The exciting game, in which six goals were scored, ended in a draw (gentle readers who are math enabled can infer the score). We all walked from the field saying to eachother how nice it was that no one lost. But in our cars, we lamented how much better it would have been to have won.
A draw is like kissing your sister. And so are these multiple endorsements.
But the Enquirer is also in the condition noted in the title of this post. Today’s paper carries, front page and below the fold, a story on problems with multiple voting (individual voters casting more than one vote in an election for only one candidate) in the first mayoral primary. What’s noteworthy here is not that Hamilton County Democratic Party Chairman Tim Burke will get a pass for his stereotyping African-American voters as less educated than their white counterparts. SWNID notes that the Enquirer’s double endorsements make it the Number One Contributor to Voting Irregularities in tomorrow’s elections. When voters say, I voted for Mallory and Pepper," they can blame the paper for their error.
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