Above: This is Muriel Strand, for whom I voted for mayor of Sacramento yesterday. (The whiskers are not a PhotoShop job.) "Why am I running [for mayor]?" Strand asks on her blog. "Because I want Sacramento's sustainable future at the top of the public agenda. After peak oil and climate change, I want a livable future city. Am I qualified? Yes. I have been reading, studying and thinking about sustainability for three decades. Why should you hire me to be mayor? So I can facilitate our creation of our sustainable future amid an uncertain and unsustainable present." Below: Sacramento Mayor Heather Fargo, who is seeking her third term, talks today about the probability of a mayoral runoff election in November, as does her opponent, Kevin Johnson. Neither Fargo nor Johnson received 50 percent of the vote in the primary election yesterday, although Johnson, with his NBA celebrity status and much larger campaign war chest, won 47 percent of the vote to Fargo's 40 percent in the initial vote tallies. Thousands of mail-in ballots remain to be tallied, but neither candidate is expected to reach 50 percent when the vote counting has officially ended, which would force a November runoff.
 
Associated Press photos
Why I voted for the bearded chicken lady
The race for mayor of Sacramento, at least superficially, appears a lot like the finally-over race between Billary Cunton and Barack Obama: The top two contenders for Sacramento mayor are incumbent Heather Fargo, a 55-year-old white woman who has been mayor since 2001, and Kevin Johnson, a 42-year-old black man who is former NBA basketball player who was born and raised in Sacramento and who is new to seeking elected office. (Billary is 60 years old and Obama is 46.)
Fargo is widely considered to be competent, if not exactly exciting, and has enjoyed fairly solid Democratic support. She won 60 percent of the vote in the last mayoral election in 2004. However, there is, I think, the sense that she’s a bit establishmentarian, a la Billary Cunton, and I surmise that the current anti-establishmentarian mood has harmed Fargo, fairly or unfairly, and that Johnson, intentionally or not, has been riding the Obama wave o’ hope and change (or at least promised change).
Fargo seems to be relying on experience, and Johnson, on the other hand, seems to be relying on image. He seems to be more of a brand name than to possess any substance, and when pressed on the issue of his lack of substance, he remarks that well, he has leadership ability, and leaders lead and inspire – they don’t get all mired in substance. That might be true for a governor or for a president, but I’m thinking that’s not so true for a mayor.
Yesterday I wasn’t comfortable voting in the primary election for either Fargo or Johnson. I’m anti-establishmentarian, but I’m not convinced that we need to give Fargo the boot. And I couldn’t vote for Johnson, whose mayoral campaign thus far reminds me a lot of Repugnican Arnold Schwarzenegger’s campaign for the California governorship in 2003’s Repugnican-orchestrated gubernatorial recall election: Schwarzy was quite vague as to what he’d actually try to accomplish as governor and rather than talk about substance, he was out to create an image, was out to make you feel a certain way about him much more than he was out to appeal to your intellect. It’s little different from how the corporations want to create feelings and images about their products rather than give you any actual useful factual information about them.
And also like Schwarzy, Johnson seems to have wanted to benefit from a rather short campaign season. One can dodge substantive inquiries for a short period of time, but such evasion becomes much more difficult over a protracted campaign season. (Speaking of protracted campaign seasons, I feel that we all know Barack Obama and Billary Cunton more than we probably ever wanted to.)
And last but certainly not least, I am very, very leery of former jocks becoming mayors or governors or presidents. It seems to me that we need geeks, not jocks, in these posts.
The Sacramento Bee, Sacramento’s largest newspaper (well, OK, Sacramento’s only newspaper, really), in an editorial refused to endorse either Johnson or Fargo for yesterday's mayoral primary election, but urged its readers to vote for one of the other five mayoral candidates (none of whom ever had a chance of winning, the Bee acknowledged) in order to deny either Fargo or Johnson the 50-percent-plus of the vote required in order to avoid a runoff election in November.
The Bee editorialized:
...Voters need this race to run until November. Johnson, making his first run for office, has too many things to answer. Fargo, seeking an unprecedented third term as mayor, has too much to answer for….
A leader is as a leader does. In the months since he entered the race, Johnson has faced questions about his conduct and character, in both his private and public life. He has not responded well to this challenge. In general, he has been defensive and reluctant to give straightforward answers to straightforward questions. That tendency would cripple him in a public office such as mayor.
Johnson has inaccurately characterized an ongoing federal investigation of his St. HOPE organization as an "audit." His vision of Sacramento as another Phoenix is unsettling at best. And the revelation that Johnson's personal attorney investigated an allegation that he inappropriately touched a teenage student at Sacramento Charter High School raises serious questions about his judgment.
Johnson clearly loves Sacramento. He has demonstrated courage in his efforts to remake Sacramento High and Oak Park. He still has the potential to lead. But what good is potential if it is tarnished by questions of character and judgment?
By November, the investigation of St. HOPE will be over, and Johnson will have had more time to learn how to conduct himself in the public arena. Maybe then his potential will shine brightly again, but voters shouldn't take a chance on that now.
Fargo, the candidate of experience, also has diminished her claim on voters. The campaign has revealed that she is out of touch with the disturbing rise of Sacramento's crime rate during her time in office. It has shown her to be indifferent to the question of a new arena for the Kings – even as others were moving toward a potential solution. She has mischaracterized a poll on her public approval and made misstatements about Johnson's tax liabilities.
Fargo's campaign also raises questions about her judgment and character. She has refused to disavow a sleazy website and mailer put out in independent support of her candidacy. Worse, she has called on the chief of police to reopen a criminal investigation of the allegation against Johnson. That tactic smacks of a gross misuse of the power of her office for political ends.
Fargo can point to accomplishments as mayor. Downtown and midtown have improved during her time in office. Her record on flood control is good, if imperfect. She knows city government inside and out. No one can match her experience. But what value does that experience have if she is out of touch, disengaged, misinformed and willing to allow others to campaign for her from the gutter?
Neither her record nor her campaign demonstrates convincingly that she has earned a third term as mayor. By November, perhaps she will have disavowed her scurrilous supporters and more clearly articulated why she merits a third term. In that case, voters may have reason to bestow that historic honor on her. But not now.
Now, the best thing voters can do is to stall for time. That means voting for someone other than Heather Fargo or Kevin Johnson in hopes that the picture is clearer by November….
When I read that editorial, I agreed; we need more time to decide whether we should stick with Fargo, who seems to have sunk to Billary-Cunton-level win-at-all-costs campaign tactics, or whether we should go for fresh blood, but Johnson is, as you can gather from the Bee’s editorial above, well, um, rather scandalous, and we need to learn more about these scandals. Maybe by November his name will be cleared; maybe it won’t.
So, taking the Bee’s advice, because I also think that Fargo and Johnson should have to work harder and longer than they have thus far, I looked at the other mayoral candidates’ statements on the Bee’s website and visited the candidate’s websites. And from my rather quick Internet research I picked the candidate I truly most would want to be mayor, if he or she actually had a chance.
It was a no-brainer: I picked the bearded chicken lady.
The bearded chicken lady is Muriel Strand, a 53-year-old environmentalist and sustainability advocate. (She’s a pagan and a Quaker, too, I read on the 'Net, and that makes her all the more cool.)
In a profile of her, the Bee quoted Strand has having said, "[We] need to focus on the long-term future. The difference between where we are now and where we need to be is so huge and so fundamental, if we don't get a fix on where we're going, I'm afraid we're going to get lost" and "This could be Eden if we have the sense enough to be in right relationship.”
The Bee notes that under Strand’s vision, “There would be no cars, no excess, no violence. The [eco-]village would meet its needs simply and independently. Eventually, all the world's inhabitants will live a life of concord and respect.”
That sounds good to me; I’m a Green Party member at heart, although for practical political purposes I’m a registered Democrat,* and of all of the mayoral candidates', Strand's philosophy seems to most closely match the Green Party's philosopy. You certainly don’t hear Fargo or Johnson talking like Strand does. To them, “progress” means building more buildings in and attracting more residents to the Sacramento region (“growth” is all-important, you know), despite the long-term consequences of overbuilding and overpopulation to the environment and to quality of life.
I (lovingly) call Strand the “bearded chicken lady” because she believes that Sacramentans should be able to keep chickens and other livestock (within reason) and I can't say that I disagree with that, although as an apartment dweller I don't have a yard. And regarding her she-goatee, she wrote an entire essay on this topic in which she wrote:
...So I decided to go natural and let my chin look the way it was genetically designed to look. Now, in America this is a radical decision, as most men have been imprinted with [images of] Playboy bunnies. So I can't say I'm really all that surprised at the number of people online who are more worried about my chin than about global climate change, nuclear winter or the mortgage market depression. It's a good thing [that] evolution is around to separate stupid people from the ones who have the sense to focus on actual survival issues.
One guy e-mailed me about his emotional upset that I didn't look like a girl should. I pointed out that when guys shave they are making their faces look like girls' faces. 'Nuff said.
Actually, though, there are probably bald guys out there who would pay big bucks to transplant my whiskers to their domes. But I can't be bought.
I've never met Muriel Strand, but I like her. And although most people would dismiss her as a kook (most people call overpopulation and overdevelopment "progress"), my intuition tells me that she'd probably actually make the best mayor.
But we're going to get Fargo or Johnson.
Strand, you see, received just less than 3 percent of the vote yesterday; of the seven mayoral candidates on the ballot, she came in at fifth place. But Strand and the other four snowball's-chance-in-hell mayoral candidates received, in all, more than 13 percent of the votes that were cast for mayor, denying both Johnson and Fargo the 50-percent-plus that they'd have needed to avoid a runoff in November. Johnson got 47 percent and Fargo 40 percent yesterday, and although thousands of mail-in ballots are still being counted, it seems unlikely that even Johnson will reach 50 percent, which means that the runoff election that the Bee (and I) wanted to see in November most likely will happen.
I'd like to think that if nothing else, my vote for Muriel Strand, whose she-beard and whose idea that we should be able to keep a chicken or two I'm perfectly OK with, at least helped to prevent Kevin Johnson's premature coronation.**
*I believe that it is easier to continue to (try to) drag the Democratic Party, kicking and screaming, further and further to the left than it is to build up the Green Party to a party that can actually win big elections. (In other words, it's easier to renovate an old house than it is to build a new one from scratch.) The de-Clintonization of the Democratic Party began in 2003, I think, with Howard Dean's campaign for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination, and ended yesterday with Billary Cunton's final defeat in the contest for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.
**If I had to pick between only Johnson and Fargo today, I'd pick Fargo.
9:18:02 PM 
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