A new entrant to the Portland mayoral race

   I always wondered who came up with the shitty motto flying under most light posts on the peninsula side of town. The side of town that to us non-peninsula types is a seemingly foreign country compared to the Portland we all claim to have once known. I always thought, looking at the banners emblazoned with the “Love. Portland. More” slogan, that the bastard statement was dreamt up by some Falmouth and/or Cape focus group imposing their take on the city on the people who have to be in it every day. Although, now that I type this, I suppose it could have been dreamt up by the city as more of a plea to property owners, who with every move of that horrible McAlister woman camped out on the city’s behalf in Bayside, haunting our very doorsteps with a moistness for fining us for crayon on the siding, hate the city more by the day... but I digress.

   No, this slogan wasn’t a way to urge property owners to not hate the city government as much as we do, but rather was the brainchild of the latest entrant to the newly minted mayoral circus, marketer Jodie Lapchick. A quick read of the announcement in the papers this morning, and I mean a skim at best, had me picking up the word ‘tourism’ and ‘creative economy’ more than once. Here is what the means to me.

   I refer to the 1980 incarnation of commercial street as a time when it looked like shit, but didn’t suck. That’s because the city, at the time, respected the main economic driver, the fisheries, and let them conduct business near the ocean. Throwing the word tourism out there as the first word of a pitch to a reporter all but ensures you’re going to lose. The fisherman won’t vote for you, the early morning diner crowd won’t vote for you, and the people of Deering (the non-artsy-other-side-of-295-part-of-town annexed under protest in 1896 – secession anyone?) won’t either.

   The creative economy knuckler thrown on the 2^nd ball won’t do any favors to placate the aforementioned crowd either. What this means, besides the obvious pandering to the marketer’s wine-drinking, trader-joes-coming-to-town celebrating pals on the hill (er, ‘east end’) and the west end, is that this candidate intends to blow her load and focus the bulk of her energy on three blocks of Congress Street that three quarters of the city won’t go near.

   The people that actually vote in Portland are coming to the realization that this artsy, ‘progressive’ and above all COSTLY drive over the last 15 years to create some sort of utopia for the bourgeoisie is making Portland completely unaffordable for the people that make the city function and own the property within it. Mrs. Lipchick doesn’t have a shot in hell. The winner of this battle will be the one most willing to take an ax to the budget, not a Bic to a city-matching-fund grant.