First in a series
[img]1802|left|Ms. Jacqueline Deloatch||no_popup[/img]Dateline Compton – If she had not told a visitor to her main street office this morning that she is running for mayor of still troubled Compton, he would not have included her campaign among his first dozen guesses.
Jacquelyn Deloatch does not fit the profile of a political candidate – wily or crafty or calculating.
She is the cherub-faced vision you mean when you say you are going home to mama.
When she says her primary target will be to quickly and enduringly restore transparency to City Hall, she is speaking with the blended gentleness of your favorite parent and that ol’ drill sergeant whose last recorded smile was in 1950.
Primarily, Jacquelyn Deloatch is Everyman’s mother.
Supporters believe that is precisely why she is the right person to sweep away the latest mountainous messes that again have stained the image of this blue collar community of 96,000.
The sunniest memories of your favorite years with your own mom are indelibly etched in her rocking-chair-on-the-front-porch personality when you shake hands and she immediately offers a chair at a comfortable table.
Ms. Deloatch may have invented friendship.
Remember what your mother began teaching you, even before you went to school:
Never speak illy of others.
For an office-seeker to adhere to that principle in a community sometimes labeled notorious bespeaks enviable self-control. Practically a miracle.
She is the loving, open-arms parent to whom you bring home the girl or boy you intend to marry. Without fear of rejection, you glide through the front door and she will curl a cozy arm around each of you, nodding enthusiastically at the same redemptive qualities of your partner-to-be that attracted you.
But first, Ms. Deloatch intends to defeat a field of 11 mayoralty rivals on April 16:
Her central promise: To restore desperately needed integrity and transparency to nearby City Hall where both have been invisible for years.
A former mayor who went to prison for committing heinous misdeeds while occupying the chair is one of her rivals.
Another is a television memory, Rodney Allen Rippy.
Only in the most general terms will Ms. Deloatch venture into what morally and legally ails Compton, concentrating instead on her own plans.
Not that she is soft or vulnerable.
Ms. Deloatch is a woman of considerable professional and personal accomplishment.
(To be continued)
