A reputable woman of the community who seldom misses events and is not bashful about spilling her opinions, attended both of this week’s City Council candidates’ forums, the one co-sponsored on Monday by the League of Women Voters and Michelle Mayans’s KidsAsk2Know, and last evening’s Culver Crest Neighborhood Assn. program.
Before spending a misplaced yawn, she said, in one extra syllable, “borrrrrr-or-ing.”
“I heard lots of similar and familiar opinions,” she said, from challengers Gary Abrams and Christopher Patrick King, and from the two men defending their offices, Mayor Jeff Cooper and Councilman Jim Clarke.
Really? Too jaded, maybe.
The lady may have been too casual in her approach, missing what has been going on in the busy head of Mr. King.
Although Mr. King said this week there is a distinction between his stern anti-fracking perspective and those of the two incumbents, the margin between them may be too amorphous to arrest the attention of the typically modestly informed voter.
That, however, is not the point.
Mr. King has been the most creative thinker since the season of candidate forums began, it can be agreed.
For voters supporting or opposing him, it cannot be denied that he has done more homework than any other contender.
Eschewing stock answers to well-worn questions, he has suggested he will be a thinking man’s political when he is elected, this time or the next to the dais in Council Chambers.
When the question of the suddenly absent Fourth of July fireworks show was posed, Mr. King produced an imaginative answer that would accommodate residents at Jerry Chabola Stadium.
When a question was asked about transporting light rail passengers into the bosom of Downtown, he suggested pedi-cabs.
Now that the transportation mode has been proposed, what ever path can the pedi-cabs travel?
“A yellow brick road,” Mr. King, no stranger to playing off of perhaps the best-known film ever to be shot in the Heart of Screenland, 1939’s Wizard of Oz.
