You Pick the Title of This One.

I don't always know I'm going to blog about something.  Sometimes, as I experience it, the idea comes to me that I have something to communicate, and what is the most relevant angle.  That's what happened at the Meet the Candidates event tonight.

My first thought (the idea for a title comes to me before I'm fully aware of what I want to discuss) was "Well, We [Met] the Candidates."  If I had used that title, I would have talked about what the candidates said.  But frankly, most of what all of them said was, apart from being answers to questions, and not their own agendas, essentially non-provocative pablum.  Each of them wanted as much to make nice with the others as they did to tell us what was on their minds.  And I'm not complaining.  The evening was structured that way.  I suppose it was nice to see that they could make nice with each other, and find lots of areas of agreement.

My second thought for a title, which came not long after my first thought, was "I Said It Before, And I'll Say It Again."  If I had used this title, I would have focused on how civilized and engaging they all were, how Mac Kennedy was slightly more substantive than was Ginny O'Halpin, but that Ginny acquitted herself well, and what an undiluted charmer is Rafael Ciordia.  I still like Rafael, and I still don't trust him.  He could have been running for anything anywhere, and he would have presented himself the same way.  At one point, he forgot the question, after Ginny and Mac had answered it, so he asked for it to be repeated and had to offer something completely off the cuff.  And where Rafa said he "doesn't want to be trite" (that's what he said), trite is precisely what he was.  He knows next to nothing about the Village, and his best offer was to promise to learn quickly.  One example of that delightful and enthusiastic gentleman's output had to do with a question about speed bumps.  Rafa talked about what a great thing it would be for us to start by putting those crossing warnings on 6th Avenue, so lights would flash, pedestrians would cross, and drivers would decide it's easier just to drive on Biscayne Boulevard than it is to "cut through" BP.  It was obvious that Rafa does not know 6th Avenue is not ours, that it's a state property, and that we can't do things like that.  And that was one of Rafa's few mistakes, in offering an opinion that was not simply trite sloganeering, resorting to platitudes, and agreeing with whatever the other two said.

What came along near the end of the event was my last choice for a title.  And that one was "Now We Know the Answer to the Question."  There was frankly pretty good and uniform agreement among our three candidates, about more or less everything.  Until we talked about the budget.  Ginny started, and she complained about the explosion of the legal expense.  It was a pretty cheap example of shooting fish in a barrel, but she wasn't wrong.  And Mac, who spoke next, completely agreed with Ginny.  They both said we've spent way too much on our attorney.  Rafa looked at it in a different way.  Oh, he, too, talked about the legal expense, but he wasn't blaming the Commission, or the mayor, or the manager, or the attorney.  No, Rafa blamed us.  Rafa explained that the mayor had been so beset with complainers so early in her term that she had no choice but to check, double-check, and triple-check everything she did, by consulting liberally with the attorney.  Because we criticized so much.  And that wasn't the last time Rafa used that perspective.  A little later, the topic of how the Commission could get along better among itself, and with the non-Commissioner BP residents, came up for discussion.  And again, Ginny and Mac agreed about one thing: we need to lose the sergeant-at-arms who sits at the Commission desk, and has the effect of intimidating BP residents.  But Rafa didn't see it that way.  He let us all know that it was our fault, and that someone(s) at that Commission desk said she/they felt threatened, and that "when a woman says she feels threatened," Rafa admonished...

Now, the fact is, Rafa, who has no experience with the Village and its functioning, and has never come to meetings until very, very recently, could only have heard an angle like this from two or three people in the world.  He could only have heard it from Tracy Truppman or Krishan Manners, or maybe the legal scam from Rebecca Rodriguez.  And there he was tonight, at the Meet the Candidates event, letting us all know who controls his thinking.  And showing us that when he doesn't know something, he'll believe any nonsense Tracy Truppman or Krishan Manners tells him.

My question about Rafa all along has been who's behind him.  Propping him up.  Feeding him.  Molding how he would understand things (about which he doesn't know).  I had my suspicions.  Tonight, he told me I was right.  He told that to all of us.