Mayor Byron Brown
Mayor Brown is a nice and personable guy. I’ve met him several times, and I like him. He clearly loves Buffalo, he exudes a no-nonsense downstate sensibility, and he also seems sincere in his desire to lift Buffalo up. He’s a good figurehead and excellent booster for the City of Buffalo.
But his policies and their implementation have often been too little, too late, too poorly implemented. Some notable examples include his haphazard demolition “plan”, the showy, political implementation of CitiStat, and the recently announced plan to form a task force to end poverty.
Buffalo needs another task force like it needs another resident to leave. It needs another plan to hold a public hearing to discuss the creation of a task force like it needs to sink into the lake.
Then there’s the fundamentally dumb politics going on.
Mayor Brown and his team are engaged in a feud with the Erie County Democratic Party and its chairman, Len Lenihan, but the reasons why are either very remote or unknown. The simplest explanation is that Brown and his top aide Steve Casey would very much like to be running the county Democratic machine. An effort to unseat Lenihan last summer failed far more miserably than anyone could have anticipated. The feud seems to be an extension of Brown’s feud with Assemblyman Sam Hoyt, and the whole idiotic charade does nothing to lift up the city, the region, or their people.
The astonishing thing is that there’s really no one out there who’s mounting a credible threat to unseat Brown later this year. Mickey Kearns is supposed to be running, but query whether even his South Buffalo base will be supporting him. Word is that Ray McGurn’s Goin’ South is backing Brown. If Kearns doesn’t have the South Buffalo machine, he really doesn’t have much.
And if not Kearns, who? Kevin Gaughan? Again? What other Democrat out there, aside from Sam Hoyt, as that citywide name recognition and support to mount a credible challenge?
On the Republican side it’s even worse. I’d not be surprised if anyone with a pulse who can properly spell and pronounce “tax cut” would be recruited, but be advised to find his or her own damn funding, thanks the end.
So here we have a popular Mayor who would be politically quite vulnerable to a quality, qualified, well-funded challenger. In Buffalo, that’ll do.
Just like Len, the mayor is unbeatable right now.
Why bother.
Think about who the candidates were last time. The Metrosexual Mayoral Candidate , who I liked), Kevin Gaughan, who has never held a job in his life apart from being Kevin Gaughan, or Judy Einach, who is right-thinking, but also never ran anything more complicated than a bake sale. It seems to me that the barriers to entry into the political process are so substantial that the game isn’t really worth the candle, and this is why, as really wrong as he is on nearly everything, a gut like Chis Collins happens. Once a guy like Collins takes office he is co-opted, of course, but that’s not the point. The point is that Byron Brown is terrible because he ran with a plan for winning the election, rather than a plan for running the city. When he was elected he found out that the city — in the form of the permanent government– had it’s own idea about how the city would be run.
Empty. Suit.
But that seems to be enough for the thousands that will vote for him. Why?
Being a nice guy was good enough to get Tony Masiello elected what three times?