Probably the most nagging, puzzling twist to Gary Silbiger’s How I Missed Becoming Mayor story this week was the former Vice Mayor’s inability to detect the one obvious move he had to make to give himself a chance, much less a victory.
He needs to answer this lonely, haunting question:
Why did he not spend every week for the past 12 months courting the vote of the single swing voter on the City Council, Mehaul O’Leary?
By Mr. O’Leary’s testimony, he never did.
For Mr. Silbiger to overlook this requisite is astonishing, like drawing a face without a nose.
If there is a single common descriptive word that Mr. Silbiger’s City Council colleagues have used repeatedly, off-stage, the last seven years to capture his approach and performance, it is “oblivious.”
He did not know that danger dominated his path to the powerfully desired Mayor’s chair at last Monday night’s City Council meeting.
Judging by the licking-hot communications that have been exchanged among the principal players this month, Mr. Silbiger did not realize until it was far too late what the rest of official Culver City knew, openly:
His well-advertised candidacy not only was in trouble but doomed.
It’ll Happen. It’ll Happen. It May Happen.
Passivity, almost shockingly, was his guiding force, as it routinely has been throughout his one and three-quarter terms inside City Hall.
He did not even have to leave home to notice it. His astute son Karlo, the first declared candidate for the School Board, already is in campaign mode — and the election is more than six months off.
Hardly any Culver City politician in modern times has been so blunt and clear about how massively he hungers to take his next step in office as Mr., Silbiger did during the past year. (Especially since the duties — but not the title and accompanying prestige — are fairly ephemeral. Most Mayors-to-be have regarded it as unseemly to baldly campaign. And so, publicly, they have jammed both hands into their pockets and mumbled “Aw, shucks.”)
Confoundingly, despite conveying the notion that he not only wanted but practically needed the promotion, Mr. Silbiger proceeded to do almost nothing about it.
He seems to have relied on the flimsy human characteristic known as “good will” — plus strong headwinds —to carry him over the finish line and into the Mayor’s office.
That strategy has been on a losing streak since Eden.
Didn’t he know he was the least popular member among the five Councilmen? That is not disqualifying, but a sign that a serious candidate better find a way to be creative.
The Non-Strategy
Based on the desperate calls for pro-Silbiger testimony that were made to residents on the afternoon of the Council election, Mr. Silbiger was the last to know he had been squeezed out, fair and square, deploying a strategy that was at least as much his fault as it was to the credit of new Mayor Andy Weissman.
Since a new City Council was seated last April, even unborn children realized the five of them were split three ways, two two-member factions and one free agent, Mr. O’Leary.
Based on his own testimony, Mr. Silbiger appears to have based his whole campaign on informal, drive-by, whimsical conversations with colleagues just after being elected Vice Mayor last April. Supposedly, on that far-off day, he wrapped up three votes to clinch the Mayoralty race.
Then he went to a corner and sat down. For the last 12 months, he has patiently, naively been waiting for congratulatory messages to magically materialize.
Even schoolboys don’t try to win class elections without campaigning.
