The gloves are off in the Coral Gables mayoral race as both candidates shot a few choice zingers at each other at their first debate Thursday night.
“Ralph is definitely a slick talker, but words are not deeds,” said Mayor James “The Ambassador” Cason.
“He should be given an Emmy,” Commissioner Ralph Cabrera said.
But there really wasn’t a clear, declarable winner.
Nor was there an obvious loser. Well, maybe the Coral Gables voters who — Ladra can’t believe — still have to hear about the long promised and stalled Miracle Mile streetscape project and pending long-shot annexations as campaign issues a decade later.
While we may come back to those issues separately, and we definitely want to write more later about the answers regarding the Somerset school expansion, pension reform and the debt incurred without public input, those are issues Ladra needs to do a little more asking on so we will keep this first review about the first debate about the gist and the way the two candidates behaved, er, I mean performed.
Both Cason and Cabrera intermittently held their own and floundered during the 90-minute Q&A with veteran TV reporter Elliott Rodriguez in a historic church hall packed with people who pretty much have made up their minds as to who they will vote for in the April 9th election.
Both candidates got a similar decibel level applause — some of it just polite, some genuinely enthusiastic — and pretty much the same number of boos, though Cabrera predictably scored the first one.
Both acted testy and seemed to be on the defensive — possibly indicating that each of them also think the race is closer than they would like less than three weeks out on the week that absentee ballots dropped.
But while the 12-year, termed-out commissioner challenging the incumbent made some classic Cabrera gaffes and maybe was not as on-point as he can be — even Cason admitted more than once that his challenger is a better speaker — he stayed on issues and answered honestly and consistently, using personal and statistical examples and owning his positions, whether they are popular or not. Any mistakes in his language choices are borne from his transparency, tendency to speak his mind and genuine effort to call things as they are. And maybe one of his chronic headaches.
Cason, on the other hand, had less convincing comebacks and more doubt in his delivery. One example: Every time he referred to the crime rate — made an issue by Cabrera but, perhaps, deservingly so — he said the chief told him, the chief “told us,” the chief said that crime was down 1 percent. That, ladies and gentlemen, is laying the groundwork for plausible deniability.
What do you mean the chief said? Verify it. What kind of criteria is he using to measure the figures? A good mayor asks questions. A good mayor does not just take everything for granted, even if it is edited and packaged to sell you a certain way. Especially if it is edited and packaged to sell you a certain way. But a useless mayor doesn’t ask questions if you want to claim innocence later.
It also helps to try to justify yourself early on.
“Where do gold miners go? Where the gold is,” Cason quipped, sort of like saying the Gables has crime because it has rich people. “Of course if you are robbed, you are going to feel bad. But it’s a perception,” he said of the alleged 13 percent hike — which Cabrera said he got from the FDLE, not the police chief that reports to the city manager that backs the mayor. “It’s not a reality.”
Cason also came prepared with props, prompting Ladra to wonder if that question about two [soft] attack mailers was planted by his campaign consultant, Jorge de Cardenas: Blown up photos that he must have felt he really needed to show the context of the booze bottle in one of the mailer pictures (he was holding a fancy bottle of Cognac at a promotional event).
He also spent much of the debate finger-pointing, bashing Cabrera’s independent streak, calling him a bully and accusing him of using scare tactics.
But maybe that’s because the mayor doesn’t have much of a track record to lean on. Well, except for having gone to 1,100 parties in the last two years, according to his own accounting. And I bet just counting them is a full-time job at almost three events a day. He must be exhausted! And maybe that is why his platform is comprised of vague generalizations and him taking credit for stuff done by the entire five-member commission. Because he has been too busy playing diplomat mayor, attending a thousand events and holding sealed liquor bottles, to make actual policy.
As Cabrera brought up in defense of the mailers that he said were not from his campaign — and he better drop that line in the interest of transparency since everyone knows his consultant, Keith Donner, did it for him out of his PAC, Citizens Action, Inc. — the message was true. “There is truth in the content of those flyers and that’s all I can say,” Cabrera said. And it is legitimate truth. Cason has not had any objections to, or even questions of, anything suggested by City Manager Pat Salerno in two years. He has not brought any legislation or programs or initiatives of his own. He has basically been a rubber stamp for Salerno and his administration, a top tier of 22 employees with fat salaries who have not had to pay higher pension contributions like the low-wage workers have had to do.
Cabrera blamed Cason — who did get the firefighters endorsement, while Cabrera got the FOP — for the plummeting morale among the city’s 700-some employees and said the city did not act in good faith with the unions. Cason blamed Cabrera for the swelling of the pension obligation, I guess not realizing that some of those who are supporting him and were in the room — notably former Commissioners Dorothy Thomson and Wayne “Chip” Withers — were also at the helm during that ballooning period. Withers even left in the middle of the debate — though maybe he got a phone call, we can’t say he got fed up.
Cabrera accused the mayor of placing a gag order on police about the reportedly rising crime. Cason accused the commissioner of jacking up the crime rate for campaign purposes and cozying up with former City Manager David Brown — and interestingly enough, the race has also now become a least-of-two-evils contest between Brown and current City Manager Pat Salerno (more on that later), whose really cozy compact with (read: control of) Cason has become another campaign issue — when in reality Cabrera was one of those pushing for Brown’s ouster.
Ladra knows. I was there.
You can’t rewrite history. But Cason sure tried several times.
He even quoted Cabrera from a 2005 commission meeting in which the commissioner, who sometimes thinks he is funnier than he actually is, said “You know when we’ll deal with the pension? When the proverbial excrement hits the oscillating device.” Problem is, Cason took the comment completely out of context, as if it were a smoking gun to show Cabrera was “asleep at the wheel,” as Elliott Rodriguez, a Gables resident and veteran debate moderator — who was duped y se las paso a little in his slanted questions — put.
But when Cabrera said that excrement line in a debate with former Mayor Don Slesnick at the dais — remember those? Debates at the dais? What a concept — he was being his usual sarcastic self and actually pushing for the commission to do something about the pension.
“What I was trying to do was wake my colleagues up,” Cabrera shot back, naturally and without missing a beat, knowing exactly when he said that. I remember it, too. Who wouldn’t? One of his more colorful quotes. “Jim, you are trying to manipulate my statements.”
He is right. Ladra knows. I was there.
“You weren’t here. But I was. And I tried time and time again,” Cabrera told him, referring to pension reform, which took up almost half of the debate time.
“You may have tried but you weren’t successful,” Cason shot back, getting one of the few laughs of the evening. These guys are not having fun, folks.
“You had 10 years and you did nothing,” the mayor added.
Well, that is not entirely true either. As someone who has covered Coral Gables since Cabrera was first elected in 2001 — in a sweeping change at City Hall that also ushered in Slesnick and Commissioner Maria Anderson, who is also termed out next month — Ladra can attest to the fact that pension reform has been something Cabrera has focused on for years. He has worked with the unions and tried to strike a balance between the need to trim expenses and the “contract” he said Thursday that the city has with its employees. He also reminded Cason that he’s been in office the last 12 years, not two, and has brought proposals to the table, including one that gave an option for employees to leave the city’s plan.
He’s right. Ladra knows. I was there.
Cason wasn’t.
So maybe that’s why it’s easier for him to misrepresent.
One audience member asked, through Rodriguez, if Cason thought five years, which is what he has lived in the Gables, was enough time to know and serve the city. He got very huffy about it.
“That’s a discriminatory argument,” Cason said. “It’s one of the things that they used to use against blacks and Hispanics and others to say ‘You’re not one of us.'” Really? Racists used to use length of residency?
“To say you have to live here a certain time to know Coral Gables, that’s not true,” Cason said, dissing the idea that “unless you are in the old guard, you can’t lead.”
“It’s advantageous,” Cabrera came back, regarding his 47 years in the city.
“I don’t need a GPS to get around.”
He also congratulated Cason on picking Coral Gables as his home after he retired from foreign service. “I’m glad you and your wife picked the city. We must have been doing something right.”
And, of course, Cason was asked about his role in Havana’s Cuba Mission thing.
“I have not raised the Cuban issue in any campaign,” Cason said. And he’s right. But he doesn’t have to. “I have a lot of support among Cubans because I think I did a lot of creative, courageous things there.” And he’s right, even if the Cuban voters are supporting him for the wrong reasons.
Too bad he doesn’t do anything creative or courageous here.
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