Wanted: Mayoral Candidates
Madison has been blessed with so many assets–from great physical beauty to a huge built-in employment base of public employees–that the city’s charmed life seems as preordained as the morning sun.
In this opinion column for Isthmus, I suggest that darker times may be around the corner, and that we need a mayor who is up to the challenge. The column begins:
You have to like Dave Cieslewicz as mayor.
He seems almost the perfect fit for a progressive-minded city filled with gently graying baby boomers. He’s funny in a self-deprecating way. He’s calm and reassuring when he speaks to civic groups. He knows the city’s history. He extols its quirkiness. He bikes a lot. He’s green-minded. And, like everyone else in Madison, he’s an amateur urban planner.
He sounds perfect, but for a nagging concern: Dave Cieslewicz seems to play the role of mayor better than he performs its duties.
It’s not that he lacks accomplishments. But after he’s logged nearly eight years in office, I’m prompted to ask the Peggy Lee question: “Is that all there is?”
For more, go here.
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Stories by Marc Eisen 
September 30, 2010 at 4:07 am
‘Is that all there is?’ Welllll…if you would look just a little further away from those deprecating perpectives of Mayor Dave, I’m sure you would uncover the real mechanisms of a neo-conservative mayor.
For starters, upon taking office, Mayor Dave immediately terminated Anthony Brown and dissolved the Equal Rights Commission. After rooting out Anthony Brown, Mayor Dave eliminated the advocacy division for equal rights and race discrimination in Madison.
Of course, Mayor Dave restructured the department with seeded off-shoots of cultural incompetents, and those pro-tolerant, obsequiously devout obscure racists who seemingly appear to liberalize his hidden agendas. Of course, depending on what side of town you live on, the boulders and potholes on your streets probably haven’t been repaired since Paul Soglin left office.
The folks on the south side of Madison’s streets know the story about Mayor Dave’s real agenda: deculturalizing Madison to antiseptic values that only certain people can relate to or appreciate; and defacing values that rob and culturally rape the communal landscapes and the values associated with them, like the scenic beauty of Lake Mendota from Wisconsin Avenue and the cultural diversity enjoyed at Lisa Link Park.
Is there more to it than this, Mayor Dave?