Angry Lanci says mayor has “consistently failed”

Ken Lanci was mad. Really mad. Breathing heavily into the overamped mike mad.

“Let’s be honest: the quality of the residents’ lives is declining,” Lanci said. “Things are getting worse, not better.”

The hot-tempered millionaire announced he’s running for mayor against Frank Jackson today. His event, at his printing company building in AsiaTown, had a very different vibe than his 2010 campaign for Cuyahoga County executive. Then he was the turnaround specialist; now he’s the angry challenger.

“The voters of Cleveland will have a very stark choice,” Lanci said. “They can vote for mayor who has not delivered and consistently failed, or they can vote for a new direction, a new approach, a new day.”

Anyone who thinks real mayors use the bully pulpit to lead have their man in Lanci. He’s the big-stick podium-pounder personified. Those tired of Jackson’s introverted demeanor will get what they ask for in the fall election. Lanci runs as hot as Jackson runs cold.

Today, Lanci delivered the most overly intense political speech I’ve seen in town in more than a decade. He stalked through it, mad as hell at the state of Cleveland, then choked up as he thanked his late mother for being “the first woman to ever love me,” then swung back to anger.

Cleveland residents’ current quality of life “is unacceptable to me,” he said. “It is absolutely unacceptable.”

Sometimes the speech was effective. Lanci tore into Jackson’s record by quoting his pledges about education, safety and jobs from his 2006 State of the City address. He cited statistics to argue Jackson hasn't delivered.

Lanci went at Jackson especially hard on the Cleveland schools. The mayor is sure to run on the promise of his twin victories on school reform and the school levy last year. But Lanci is running on the results of the last eight years: the district met none of the state’s 26 standards in 2012.

Inevitably, Lanci used the mayor’s most underwhelming catch phrase against him.

“I think Frank Jackson is a good man. I also feel that he has done his best. However I feel that being involved in city politics for 30 years has given him a sense of, ‘It is what it is.’”

Ooh, some in the audience responded.

Lanci spoke from a stage in the middle of his Consolidated Graphics’ printing room. Several employees in work shirts sat atop the big Heidelberg Speedmaster presses for a better view, while dozens of people wearing Lanci stickers, dressed in everything from suits to business casual to working-class plaids, milled about between the rows of machinery.

African hand-drumming announced Lanci’s impending arrival onstage. The event seemed planned with acute awareness of the challenges facing a white challenger to a black mayor in a black-majority city.

But the invite list, while diverse, seemed filled out with a motley crew of gadflies. Black on Black Crime’s Art McKoy and black-trades activist Norman Edwards topped the list of recognizable figures. A guy sporting a New Black Panther Party jacket and pin managed to plant himself right behind Lanci during the candidate’s post-announcement press conference.

There, reporters asked for specifics lacking in Lanci’s speech. How would he bring more jobs to Cleveland? How would he change the schools reform plan?

“I can create more jobs by seeking out companies to come to Cleveland,” Lanci said, repeating the mantra of most businessmen-turned-candidates.

He didn’t critique the mayor’s plan for the schools. Instead, he said, “I can create a culture in the schools about caring, love, and opportunity. I’ve been in the schools 18 years. I’ve funded programs that do work.” (His campaign flyer mentions Project Love and Purple American, for at-risk teens.)

What makes Lanci run?

A lot of people wondered that when the orange-tanned businessman ran for county exec as an independent, spent $1 million of his own cash, covered the county with roving bus ads, and won 11 percent of the vote. A lot of people, especially Jackson supporters, will surely ask why he’s running now and why he moved from Brecksville to an East 12th Street apartment to do it.

A young Fox 8 reporter provoked Lanci: “To anyone who would say that you’re a guy who just has a lot of money and likes the attention, what would you say?”

Lanci responded by talking about his 2007 heart attack. “At 57 years old, I died. Through the grace of God, he brought me back. What did I need to come back for?” His answer: to use his talents to give back to the city.

Jackson should be able to dispatch this challenge by running on a few favorite themes: Others talk, I work. I have a plan; what’s his plan? He didn’t live here; why’s he a candidate? But if you want an aggressive challenger to the mayor, you’ve got him in Lanci, a temperamental opposite with drive and funds and fight to spare.

Mayor Jackson: 'I must be a new person, they tell me'

Frank Jackson has heard the talk that he's finally gone from caretaker mayor to visionary mayor. It bugs him.

“I’m no different today than I was then,” Jackson says. “It’s just that people see me different, because they’re looking at these things, and they say, ‘Oh, the mayor has come up with ideas!’ ”

He’s talking about his plans to develop the waterfront and close Public Square to traffic, creating a single park. They capped a good 2011 for Jackson, when a lot of people around town thought he stepped up more as a leader.

That helped make Jackson #4 on this year's Power 100 list, published by Cleveland Magazine's sister publication, Inside Business. That's up from #7 last year.

Some of the buzz about Jackson's vision is premature. His highly touted lakefront plan has very little money behind it and is best understood as a marketing move to try to attract private developers. But progress with the Rock Hall induction, sustainability, and downtown jobs have the mayor feeling confident.

“I know people have talked about, ‘Why doesn’t the mayor use the bully pulpit more?’ ” Those critics, Jackson says slyly, “were critical because they thought I ought to use it for them.

“But I do use it for the schools. I do use it for the lakefront, for the square. I do use it for sustainability. And I guess the bully pulpit of the mayor’s office in those areas wasn’t considered as relevant. But now it seems to be.

“Because I must be a new person, they tell me. I must be a new person.”

You can read my article about Jackson here and in the January-February issue of Inside Business. You can see who else made the Power 100 list here.

Mayor Jackson talks at Landerhaven

Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson is heading to Halifax, Nova Scotia next week to try to attract shipping traffic for the city's expanding port, he told a crowd at Landerhaven yesterday.

The mayor was interviewed by Leon Bibb of NewsChannel 5 at the event center in Lyndhurst as part of its Corporate Club speakers' series.

Jackson told Bibb the trip to Halifax is part of an effort for Cleveland to partner with deep sea ports and become more competitive in the worldwide maritime market. Cleveland's port, Jackson argued, could become an alternative for freighters that get stuck in a "traffic jam" on the East Coast. "We'll be more efficient, less costly, and more effective," he said. The port is working on a half-billion-dollar plan to expand and move from downtown to the foot of East 55th Street.

Other highlights of the mayor's talk:

-Jackson criticized the Go Cuyahoga reform effort, saying it was "designed to take advantage of" the FBI investigation of the county government. Bibb asked Jackson if he liked the current form of county government. Jackson said he likes "any form of government that will work."

-Several times, Jackson defended his quiet approach to leadership. Bibb asked him what he thought of the idea that the mayor should be a "cheerleader" for Cleveland. (I call it the bully-pulpit theory.) Jackson played around with the word "cheerleader" for the rest of the talk.

"I don't cheerlead," he said. "I will promote something I believe in." But he's more comfortable dealing with tasks: the "not glamorous," the "nuts and bolts," the "mundane," he said. Then "one day you wake up and things are as they're supposed to be." He focuses on work, he added, not "what sounds good."

Frank Jackson and the bully pulpit theory

One reason some people wish someone would run against Mayor Frank Jackson is that they think big-city mayors have powers far beyond the official definitions of the job. They want an inspirational leader. It’s an idea we explored in our coverage of the 2005 mayor’s race, when we went in search of “The Perfect Mayor.”

Trouble is, Cleveland is shrinking, so City Hall has no extra money to spend, so the mayor’s clout and power are shrinking. Being mayor of Cleveland just ain’t what it used to be.

That frustrates some people. They say: The mayor should use his bully pulpit to rally the city and region around a plan for a comeback!

I hear this all the time, and I heard it when Jane Campbell was mayor too. The bully pulpit idea is one of the two biggest clichés about how a big-city mayor should lead. (The other, usually used against bully-pulpit mayors, is the charge that a mayor is favoring downtown and neglecting neighborhoods. This automatically comes up whenever a big project is built downtown.)

The bully pulpit theory of leadership is popular among businesspeople, who want the mayor to be a dealmaker, handing out tax breaks and schmoozing people like them to bring jobs in the city and build big stuff downtown. It’s popular among journalists, because dramatic speeches, calls to action, and huge and expensive projects are all good stories for us. Suburbanites usually like bully-pulpit mayors (unless the mayor is a total bully), because their opinions come from TV or the paper.

But city residents judge the mayor by whether their garbage gets picked up or the cops show up when they call. I think that’s why the bully pulpit theory isn’t popular with most Cleveland voters.

If it was, they wouldn’t have elected Jackson. They knew he wasn’t a bully-pulpit mayor when they elected him. They chose the quiet guy because they saw him as reliable and trustworthy.

I think bully pulpits are overrated, but there are moments when a mayor, like a president or other leaders, needs to speak up and calm everyone’s over-shocked nerves. Take the scary incident in the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood in 2007 that caught the whole town’s attention: a man’s house was riddled with bullets as revenge after he shot an armed robber in self-defense. Jackson’s stubborn refusal to speak up about that made him look weak and out of touch.

But if you think Jackson should be more of a cheerleader, stage-directing a little more Believe in Cleveland drama, well, he does that, in his own way. Take a look at this op-ed piece the mayor sent to the Plain Dealer last month. Read it twice. First, just read it as Jackson’s variation on the common complaint that “Cleveland has a self-esteem problem.” Then read it again, asking, who does he believe is the critical voice inside Cleveland’s collective mind, telling Cleveland it’ll never amount to anything?

Here’s the clue: the quotes. Jackson wrote the piece in response to the Sunday, November 23 edition of the Plain Dealer, which had the caption “Pittsburgh’s power over Cleveland” atop the front page and the headline “Cleveland is falling apart: Who will pick up the pieces?” on the Forum section front.

A bully pulpit mayor would've called a press conference and yelled and screamed that the Plain Dealer was bringing the city down. Then the press would've written self-referentially about the mayor's feud with the press. Instead, the angry but polite mayor (or an aide) sat down at the keyboard and wrote something. How civilized!