Cibrian for Mayor
Diane Cibrian for mayor?
While hedging on her Fiesta medal slogan, Cibrian did confirm that she has been exploring the idea ever since last fall, when she says a group of constituents asked her to consider running.
That would have been when she had logged less than six months on the council.
So what magnificent achievements had she accomplish in six months to warrant constituents asking her to run for mayor? Let’s see, by August she had join Council Member Wolff in calling for a 1-cent reduction to the property tax rate, failed to stop the development of more traffic congestion inducing stores and offices, and expressed her concern that simply synchronizing traffic lights might not be enough to ease congestion. She also demonstrated her ability to manipulate numbers (or just ignore them completely) for her own purposes.
Now why do some of her constituents want her to run?
She said her short tenure doesn’t reflect her full experience, which includes 20 years in government and nonprofit service.
She wants to run, she said, because “I’ve been part of an effective city government, and I want to continue that progress.”
Okay, even though I have serious questions about the value of her “experience”, if it is so significant, why didn’t she run for mayor to begin with? Maybe she was waiting to demonstrate the “effective city government” part? So she saved District 8 from Booby Rock but wasn’t interested enough in what was happening in other districts to understand the zoning issues related to Toyota.
Some observers think she may have made a mistake:
Henry Flores, dean of the graduate school at St. Mary’s University and a political science professor, agreed that making her intentions known so early may backfire on the hard-charging councilwoman.
She may have thought an early announcement would run off potential competition, he said, “but it also gives the opposition time to find their own candidate. She has set herself up as a target very early.”
So it would seem. But Cibrian is proof that the delivery is more important than the message. People don’t remember why she was in the news, only that she was in the news. After all, this was the candidate holding up signs of street corners.
In any case, I can’t wait to see her campaign messages, “I’ll do for San Antonio what I’ve done for district 8″–which is????
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