| 8.10.06 |
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Gimmickry
By Rebecca Wakefield After Tropical Storm Chris petered out last week, the National Hurricane Center seemed to lose its ardor for disaster prediction. The NHC downgraded our impending doom index to “12 to 15” named storms, “seven to nine hurricanes” and maybe “three to four” major hurricanes, which amounts to slightly fewer frogs and less blood than it predicted in May. Regardless, my hurricane plan still consists of bunkering down with Max Mayfield and a bottle of Havana Club. But the season for public relations gimmicks is nigh upon us. Also this week, SustainLane.com, a company in San Francisco that “measures” natural disaster risk for America’s big cities as a way of pushing a sustainable living agenda, ranked Miami as the one most likely to be smote by a vengeful god in 2006. Cheerily, with our position at the end of a peninsular sandbar saturated with shoddy construction, traffic and flood zones, we beat out New Orleans this year. Some People Call Him Maur-reese With apologies to the Steve Miller Band, I like to call Maurice Ferré the space cowboy who won’t die. A gangster of pompitous, he really loves your peaches and wants to shake your county government. Ferré, Miami’s cocaine cowboy-era mayor (‘73 to ‘85), tasted the sweet life of a county commissioner in the early Nineties, but lost bids for county mayor in 1996 and 2004 as well as a gambit in 2001 to re-mayor the city of Miami. Lately, our perpetual ex has been popping up everywhere. On July 20, he penned an opinion piece in the Miami Herald about why the county needs a strong mayor. He couched it in ideals of American democracy and the history of the shift in 1992 to electing commissioners from districts rather than countywide. A version in Spanish ran the following week in El Nuevo Herald. Ferré made a good point about the district elections. The commission would be a stronger, less-pandering body if three or four of its 13 members were elected countywide. Disgraceful yahoos like Pepe Diaz and Dorrin Rolle might be less likely to get elected and better neutralized if they did make it. The ante for buying a commission vote would be higher and easier to track. The strong mayor idea is up for debate. In fact, Ferré is debating it at the Downtown Bay Forum lunch on August 30. The DBF is a charmingly antiquated holdover from the days when a) people knew who Maurice Ferré was and b) Anglo-dominated civic institutions still had relevance. It is run by Annette Eisenberg, a woman of tiny stature and outsized personality who ought to have her own political talk show entitled “I’m Not Too Old to Spank You If You Don’t Behave.” Ferré’s sparring partner will be Merrett Stierheim, he of the repetitive stints as county manager and post-public service beard growth. Ferré is also moderating an August 28 county commission candidate debate sponsored by the Urban Environment League of Greater Miami and the Kendall Federation of Homeowner Associations. This past Tuesday, he succeeded in getting the Herald to run another op-ed about the strong mayor thing, this time capitalizing on the newspaper’s excellent series on the county’s affordable housing scandal to argue the point that legislative policymaking should be separated from executive buck-stopping. If such diligent punditry was the result of Ferré’s newfound zeal for community building, then I would say, beautiful, go to it old man. More voters should care about local methods of governance. Let’s mix it up. But, sadly, I suspect Ferré is thinking ahead to what he could do from a strong mayor’s office, either himself, or courting the favors of a protégé. Read Our Paper – Win Prizes! The other day, I joined the exclusive Miami Herald Reader Advisory Panel. I did it because Executive Editor Tom Fiedler promised in a mass e-mail that big prizes were in my future. For filling out a “very short survey,” I could be in line to win “a free hotel stay, a dinner for two, and other great prizes!” How could I resist? But I couldn’t wait for the survey, so I decided to offer a few observations, gratis. One is that the online comments people are posting in response to stories are way more interesting than the actual letters section. Ugly and error-prone, often, but a nice line on reader psyche nonetheless. Not only that, often the blogs Herald reporters write turn out to be more revealing than some of the stories making it into the paper. Case in point is South Beach scenestress Lesley Abravanel’s “Scene in the Tropics” column, which is generally a sanitized compendium of tidbits fed by publicists pushing venues or C-list clients. Her blog version offers catty, delicious fun with a properly sardonic take on PR bullshit. Almost as good as thedirtmiami.com. My last bit of advice for my daily paper is this: Please stop treating readers as if we live in the 1950s. On Sunday, the Herald ran a story headlined “The GOP Brawl We All Expected Might Not Occur.” The story explained that gubernatorial candidate Tom Gallagher actually intends to keep his promise to run a “gentlemanly” primary campaign against opponent Charlie Crist, even though he will probably lose the election. “Even a pro-Gallagher group, the Coalition to Protect the American Dream, came out with an ad this week that praised Gallagher instead of attacking Crist,” reporter Gary Fineout wrote. The kicker was this line: “And there’s nothing wrong with that, but you have to wonder if it’s a winning strategy.” That nod to the famous “not that there’s anything wrong with that” joke on Seinfeld is as close as the Herald came to outing the long-running, oft-discussed rumor that Crist is a closeted gay man. Crist himself has denied this repeatedly, but it is relevant here because that is exactly the kind of mudslinging the Crist campaign would have expected if Gallagher was in a less gallant mood. It was worth noting. Even better, ballsy political columnist Beth Reinhard should write about why Gallagher really chose not to go that route. The first graph could read “Gubernatorial candidate Tom Gallagher agrees not to suggest opponent Charlie Crist is too tan, dapper and single to be straight. In exchange, Crist won’t harp on Gallagher’s extramarital skeletons.” Just a thought. Comments? E-mail wakefield@miamisunpost.com |