Blue dots flee Cincinnati

The 2005 award for Best Campaign Prop in a Stump Speech goes to Republican council candidate John Eby. And the vote is not even close.

Thursday night in the gym at Hyde Park Elementary School at Edwards and Observatory, about 150 Hyde Park and Mt. Lookout voters gathered for a candidate forum sponsored by the community councils from the two neighborhoods.

Council candidates, whose numbers this year are legion, were brought up to the stage in groups of five or six to give their two-minute stump speeches and take questions from the audience for about 20 minutes.

Eby, a west side Republican running for council for the first time, stole the show when he talked about the problem of the city's shrinking population, which he attributes in large part to fear of increasing crimes in formerly safe, middle-class neighborhoods, particularly in his beloved west side.

To demonostrate his point, Eby pulled out of his pocket a photograph - a picture of his 1976 eighth-grade class at the St. Williams parish school in Price Hill. He had drawn blue dots over all the faces of classmates he knew no longer lived inside the city's borders.

Of the 120 faces in the photograph, only six were not covered with blue dots.

Looking out over the crowd sitting in folding chairs or lingering around the food table, you could see heads shaking in amazement.

"This says it all,'' Eby said. Note - Eby is in the second row, on the far left.

Other scenes from the Hyde Park/Mt. Lookout event:

Damon Lynch III may not get many votes from the people who came to Thursday night's forum in Hyde Park, but he did get a good laugh out of them.

In his stump speech, Lynch, who finished only about 740 votes short of winning a council seat two years ago, said that "the 10 votes I got from your two neighborhoods almost put me over the top. I hope I can get 10 more of you this year.''

Actually, Lynch got a combined 787 votes in Mt. Lookout in 2003. But while he ran 10th citywide, he finished 18th of 26 council candidates in Hyde Park and 19th in Mt. Lookout.

By comparison, the front-running candidate two years ago in those two affluent neighborhoods was David Pepper, who had 4,456 votes, or almost six times as many as Lynch.

Speaking of Pepper, he too was at the Hyde Park/Mt. Lookout event, along with his opponent, Mark Mallory.

But the mayoral candidates had to wait their turn; it took over two hours for forum organizers to shuffle 25 council candidates on and off the stage.

It was well after 9 p.m. when the mayoral candidates finally got their turn. by then, half of the audience had drifted out of the gym and headed home. The mayoral candidates, after a full day of campaigning that included a noontime Rotary Club debate, looked fairly well burnt out.

"Is this our last debate, Mark?'' Pepper asked Mallory while making his five-minute stump speech.

"This isn't a debate; it's a forum,'' said Mallory, who has gone head-to-head with his opponent in about a dozen debates over the past two months.

"Right, a forum,'' said Pepper. "I'm starting to feel like we are Lincoln and Douglas.''