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The sitdown with Mr. Gourley completed a round of in-depth interviews with all five School Board candidates for the Nov. 6 election.

Flatly, I believe it is the strongest lineup of candidates Culver City ever has fielded — for City Hall or the School Board.

If voters went to the polls blindfolded three weeks from tomorrow, they could use any method and still elect two men whom I think will change the culture of the often dainty culture of the School Board — for the better.

Will They Draw?

I hope both of this week’s Candidate Forums — at 7 on Tuesday night at Lin Howe School and at 7 on Thursday for the Culver City Homeowners Assn., at the Vets Auditorium — draw sizable, informed, or at least curious, crowds.

Best summer I ever had as a journalist was covering the almost-every-night candidate forums in Baltimore in the late ‘90s when more than two dozen persons were running for Mayor.

Jailhouse Rock

Being Baltimore, where corruption was a sometimes-respectable industry, one candidate filed papers from jail.

Unlike our laidback lifestyle, this was mean-faced, dripping, passionate politics. We have merely excuse-me tiffs. In Baltimore, the campaign was stoked up every single day of summer in the neighborhoods, and our newspaper had reporters out on the streets.

This was a throwback to dirty, derby-hatted, smokey, cigar-chomping politics of a century earlier.

Talking It Over

On hot evenings, and they all were steamers except for those that were rain-drenched, people sat on stoops in their underwear shirts. With a bottle or glass in hand, they argued the candidates until bedtime, in East Baltimore and West Baltimore.

I never had seen a mayoralty race so teeth-grindingly intense. Every night you perspired.

The Color of Politics

Baltimore’s population is two-thirds black. For the previous dozen years, a nice but virtually dead man, Kurt Schmoke, who happened to be black, had been Mayor. Shouldn’t that set the stage for the second black Mayor in Baltimore history? some argued.

Overtones of racism, cheating and sexiness were inevitable during the messy campaign. The charges merely made the main candidates even more delicious to cover. Ah, this was politics that seasoned everything you tasted.

O’Malley for President?

The winner was a Jack Kennedy type, Martin O’Malley, who was elected Governor of Maryland last November. Still a kid at 44, I think Mr. O’Malley will grow into a Presidential contender. Young, Irish, Catholic, charismatic and a family man, he comes battery-equipped with the right genes to take the White House. But, as with all major political figures in Baltimore and Maryland, his toughest challenge will be avoiding scandal. The last Maryland governor to come to Washington was the disgraced Nixon Vice President Spiro Agnew, who was forced to resign.

A Superior Lineup

Circling back to Culver City, where no one is supposed to get too het up about politics:

I can practically guarantee the field for the School Board election is stronger, classier, smarter, more steeped in knowledge, broadly more qualified than the cast that will run for the City Council in the spring.

Top to bottom, the five men have not shown a serious flaw. City Hall should be envious.