If Chris G. hopes to win, she must run against right Goodman
If the polls can be trusted, Chris Giunchigliani faces an uphill fight to defeat Carolyn Goodman in the Las Vegas mayor's race.
By June 7, Giunchigliani must convince a mostly preoccupied voting public she has not only the experience but also the vision to do the job.
That, or find a way to savage her opponent sufficiently to win the final round of a political donnybrook.
Either course she takes, I can say with some confidence the one way she won't be able to defeat Carolyn Goodman is by running against Mayor Oscar Goodman and his record of downtown redevelopment.
Over the past dozen years, the Martini Mayor has worked tirelessly to reinvent the area and save it from decay and utter collapse. Even in a rotten economy the signs of life downtown are undeniable. From East Fremont Street and the Arts District to Symphony Park and the Zappos relocation, Goodman has notched numerous successes against long odds.
Giunchigliani, the seasoned political veteran, didn't see it that way last week during a candidate forum sponsored by the Commercial Real Estate Development Association. As reported by the R-J's Alan Choate, the candidate reduced Goodman's redevelopment legacy to a couple blocks of Fremont Street nightclubs and the growth of the downtown Arts District.
"It's a good start, but in 12 years we should've done better," she said. "And a lot of that is because of an over-focus on a stadium."
Giunchigliani called Goodman's push for the Mob Museum a mistake and said others also deserved credit for Symphony Park.
"It's not what it seems," Giunchigliani told the group. "Let's redo the whole plan. We've lost a lot of our affordable housing in the core -- it's all gone to high-rise condos."
At this point, I'm guessing Giunchigliani wishes she could erase such comments. Although Goodman surely could have done more, the fact is no one has done as much to resuscitate downtown.
Not surprisingly, Goodman's cheering section from the business and political communities jumped all over Giunchigliani's ill-advised remarks. Carolyn G.'s campaign adviser Tom Letizia let me know heavy hitters Sig Rogich and Larry Ruvo were standing by to spill the facts of Oscar G.'s legacy. (And shed Giunchigliani's blood in the process, I suspect.)
Now, boys. There's no need to resort to violence.
Everyone who has been paying attention has seen the physical changes that have occurred downtown. The transformation has been gradual, but the results are dramatic for an area that was written off by the boomtown swells in Southern Nevada's development and casino crowd when Goodman took office.
A short time after the candidate forum, Giunchigliani seemed to rethink her comments.
"It's a good start," she said. "It's totally commendable but there's just so much more that needs to be done."
Yes, sure there is. But that's not exactly what she said.
Giunchigliani's trouble is simple: She must run a near-perfect race to defeat Goodman, the private school founder and popular wife of the extremely popular mayor. And perfect this ain't.
For Giunchigliani, the wild cards are work ethic and demographic diversity. If she gets the most out of the varied ethnic and social interest groups she's been appealing to, she could pull off an upset.
But CarOscarLyn is awfully popular.
And popularity is almost everything in politics. Those who lament that the mayor's race is a popularity contest deny the fact that, at its core, politics is a largely an image-obsessed popularity contest, where things like handsome faces, jaunty slogans, and name identification have almost always trumped complex issues and high IQs.
Mayoral candidate Carolyn Goodman is beatable. CarOscarLyn is not.
If Giunchigliani is to pull off an upset in June, she must take care to run against the right opponent.
John L. Smith's column appears Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. E-mail him at Smith@reviewjournal.com or call (702) 383-0295. He also blogs at lvrj.com/blogs/smith.
