In a STYLE Weekly Back Page piece, Bill Farrar writes about Paul Goldman, the human quote machine who withdrew from the mayoral race last week.
This is a piece that some of the bloggers who fell in love with Goldman’s avalanche of ideas and rock-the-boat style should read. Then those well-meaning bloggers, who know who they are, ought to consider the possibility they were so against certain elements in town that they unwittingly bought into a campaign that was mostly a publicity stunt all along.
Still, if there is one person who epitomizes the failure of City Hall over the last four years, it is Goldman. Oh, sure, Mayor Doug Wilder has been the man in charge. But he never knew how to run the city, and the voters should have known better than to elect him.
Goldman, however, was the self-proclaimed architect of a flawed populist movement, standing on Carytown street corners in his ball cap asking passersby to sign petitions supporting the change to an at-large, elected mayor.
He presented himself as an altruist, just a regular guy trying to fix what seemed broken, but Goldman actually was well-paid for his efforts. He received tens of thousands of dollars in consulting fees while serving as executive director of the Mayor At-Large Referendum Campaign, according to the Virginia Public Access Project.
The lion’s share of those funds — including additional pay he pocketed managing Wilder’s inevitable power grab — came in donations from the same corporate leaders he hypocritically derided for supporting his mayoral opponents this year, saying their kind of influence is damaging City Hall.
Click here to read the entire piece.
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