With the City Council electing a new mayor at tonight’s 7 o’clock meeting in Council Chambers, this was going to be a sweet hour for Scott Malsin, his triumphant return to the dais 4 months, 11 days after his historic resignation over healthcare benefits.
But after falling 384 votes short of overtaking Jim Clarke for the final qualifying seat, his thoughts are elsewhere on a day of gloomy weather.
“I don’t mind losing,” Mr. Malsin told the newspaper this morning, “but I don’t like the way I lost.”
Losing was by no means a shock, he said emphatically.
“I have won election twice. The first time I ran and won was extremely exciting. The second time I ran and won, it was very validating.
“My accomplishments remain, and I am very proud of them. Serving on the Council takes a great deal of work. It is so time-consuming. It was a real burden to my family. Now it is nice to have the time back to spend on work and family.
“While it seems as if an election is a very binary kind of a thing – there is a winner and there is a loser – remember, I got an enormous number of votes, nearly 2400. I am proud of that level of support.”
Lovely thoughts aside, what galls Mr. Malsin was the shadowy way that he lost, by innuendo, often from sources who shed their names before leveling accusations.
This Is New
Historically, candidates for the City Council and School Board are not accustomed to being personally criticized during campaigns. Mr. Malsin felt he was not just rebuked but blackjacked, if not hijacked, over his stance his last year on public worker benefits, his mid-term resignation and his perceived worth.
It was difficult for him to finger critics. They hardly ever revealed their faces. Just their words, heavily seasoned innuendo against Mr. Malsin.
“We chose the high road,” he said. “The only way to fight a negative campaign is to get down in the mud and attack your opponent. As soon as you start responding to every attack, you are playing on your opponent’s turf.”
To the question of where his mind has wandered in the nearly two weeks since voters rendered their verdict, Mr. Malsin said:
“I have given a lot of thought to why negative campaigns work.
“When you look at other races, county or state, if one candidate goes negative, the other does, too.
“The goal of the negative campaign is to undermine the support for your opponent and to suppress the vote. If you look at very negative campaigns, you don’t see the (targeted) candidates in larger stages responding to them incessantly. That is not the strategy that apparently works.”
The Core of the Problem
Now as a private citizen, can Mr. Malsin influence at least the curtailment of negative campaigns, which have gained impressive momentum in recent months?
“I have given this a lot of thought,” he said. “Our local election laws are woefully inadequate. Disappointing and surprising.
“For instance, each candidate signed a pledge to run a clean campaign, to not engage in scurrilous whisper campaigns. Also, they would stop their supporters from doing that on their behalf. All six candidates signed the pledge under the California Election Code.”
Then came a bundle of bad news.
“We went to our city attorney to see if there were any teeth in the pledge. There are not.
“That needs to be addressed. There needs to be a threshold at which our local government can step in and take action.
“We ought to put real teeth into our local election law in order to ensure that all future campaigns are run cleanly and fairly.
“If we don’t,” Mr. Malsin warned, “we will find fewer and fewer candidates willing to step up and run. They may be willing to serve, but they may not be willing to put themselves through the wringer.”
Mr. Malsin has not yet fleshed out a strategy for how he and other private citizens can influence meaningful change.
