A reader writes to say that City Councilor Tom Baker announced at a Democrat fundraiser over the weekend that he will be running for Mayor. My correspondent linked to this BatesLine entry about Baker from the 2004 Council elections and indicated that his stump speech this weekend was along the same bureaucratic lines. Whatever his virtues, Baker is, to quote myself, "a bureaucrat to the core." In describing his modus operandi, I wrote:

Another key bureaucratic skill is the ability to make decisions in a way that avoids accountability for the results. A proven technique for achieving this is to develop a process involving quantifying the intangible and unquantifyable, then putting the numbers through complex formulas, and hallowing the result as Vox Dei. This technique dates back at least as far as Aaron at the base of Mt. Sinai: "While I may or may not personally have chosen a golden calf as an object of worship, it emerged from our board-certified, ISO-9000 compliant process of evaluating this nomadic community's quality of life, to which all stakeholders previously agreed, and so we must all accept the result."

I've been told that Don McCorkell, another Democrat running for Mayor, has a bit of a charisma deficit. Perhaps Baker has been asked to run in order to make McCorkell look like the love child of JFK and Bill Clinton by comparison. It's interesting that the same entity -- called "Gear Up" -- registered both bakerformayor.com and donmccorkell.com back on October 8, using the phone number for directory assistance in San Francisco (415-555-1212). The domains aren't just parked either. On November 7, both domains were pointed to domain name servers at aquesthosting.com, a North Carolina based hosting firm.

Maybe this is going to be a pro-wrestling kind of primary, a staged fight that will keep McCorkell in the news during the fireworks of the Republican primary between LaFortune, Medlock, and perhaps two or three others. Baker could take potshots at the Republicans (to be duly reported and editorialized by the Whirled), while McCorkell accentuates the positive and keeps from sullying himself with negative campaigning. Baker loses graciously with the promise of his dream job in the McCorkell Administration: head of the process to develop the process-development process.