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Over the past 50 years, the number of St. Louis County executives has equaled the number of popes. That would be five.
I suppose the two aren’t all that comparable. With a salary of $140,000, an ordinary car, and no digs, the county executive’s position certainly lacks the wow factor of the Vatican, and the duties are quite dissimilar.
But this much is in common: You apparently take the job thinking you have it for life.
The current county executive, Charlie Dooley, is seeking his third re-election after having been appointed in 2003, when Buzz Westfall suddenly died from a staph injection after a brief hospitalization. In fairness, Dooley is only trying to keep up with his political benefactor and friend, Mayor Francis Slay, who is serving the fourth of his projected 17 terms in City Hall.
Both Dooley and Slay are decent enough fellows, as honest and well-meaning as other career politicians, and they certainly cannot be blamed for taking advantage of a political system that makes lifetime service a real possibility. Combine the advantages of incumbency with the absence of term limits—with a cadre of friends, family, and paid consultants along for the ride—and you’ve got your fiefdom in waiting.
You also have poster children for the aforementioned term limits. It is human nature to feel ownership rather than stewardship of an office after you’ve held it for many thousands of days. One’s sense of humility eventually yields to one of entitlement. One’s need to compromise morphs into a need to dominate. And settling differences yields to settling old scores.
All of that describes the Dooley administration, circa 2014. And all of that cries out for two-term limits for this and other executive posts, just like the ones in place at the presidential and gubernatorial levels.
It’s stunning how much can change over time. After several years of virtually scandal-free government—with a restored AAA bond rating and good efforts on regionalism, transportation projects, and the like—Dooley now presides over a scandal-a-month government that appears more mismanaged by the day and is at least occasionally corrupt.
Look what a decade or two can do.
Fifteen years ago this month, Dooley was a little-known county councilman with a big dream: He would run against state Sen. Lacy Clay for the congressional seat being vacated after 32 years by Clay’s father, Rep. William Clay Sr., D–St. Louis, in the 2000 election.
As a loyal Democrat and the first African-American on the council, Dooley had the support of Westfall and County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch, among others.
“I talked to Charlie a long time ago and told him he would make a terrific congress- man, and if he decided to run, to let me know,” McCulloch told supporters at Dooley’s old high-school gym that day. “I’ll do whatever I can for him.”
Dooley lost to Clay and then had to survive a council re-election race in 2002, with the Clays backing his opponent as payback. Then came Westfall’s sudden death and an entirely new chapter in Dooley’s life as the first African-American county executive, after his appointment to the post as the top-ranking Democrat on the council.
But Dooley didn’t luck into anything. He had to fight off a primary challenge, and he seemed an underdog when up against Republican Gene McNary, who was attempting a comeback to the post that he held for almost 15 years more than a decade earlier. (By the way, McNary credited the support of a congressman named Todd Akin for helping him win the GOP nomination).
Dooley absolutely trounced McNary, riding a boost from—get this—the coattails of Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry, who won the county by more than 50,000 votes on the way to losing Missouri. But with the stunningly large win, Dooley was off to write his own proud history.
Does that seem long enough ago?
Flashing forward a decade, Dooley has the active support of his old opponent, Clay. His old supporter, McCulloch, filmed TV commercials for Dooley’s current opponent, Councilman Steve Stenger, decrying corruption in the Dooley administration. And Dooley is at war with the very council that had been his springboard to prominence.
Ironically, it is now Stenger who holds the promise that Dooley exhibited a political eternity ago, as an up-and-coming councilman. He’s a bright guy who for years has been the most engaged and articulate member of the council. The flip side is that he’ll be criticized as a politician who plays up his differences with Dooley for headlines. So what?
On most political issues of the day, there probably isn’t much to separate Dooley and Stenger, both of whom can rightly be termed moderate Democrats. But this race will be decided less on issues than on whether the voters perceive that new blood is needed to overhaul the quality of management and services from the county government.
The race is also a fascinating case study in money and politics. After enjoying longtime support from organized labor, Dooley lost almost all of it—suddenly and unceremoniously—when union leaders announced last year that they would not back his re-election.
You don’t see that every day. Now you have Stenger, who has never run for county- wide office previously, receiving tens of thousands of campaign dollars to use in a primary contest against a long-standing incumbent with an overall record of good support by and for organized labor.
Yes, there have been issues over a county project using nonunion labor and over what unions have seen as a lack of input into appointments, but I’d say Dooley’s problem comes back to the core issue of whether he has held the office too long. Sources say it was as much about style as substance: Dooley is seen as detached from day-to-day operations, leaving a small inner circle of policy and political advisers to run the show. And in contrast to Dooley’s affability, what has emerged is a sense of arrogance and entitlement that has caused one former ally after another to jump ship.
Meanwhile, Dooley is getting his most visible and enthusiastic political support—outside of his strong North County base—from Slay and his supporters and operatives. And the largest financial backer is none other than quasi-billionaire financier Rex Sinquefield, the man who collects politicians like trinkets, with campaign gifts like the two $100,000 whoppers bestowed upon Dooley in the past year or so.
What an interesting development. Here you have Dooley, a proud and vocal proponent of public education, getting bankrolled by a man whose passion for school vouchers would undermine its existence. And you have a self-made advocate for the poor and less fortunate receiving all of that money from a guy who wants to eradicate all income taxes in favor of cruel, regressive sales taxes.
Consider it this way: In a county that was carried by President Barack Obama by more than 70,000 votes in the past election, a man is running for re-election with the backing of the state Republicans’ largest supporter (Sinquefield), with strong opposition from organized labor and while waging war on a Democrat-controlled county council.
If you didn’t know better, you’d think Dooley was running in the Democratic primary as a Republican.
This is one for the ages.
Yet Dooley may still win it. He is rightfully the pride of the African-American community, which composes 23.6 percent of the county population, a number that has been steadily rising. He has won tough countywide races and is running against a first-timer in that regard. He is a strong campaigner and a proven winner.
But if he loses, Dooley has no one to blame but himself, his team, and the fact that all those years of incumbency can backfire on you. On issue after issue, the same cycle emerges: Some scandalous thing happens, followed by initial denials or no-comments from Dooley’s camp, followed by someone on Dooley’s behalf (or Dooley) lashing out in anger at Stenger or others on the council—especially Democrats perceived as disloyal—and at the media.
But when the president of the Board of Police Commissioners receives $3.7 million in subcontracted payments for a construction project at police headquarters and the police chief calls in the FBI because it’s so outrageous, only someone who has been in office too long would attack the chief and awkwardly try to get board members to fire him.
The same can be said when you double down with an opinion from the county counselor that, in effect, there can’t be a conflict because the payment was laundered through a subcontractor. Or when there’s widespread outrage over some scandalous expenditures and nonaccountability at a local cultural institution and its governing boards, and your reaction is to refuse to reappoint one of the board’s most outspoken reformers. Or when there’s a scandal in the Health Department and you have millions of dollars stolen on your watch, and then you’re slow to involve law enforcement and you stonewall when the media wants some information. Or when you get defensive when asked why a children’s fund is stockpiling tens of millions of dollars, rather than spending it on children’s needs. And so on.
When all of these things happen and you’re the victim and your critics are all politically motivated losers with no principles and the media is out to get you, I’d say it’s time to look in the mirror. Maybe the problem isn’t all of them. Maybe it’s you.
That’s why a lot of people, myself included, think Stenger makes sense as someone to replace Dooley, a good guy presiding over a not-so-good county government.
That is, on one condition: that Stenger’s not still in the job by the year 2025.
SLM co-owner Ray Hartmann is a panelist on KETC Channel 9’s Donnybrook, which airs Thursdays at 7 p.m.
