Race down to the wire

Let’s begin today with an apology. It goes to the several readers around the state who have called or emailed to say they can’t begin to express the extent to which they care not a whit about a mayor’s race in Lit- tle Rock.

Alas, I regret to inform the preternaturally bored that there will be another column on that subject unfolding over the ensuing paragraphs today. And there probably will be another after Tuesday to analyze knowingly what I have no idea about today—the outcome.

It’s just that we haven’t had a mayor’s race of this profile and nature in this town … maybe ever, and certainly not in my lifetime.

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In 1957, the city switched to a city manager/corporate-like board of government featuring at-large board representation and a ceremonial mayor, supposedly to run the city like a business and keep politics out. The city also might have chosen such a system so that the ruling business elite could keep the black people down, considering that they were starting to integrate the schools.

This race assumes a new kind of mayor—one earning and using political capital—although a hybrid two-headed form of government adapted along the way continues to hamstring the conventional exercise of political responsibility and accountability in a mayor working with a city manager.

Both candidates indicate, by the combined force of their own strength and the high level of public engagement in this campaign, that they’ll blow through conventional impairments and declare Day One who’s the new boss in town.

I’ve framed the race as:

■ Baker Kurrus running on competence as the comfortable choice of the comfortable class.

■ Frank Scott running on a message of unity as the connecting candidate of the historically disconnected.

That’s not to say Scott offers no competence and Kurrus no unity. It’s to assess the prevailing essences of the campaigns.

Both candidates have found it necessary to attempt to perform delicate balancing acts.

Kurrus barely made it into the runoff, edging midtown liberal favorite and change agent Warwick Sabin by a scant 600 votes. In a play for those votes, Kurrus has cast himself in the runoff as the real agent of change.

He has offered the not-unclever argument that his support from city board members, rather than revealing him as status quo, means he will have the necessary backing to execute real change.

But he can’t abandon the comfortable—those doing well in Little Rock and not wanting jarring change. So he argues that he can exercise more traditional power without a formal change of government. And he stops short of proposing an elimination of at-large board representation in favor of full neighborhood advocacy.

Scott’s balancing act is that he wants to connect the disconnected without running solely as a champion of the disconnected, who often are black. He can’t be the candidate of unity if he is the candidate of a skin color.

Late last week, The Associated Press ran a national story on this race. The hook was the possibility that the city of the internationally ignominious 1957 school integration crisis might, 61 years later, popularly elect a black mayor.

Scott gave that article the quotation he’s given everyone else: He wasn’t running to be the black mayor of Little Rock, but the mayor of Little Rock.

There’s one other double balancing act.

Kurrus has the endorsement of the Fraternal Order of Police and doesn’t seem to want to squander whatever comfort that crime-fighting association might offer the comfortable. Thus, he limits his statements of outrage about nationally reported police abuses and a race-tinged FOP Facebook post against Scott.

For his part, Scott wants to decry discriminatory police actions while insisting he will support the local police. He declines to call the race-tinged FOP post against him racist, choosing instead “divisiveness.” He says the cause of unity in the city would be better-served if white people would call out racism.

The race’s last week was marked by a silly “push poll” against Scott commissioned by the apparently independent action of a Kurrus supporter, and Scott’s allegation that Kurrus opposes local control of Little Rock’s schools simply because Kurrus—after being appointed by the state to act as a superintendent during a state takeover—resisted the idea that he could work efficiently for both the state Education Department and a still-advising local board.

Indeed, as the runoff has drawn down, no candidate has looked better than the third-place finisher, Warwick Sabin. What began as an ennobling competition of uncommonly worthy candidates is ending as something less, if still better, either way, than what Little Rock has had.

Kurrus is all about the budget, and government insiders have long known that real policy is the budget.

Scott is all about an inspiring new day.

I have a preference but wouldn’t dare inflict that candidate with a public declaration of it.