Let’s start with the announcement rollout on Monday by Charles Potter and Dennis Williams – as I noted in my Sunday post, the Williams announcement was expected sometime this week. Yet Monday afternoon, Potter sends an email to his list declaring for Williams’ Representative seat, clearly catching Williams off-guard (see Esteban Parra’s article here). Since the cat was out of the bag, Williams gets himself on Rick Jensen’s show to announce. Odd, right? The usual thing is something more like Bobby Marshall’s announcement more than a year ago. But it has been noted that Williams didn’t look ready and it looked like Potter forced his hand.
There’s a great deal of cliquishness among Wilmington’s political class and you probably need some of that backstory to understand what is going on. Ted Blunt (former City Council President) was making his moves to announce for Mayor. Once Williams choose back in the late winter or so to tell Bob Gilligan he was staying in the GA, he promised Blunt his support (if not outright managing his campaign) – support that Blunt was counting on. The last time Blunt was in the public eye, he had crashed and burned pretty spectacularly in his Lt. Governor bid. Williams’ support would give Blunt a pretty big boost into a pretty competitive place.
So when I tell you that Potter and Blunt don’t exactly get along, some pieces start falling into place, right? As I hear it, Potter wasn’t happy with Williams for supporting Blunt. Besides, Potter had been telling some people and hinting with others that he wasn’t running for City Council again. The CW for some time has been that Potter was going to run (there’s even been a campaign committee formed) for the Senate seat now held by McDowell. Redistricting got in the way of that and Potter was written out of McDowell’s district, leaving Potter looking for something else to do. Running against Margaret Rose Henry was apparently out of the question, so Williams’ Representative District was what was left. So Potter and Williams came up with this plan to revive Williams’ Mayoral bid, with Williams’ basically anointing Potter as his successor.
Since the announcement, Potter has been calling other public officials – including some who could still get into the race for either Mayor or for Williams’ rep seat – telling them that he (Potter) was going to be the next Rep and conveying outsized expectations of support. This isn’t leaving alot of goodwill in its wake.
I’m going to go back to the thing I’ve been saying since I did the first Cattle Call article for the Wilmington Mayor’s race – people in this City are angry and disappointed. And one of the biggest reasons why they are angry and disappointed is because there are major bits of its political class who are vastly more interested in tending to their own ambitions and business than they are in getting the people’s work done. This kind of thing – picking your own successors and obviously working on your own interests – is the kind of thing that people here are *already* mad about. It shouldn’t be a surprise that Potter was Ground Zero of the City Council’s opposition to reducing the size of Council (even though there is plenty of popular support for this in this age of austerity).
This City really does deserve much better than this – and really won’t be able to thrive until the influence of its more self-serving elements are greatly minimized. I’ll say again – if you live in the City and have been thinking about how to change it all, now’s your chance. There won’t be a better chance to change City Council AND the Mayor’s office than now.