Former state lawmaker John Kromko tells us that he’s not going to run for mayor after all.
Kromko, who had registered a write-in candidate for the Green Party nomination last week, says he realized he couldn’t raise enough money to run a viable campaign against Republican incumbent Bob Walkup.
“I didn’t want to get into a race where I had no chance,” Kromko says.
More in this week’s Skinny!
This article appears in Aug 2-8, 2007.
Oh thank goodness. He’d hate to split the green vote.
Any old-timers remember when the little fellow calling himself Bilbo Baggins (that was his legal name, although not the one foisted upon him by his parents) ran for mayor? I think it was in the late 1970s, of course. And what’s all this about repealing the “garbage tax”? In the ’70s, the locals simply recalled the council members who voted for higher (and more realistic) water pumping fees and replaced them with know-nothing goons, each of whom lasted about one term before the populace came to its senses. Those were the days when local campaigns were interesting!
In regard to this weeks Skinny, why won’t this be an interesting, or even exciting, campaign without John Kromko running against Mayor Walkup?
Are you saying that the Weekly intends to fulfill its role as a media cheerleader for the status quo? That you don’t want to appear as if you might be encouraging people to look at the diseased roots of the current system?
When anyone takes an objective look at what’s going on in the world today, they immediately realize that change is necessary. Unless, of course, their salary depends on them not realizing that. I guess advertising dollars trumps not only common sense, but life itself.
What we have in Dave Croteau is not only a candidate who is qualified to be mayor of Tucson, but who offers the people of Tucson and its economy a very clear choice that the major parties are deathly afraid of. Those who think the only path to Tucson’s economic future is by encouraging more low-wage no benefit service sector jobs and paving over what little is left of our fragile desert ecosystem in order for special interests–very few of whom are local–to continue amassing obscene fortunes are those who have neither vision nor hope.
If the job of the press is to help educate people and make them aware of issues, the Green vs. Republican choice, and especially Croteau’s sustainability through relocalization campaign, should be generating more interest than anything else the Weekly has covered in decades.
Isn’t repeating the conventional “wisdom” that Mayor Walkup is unbeatable simply helping to create a self-fulfilling prophecy? As was made evident to me by the replies I received to my recent op-ed piece in the Star, “Rejection of growth is a viable policy option,” people are aware that some hard decisions must be made. And they want them made now. Rejecting change because it is not politically expedient is simply a cop out, when the necessary path is to elect a mayor with the vision and courage to do the right thing for our community, its economy, and the environment they both depend on.
If, as per Ben’s post, Kromko chose to flipflop between the Libertarian Party and the Greens, that seems incredibly strange: the two parties have remarkably different positions on some areas of legislation.