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Iorio sings the loudest in this chorus of candidates
© St. Petersburg Times Bob Buckhorn would be the Pothole Mayor. He would know where all the potholes are. He would have a pothole policy. He would know the name of the city worker filling the pothole. He would ask that guy about his wife. He would have memorized the wife's name. Pam Iorio would be the Competent Mayor. We do not know exactly what she thinks about potholes. We do not know exactly what she thinks about anything at all. But you can rest assured that she has been darned able in the past and is sure to be so in the future. Charlie Miranda would be the Old-Hand Mayor. No matter where you were, he would be able to tell you something about the place from his childhood. He would veer into bureaucratic speak for a little while about grants or something. In the end you would decide he was not a bad guy. Frank Sanchez would be the International Mayor. Next thing you know, Latin and South America would be all over us. Dark-suited and worldly, Sanchez would negotiate one thing after another. He would bring us all together in a room to work things out. As for Don Ardell, the fifth and longest-shot candidate: He would be the 4-F-Mayor, for his promises of a fit, fun, free and functional Tampa. Really, he seems like a friendly and interesting fellow, but he ought to start out running for the City Council or something. By Tuesday's election the candidates will have attended something like 42 or 43 forums. They deserve a medal. One of the last of these forums occurred Thursday afternoon on the Ybor City campus of Hillsborough Community College, put on by the student government. Buckhorn was not there, having another obligation, but I had to laugh at one of his pieces of campaign literature in the lobby. It was a white paper on crime that opened with a quote from Aristotle: "Law is order and good law is good order." It makes me nervous to hear the ban-happy Buckhorn talk about "order," but it must be playing well among those citizens fearful of a sudden outbreak of disorder. Iorio is the star of the race, having been the automatic front-runner ever since she decided to leave her job as the county's elections supervisor. No one has been able to dent her aura of good-guyness. The main question Tuesday is whether she can win outright, with more than 50 percent of the vote, or whether one of the others will limp into a runoff against her, albeit on life support. The others therefore are belatedly going after Iorio a little more. Buckhorn is sending out a direct-mail piece to suburban New Tampa harping on the fact that as a county commissioner years ago Iorio did not do enough about that area's roads. (Not exactly Watergate, but you have to work with what you've got.) Naturally, the piece uses unflattering, black and white pictures of her. I wonder if political candidates see each other only in black and white, kind of like dogs. I listened -- very hard -- to each of Iorio's answers Thursday, vowing to grasp the gist of them, but I swear that I could not. This was my fault, not hers. I would focus as hard as I could, but while she was saying things like infrastructure and governance and so on, my ears would block out the rest and tell my brain, "Look, it's Pam, she knows what she's talking about, don't worry about it." Sanchez is better than the bad press he has created for himself and really does speak well about trade and such things. If we could cram Sanchez and Buckhorn into the same body they would be the perfect combo of pothole-big picture. Miranda charmed the crowd and, on a question about racial profiling, had lots of heads in the student audience nodding with his own tale of being hassled by a hostile police officer. Ardell is in over his head, but overall there is not too bad an apple among them. At least three of them, if not four, will be out of the race after Tuesday. They ought to sign a mutual pledge before then that whoever wins gets to nag the rest to stay involved, by hiring 'em or naming them to an important committee or something. Hey, it's just a thought.
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