He's got to be kidding


The howls really went up over the weekend as the O ran a story on Portland's hapless mayor, Dud Wheeler, in which he suggested he'll be running for a third term a year and a half from now. Alas, the story is behind the Paywall of Pity, and so I won't get to read the whole thing unless it gets reprinted somewhere. But I don't think I'm missing too much, because the whole concept of Wheeler having a political future seems patently absurd.

Ted Wheeler is the worst mayor Portland has had in at least 50 years. But the scary part is, he was head and shoulders above the clown car occupants he ran against in 2020. And he almost lost. If the nuts on the far, far, and I do mean far, left hadn't split their vote, one of their airhead nabobs would be mayor today. And those candidates are still lurking around, make no mistake. They're otherwise unemployable.

What Portland needs is for a viable moderate candidate, more competent than Wheeler, to come forward soon and get recognized by the public as a contender. Then maybe a poll would show Dud what an early poll showed Creepy Sam Adams during his one term as mayor: that he has no chance of re-election. At that point, maybe Wheeler will decide he wants to spend more time with his trust fund and bow out.

It's going to be an interesting election, to be sure, because as I undsrstand it, that's when the entire City Council will be up for a vote in the goofball, completely untested version of "ranked choice" voting that the public here has decided to roll the dice with. The council will be expanding to 12 seats representing four newly formed districts, and in keeping with Portland reality detachment, as usual there will be unlimited pots of public money available to finance the campaigns of any busybody with a few friends. 

Maybe the dozen-seat free-for-all will attract most of the fringe people to the council races, which could leave Wheeler or a better sane candidate up against only one or two windmill-tilters for mayor. But even if there's a crowd of lefties on the ballot, I believe the mayor's race will be decided by "ranked-choice" voting, which seems designed to give the fringe a lot more power. And there will be no primary to test any waters whatsoever.

It's going to be a tough mayoral contest for any moderate, or anyone with real management skills. Portland voters don't like what they're seeing, but they're notoriously insistent on voting for the same types of clueless politicians, over and over. The race would be especially tough for Wheeler, whose many failures become more and more obvious by the day. You can't look away from them, because they're everywhere. His chances at re-election seem minimal at this point.

Anyway, Wheeler says in the story that he's "made for this moment." Maybe, but he sure wasn't made for the million moments that got us to this sorry point in the city's history. The man needs to find the door.

Comments

  1. My anger is with his sycophants in the local media that seem to condone his behavior.

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  2. I contend Wheeler still rues the day that someone convinced him to leave Salem and run for mayor of Portland and next run for governor.
    His Portland Mayor stint has exposed his complete lack of leadership ability, fecklessly driving the City into the shithole it has become, with no possible recovery in sight anytime soon.

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    1. He is certainly far dumber than he once looked.

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    2. They didn't convince him, they told him. Big difference.

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  3. "Ted Wheeler is the worst mayor Portland has had in at least 50 years."

    I gotta disagree. Did you sleep through Vera Katz, Sam Adams, and Charlie Hales? I mean, really, there's gotta be a four way struggle to claim that title. And, hey...I remember a cad named Neil Goldschmuck who seemed to look good on screen, but had a very dark side. I remember 'mandatory weatherization' and other chuckleheaded initiatives.

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    1. Goldschmidt saved this town from Robert Moses and created the foundation on which the city stood for the next thirty years. He also belongs in prison. Both things can be true.

      Vera, Adams, and Hales ran things through the boom years of Clinton, Bush, and Obama. It wasn't a difficult gig. Which brings us to Potter, who was as bad as he was forgettable. He had the wind at his back, a city on the rise, and no one remembers him. THAT was a bad mayor.

      Still, any of those four would be preferable to this dude.

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    2. In retrospect, Vera Katz was pretty good. There is no way she would have stood for the crap that's gone on in town over last four years. Hales was downright evil, and he set the city on its current deadly course, but at least he stood for something (developers' money). Adams was a dolt and a creep, but I'd still put him ahead of the Dudster.

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    3. Hales was less evil than cynical. He'd been making a nice living out on the lecture circuit, telling the nation how they needed to be more like Portland. He treated his job as mayor more as a credentialing than an actual job (see also how Buttigieg is treating the twin transportation disasters laid on his doorstep in the last sixty days...he's another credentialer). But yeah, he certainly didn't help any. As a bonus, he no longer gets to lecture about Weird Portland...only Antifa Portland. I wonder how that's going.

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  4. Headline 'I was made for this moment.'

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  5. The city is lost in cloud of pot smoke where rebellion against the norm is the #1 priority.

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  6. Under the new system, will the mayor have any power? He/she/it doesn't get a vote, except to break ties, and there is a "professional" city manager to actually manage the bureaus, so what does the mayor do all day?

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  7. There used to be (maybe still is?) a phone number you could call to hear someone yelling f*** Ted Wheeler over and over again. I discovered it at the height of the 2020 protests from a lefty source. If you're hated by the far right and the far left, maybe it's time to pack it in.

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  8. Born with a platinum spoon in his mouth, a pompous Mayor that is now believing his own B.S….They are all bad, I have lost confidence in a city I love.

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