What happened, Who Was Behind It, and What it tells us

CUYAHOGA POLITICS TODAY

Maple Heights Mayor Annette Blackwell and Warrensville Heights Mayor Brad Sellers

The short-lived candidacies of Maple Heights Mayor Annette Blackwell and Warrensville Heights Mayor Brad Sellers for Cuyahoga County Executive say more about the state of the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party and the utter absence of any coherence within the local black political community than about the candidates themselves.

Let’s look at the facts and then what’s behind them.

To be sure, neither of these first ring suburban mayors was ready for prime time, even though they both have been extraordinarily effective chief executives of their home cities.

We thought Blackwell had a chance to be an effective contender for the Democratic nomination even though she stumbled in the way she entered the race the first week in December.  But she never showed signs of engaging either the voters or the Party’s executive committee members whose endorsement votes next week will go a long way towards deciding who wins the May primary.

It’s now clear why Blackwell was a reluctant campaigner. It was likely only a few weeks — if that long — before she realized that the promises and assurances of support she had been promised had already been reneged upon. She had been seduced and quickly abandoned for fresh meat: her friend, neighbor, and mayoral colleague, a reluctant seven-footer with a longer resume. Once Blackwell realized her campaign had been consigned to road kill by false friends, she sat and waited until it was certain that Sellers would stride into the race on January 5.

Blackwell then announced through a spokesman on January 3 that she was “suspending” her campaign.

Sellers was harder for the vultures to lure into the race than Blackwell. He’s been a mayor ten years — twice as long as her five — and possessed more political savvy. He agonized over his decision for weeks, partly because he was at a comfortable place in his life. He could continue as the successful mayor of his hometown for as long as he wanted. And he also had reason to know that getting in the race meant he would be dogged by the resurfacing of the very allegations about his past property tax delinquencies and his residential tax abatement.

Why did he get in the race when the harsh end was so predictable? Two reasons, one a surmise, the other a fact. The surmise is that the possibility of engaging and possibly winning a countywide election stirred the dormant competitive juices of a former world class professional athlete.

Sellers formally declared his candidacy on January 5; he formally exited ten days later, his long shot rudely and thoroughly rejected by local news outlets digging into the public records of what should have been a routine tax abatement granted to any new Warrensville Heights homebuyer. The particulars a curious reader can find elsewhere, and it’s likely they may be reviewed by the county prosecutor.

Some shots, whether in basketball, life, or politics, are ill-advised and should not be taken.

The second reason for Sellers to come off the bench and appear at center court to the heart of the matter, which is the arena in which both these well-respected mayors were reduced to bit players.

Who were the general managers and what game are they playing? The answer requires an understanding of decades of local Democratic Party history.

Even if you could isolate the deep corruption epitomized by the leadership of former county officials and party leaders Jimmy Dimora and Frank Russo, you would find a party governed more by the pursuit of personal power than by any sort of principled commitment to issues of public policy. The causes are both structural and cultural. The party organization tracks the senseless division of the county into 59 municipalities, each its own fiefdom with elected officials competing in an apprehension of scarcity — resources, power, influence — as opposed to an appreciation of collaboration around the basic purpose of party: collaborating around agreed principles and policies to win victories at the polls so that those principles and policies can be the basis of governance and the operation of public institutions, like the justice system, the school system, and the implementation of polices regarding taxes, commercial regulation, and so on.

What exists within the Party today are the death throes of a struggle that more enlightened communities moved past long ago. Succinctly put, there is a faction, loosely centered in the southwest part of the county, but with fraying tentacles all around, fiercely trying to maintain its dying grasp on the internal levers of power that in our overwhelmingly one-party county, effectively control judgeships, contracts, and appointments, and consequently influences the flow of political donations that grease many wheels.

In Part II, appearing later today, we will discuss this faction and its role in the state of the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party. In Part III, appearing tomorrow on Martin Luther King Day, we will look at the local black political community in the light of the current state of the county Democratic Party.

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