Race For Mayor

A. Robert Kaufman took his socialist agenda to The Block yesterday, where he announced his candidacy in the mayoral race and called for the creation of a "red-light district" where prostitution and drugs would be legal. Kaufman ran unsuccessfully for mayor in 2003 and 1999 and also lost bids for a U.S. Senate seat last year and in 2004. Over the years, he has run in other federal, state and local races and never won a seat. In 2003, he garnered 645 votes when he ran in the Democratic mayoral primary.

Frank M. Conaway Sr., one of the oldest hands in Baltimore politics, announced officially yesterday that he will run for mayor, harshly criticizing the policies of Mayor Sheila Dixon and outlining his plan to remedy what he called Baltimore's crime-rate "crisis." At his announcement at War Memorial Plaza, the three-term clerk of Baltimore's Circuit Court argued that Dixon has lost control of the city, which he described as a lawless war zone. Bowing out Comptroller Joan M. Pratt decides not to run for mayor.

Andrey Bundley, the former high school principal who ran an unsuccessful campaign for mayor against Martin O'Malley in 2003, formally announced yesterday that he will give it another try. Bundley, 46, surprised many political observers when he captured nearly one-third of the vote in the 2003 Democratic primary against O'Malley, a popular incumbent at the time. This year, Bundley will face a much larger and more diverse set of candidates, but he said yesterday that he is up for the challenge.

Andrey Bundley, the political newcomer who managed to take about a third of the Democratic vote from the better-funded, better-known Mayor Martin O'Malley in the mayoral primary last year, has spent a lifetime defying odds and expectations. Raised in a tough West Baltimore neighborhood that drew his brother into a life of drugs and crime, Bundley did more than just stay out of trouble and in school. He earned a doctorate and became a principal at Walbrook Uniform Services Academy. When Bundley challenged the popular mayor in September's primary, pollsters predicted he would get 1 percent of the vote.

Baltimore's election season takes to the airwaves today, when Mayor Martin O'Malley's first two campaign commercials portray the heavily favored incumbent as a regular guy and a stately politician. In the first 30-second spot, O'Malley, wearing a hard hat and wielding a hammer, is helping to rebuild a vacant house. In the other, he is striking poses of a distinguished, suit-wearing leader whose political priorities seek to protect Baltimore from terrorism. Political commercials are one of the most costly, and effective, items in any campaign.

Candidates for local office blanketed Baltimore with thousands of signs this weekend, as the "green machine" campaign team of Mayor Martin O'Malley and placard-waving volunteers of his opponent Andrey Bundley -- among many others -- took advantage of the first weekend that it was legal to put up lawn signs. City sanitation enforcement workers have ticketed the campaigns of Bundley and O'Malley for illegally posting signs on public property, utility poles or other forbidden areas. More than a dozen improper Bundley stickers were observed on utility poles yesterday, and the candidate said no one told him that this was wrong.

TODAY WE spend a few moments with Carl Stokes, whose views on education and neighborhoods and race make him one of Baltimore's thoughtful public figures. But first we look at Nathaniel J. McFadden, who needed to get in touch with his own brain. Four years ago, in the dispiriting slum of the campaign for mayor, it was state Senator McFadden who said that Baltimore was 202 years old, and that white people had held the job of mayor for 189 years and black people only 13 years. Meaning that, whatever else was happening, such as 300 homicides a year or decaying housing or the ongoing catastrophe of the public schools - or the character of the candidates - sheer racial history is why the city should not elect another white person until the political arithmetic was balanced, in about another 200 years.

When his declaration of non-candidacy ended Wednesday, a reporter asked me, "Do you take him at his word?" What, he wondered, is the real reason Mayor Martin O'Malley won't run for governor of Maryland? I knew I had already succumbed to the same reporters' cynicism. Comes along with some other professional reflexes: Never expect an exciting political race. Politicians see drama as the handmaiden of defeat. Never let a politician explain his motives. Everyone knows a politician's motives.

MEMO TO Time magazine: Take your Luce journalistic morals and buzz off.We don't like strangers from New York coming into Baltimore and making fun of our candidates for mayor. We think people who live and work in Baltimore should be the ones making fun of the candidates for mayor of Baltimore.We know what we've got in the current campaign -- and we also know who's spending about 10 minutes to cover it, and trumpet its most ridiculous elements, and why.We've got Time magazine, brainchild of Henry Luce, spawner of imitators such as Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report, all of which call themselves "news" magazines -- even in an age where the world's news arrives instantly, around the clock, out of breath, and these "news" magazine folks show up a week later pretending they have something to tell us that we don't know.