All it took was four days of negative headlines and a dude dressed in a chicken suit to get mayoral aspirant Kathleen Ford to stop ducking candidate debates. Yet the question remains, why was she ducking the debates in the first place?
Today’s PolitiFact ruling — that a claim she made is such “nonsense” that it earned a ‘Pants on Fire’ rating — reinforces the theory of why Ford ducked the debates: She’s a single issue candidate (stopping “The Lens) who simply doesn’t know what she’s talking about and often gets herself into trouble by attempting to sound smarter than she is.
Forget the argument that Ford skipped the debates because she’s leading in some polls. No, it’s simply because Ford is not fast enough on her feet at these forums. Unless she bites her tongue, she gets herself into trouble at candidate forums or when smart people ask her tough questions.
Take her performance at the first candidate forum, which was sponsored by the NAACP and The Weekly Challenger. How did Kathleen introduce herself to the mostly black crowd at this event? By stressing that she had relatives who fought for the Union during the Civil War. This was such a condescending statement that Adam Smith, political editor of the Tampa Bay Times, named Ford the “panderer of the week.”
This kind of verbal snafu is nothing new from Ford.
She once famously argued for tougher code enforcement because “Snell Isle is only going to be so nice if the Old Northeast is a good buffer.” As a council member, she accused then-police Chief Goliath Davis of lying and suggested he was tipping off drug dealers about investigations without offering any proof.
In 2009, without any evidence, she suggested the police knew of drug dealing at the Midtown home where an 8-year-old girl was shot and killed in a gang-related shooting.
In a Chamber of Commerce candidate interview during her last campaign, she recklessly claimed Bill Foster knew of rumors that the late council member John Bryan engaged in pedophilia and lied about it. She has mischaracterized the adoption of the city’s investment strategies.
And, of course, there was that matter of describing Go Davis as the “HNIC” of St. Petersburg.
In other words, Kathleen doesn’t have anything nice to say, so she’s shutting up.
Don’t for a second buy Ford’s excuse that she could not participate in the Tiger Bay panel because she has a two-week trial. This is a woman who made just over $17,000 last year from practicing law. This is less than half what the clerks in the city legal department Ford wants to lead earn. Yet, rather conveniently (and just as early ballots are being mailed) Ford has a two-week trial.
Puh-leeze.
She’s ducked Tiger Bay. She’s ducked Creative Loafing. She’s ducking the rest of the media.
She’s not a candidate, she’s a shut-in.
