Sylvester Turner for Mayor. HoustonChronicle.com ($$$)
None of the seven major candidates running for mayor can claim a complete resume.
The "endorsement" goes on to provide Turner with some back-handed compliments for hanging around the legislature for a long time, for coming up with a pension solution that the ed board still "has strong reservations" about and for a lot of time passing from the scandals that weighed Turner down in his prior two runs for Mayor.
That's hardly effusive praise, and it's hardly a reason for Houston voters to pull the lever for a man who seems to be running on a platform that's a mixture of raise taxes, increase spending and work the city's legislative lobby department to death.
For example, Turner wants to "increase funding to Houston schools" as Mayor but admits that school funding is provided by the Texas Legislature. To accomplish this goal he's stated (on Twitter) that the city will lobby harder for increased funds. While that's laudable it's hardly a solution to education funding that a true leader would espouse.
While the Chron makes mention of Turner's "impressive policy papers" on many issues what they fail to notice is that most of them are really just outlines of things that might be a plan that skirt important specifics such as where the funding is going to come from.
That's the biggest problem with Turner's campaign, one that the Editorial Board doesn't address, that he has a ton of plans to dust off and role out Mrs. White's old money catapult, but is unwilling to say where exactly the money to put in that catapult is going to come from. The answer, of course, is through repealing the pillow-soft, voter-approved revenue cap and raising taxes on everyone except for his supporters and key constituency. Turner's a smart enough politician to understand that if he says this, he's going to go down for a third time.
More importantly however, is how the Ed board chooses to address the remaining candidates in what we can only assume is an effort to maintain access should Turner not prevail.
Adrian Garcia: Was given the worst treatment as the Chron has determined that all of his pre-campaign high hopes have been dashed against the reality of his disastrous administration of the Harris County Sheriff's Office. They also point out that "Sheriff Selfie" is pretty much an empty shell. Garcia doesn't have policy he has pictures, that he posts on-line. Ironically, the criticism of Garcia's relatively lightweight policy muscle can be passed on to Turner as well. Neither of the two front-runners in this race seem all that bright from a policy perspective.
Stephen Costello: You get the feeling that the Chron wanted to throw their endorsement toward Costello but felt a lot of pressure to not do so due to his mid-tier standing in the polls. Confusingly, they praise current Mayor Annise Parker for being a competent Mayor but then criticize Costello for being too much like Parker. The fact is that Parker has been a disastrous, although popular Mayor who has exacerbated Houston's financial woes while choosing to focus on policy priorities such as HER Ordinance and exaggerating her impact on the homeless situation.
Bill King: Again it feels like the Chron thinks King might be the one person in the race with solutions to the problems, but they again shy away due to fears over future access to City Hall should they be wrong. Of all the candidates, King got the most positive write-up and the specific mention by the Chron that he should be included in future situations.
Ben Hall, Chris Bell, Marty McVey: None of these candidates were given a passing mention, which means that the Ed Board either did not talk to them or did not consider them serious candidates to the race and saw no sense in mentioning them to maintain access.
In the title, I suggest that this endorsement is a harmony of all the major themes of this blog. Houston has a leadership vacuum that's only going to get worse if Turner is elected. The Chron Editorial Board can't even pen a decent endorsement any more, which some would argue is their only remaining purpose for existing. Beyond all of that however, making an endorsement for a candidate with scandals in his past, whose only qualification for the job is that he's been in politics for a while and who is the candidate that you think might win the thing is a cop-out.
Every time I think the Chron Ed Board can't dig the hole any deeper, they produce a shovel with a longer handle. This mayoral endorsement should never have been written and it serves no purpose in the race. In fact, it was more damning of Turner than anything that's been previously written because it casts him as an empty suit who's done nothing during his career but look after his own interests.
Of course, being the bad candidate that his is, Turner has the endorsement all over his campaign website.
That right there tells you pretty much everything you need to know about Turner. It's not this site's policy to make endorsements, it probably shouldn't be the Chron's policy either since they seem to be incapable of credibly performing the duty.
