What's old is new again

Well this is being well-brushed under the rug. I have two observations.

From Police find Andrew Gillum in hotel room with man treated for apparent overdose by Richard Luscombe. Recall that Gillum was the former Mayor of Tallahassee who ran for, and came within a whisker of winning, the governorship of Florida in 2018.

It is not immediately obvious from the article but police were called to a hotel room where they found Andrew Gillum either under the influence of drugs or deeply inebriated. Drugs were scattered about the room. The other gentleman with whom Gillum was partying was a male sex worker who was in the throws of overdosing. Fortunately a third man had come to the room and called the police and paramedics. The report downplays, misdirects, euphemizes.

Woof. Florida man primo. Florida certainly dodged a bullet.

Reminds me of the heyday of Marion Berry, Mayor of Washington, D.C. when I was a university student there. Hard to believe today that he was the first black Mayor of a major city. Hard to believe in both senses of the word. Hard to believe that he ever got that position and held it for twelve years. And also hard to believe that as recently as 1979 there were no African-American mayors of a major city.

I can't say I have ever seen a headcount but I would guess that perhaps a third of major cities now have African-American mayors. Seattle, San Francisco, Tallahassee, Nashville, New York City - Those have white mayors. But Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Chicago, New Orleans, Charlotte, Washington, D.C. are all African-American mayors. It is so common as to be unremarkable. But Berry was the first.

He had a wonderful start in politics when elected in 1960 as president of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). But things went downhill after his election as Mayor of Washington, D.C.

Wikipedia describes his first term as "characterized by increased efficiency in city administration and government services, in particular the sanitation department." That's not how I remember it. Parties, jet-setting, murky finances, allegations of cocaine use, epidemic crime, endemic corruption, and serial corruption scandals was more the tone. But he was charismatic in his way and definitely something of a Greek Tragedy.

Ultimately he was brought low by an FBI sting with an accompanying video involving a tryst with an amour and involving crack cocaine. The sense at the time was that this was sort of an Al Capino denouement. It was what they caught him for but it was the tip of the iceberg of what he was guilty of.

Andrew Gillum has now done him one better.

The other thing that strikes me in this case is the curse of being deemed a "rising star" in the Democratic party. The crooked and incompetent former mayor of Atlanta, Kasim Reed, was so anointed by the press just before the results of FBI and accounting investigations began turning up the evidence behind the observed corruption everyone experienced. Andrew Gillum was deemed a rising star. Stacey Abrams has been so described. None of them with talent or capability and with moral handicaps of the greatest kind. But "rising star" seems necessarily to come before the fall.

Actually there is a third striking thing about the Gillum incident. It seems likely to be one more instance where there is one law for the anointed and another for everyone else. The police come into a hotel room with a dying/over-dosing sex worker, with drugs scattered around and with Gillum unable to communicate due to alcohol or drug impairment. And there is no arrest and apparently unlikely to be an arrest.

Hard to imagine that that would be the case for an ordinary citizen.