Re-elect Karl Dean solicits journalists to join his community steering committees

An eyebrow-raiser:

Don't know how many other reporters received invitations to jump on the Mayor's campaign bandwagon, and surely the reporters are not at fault for getting solicited by Karl Dean's campaign. However, this does not allay concerns that news about Mayor Karl Dean is managed and filtered rather than reported, and it does not help the journos maintain a level of detached neutrality, if not objectivity.


This is the bandwagon period of Dean's campaign where he is re-framing himself broadly as the Mayor of all communities in spite of the particular way he governed during his first term. And nobody wants to be left out of the juggernaut at campaign's end when the power pie is cut up, especially since the Mayor has his sights set on statewide office.

Even my council member Erica Gilmore is doing her part sending out Re-elect Dean campaign material via email to constituents. I know this because I keep getting them even though it would take a titanic turn on Dean's part for me to vote for him (namely, it would require firing most of his inner staff circle, dispatching the part-time Bredesenista's he has hired, and promising to keeping hosting these regular community meetings he started to launch his campaign, and to do so for an entire second term with measurable results).

So, the campaign is pulling out all the stops and pulling in everybody it can because it can. It's "all hands on deck" until August, and then everybody, including the Mayor, can go back to what they were doing and how they were doing it before. And few are stopping to question the ethics of it. Political power and an aura of inevitability have a way of commanding that outcome.