Mayor Suburbs has no clothes

Columbus' mayor is nothing without his little propaganda machine.

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Mayor Andy Ginther is like every member of Columbus’ Democrat-controlled City Council in that he got his start in local politics by schmoozing on the cocktail circuit.

Ginther was so prodigious, in fact, that he earned an appointment to the Columbus City School Board at just 26.

For whatever reason, a lifelong Republican hobgoblin decided to promote Ginther as he rose through the city’s political ranks, even after he got caught red-handed in a corruption scandal that sent his former neighbor, John Raphael, to prison.

From Bill Bush of dispatch.com on Monday:

Ginther's first big political break came when a school board vacancy arose in 2001. Moss and four other Democrats scuttled an attempt to appoint a Republican, and threw out Ginther's name instead. He was just 26, and suddenly representing Ohio's largest school district without having ever won an election.

He became a favorite of former Dispatch Publisher John F. Wolfe, whose editorial pages endorsed Ginther for his first successful election in November 2001, saying he had "shown great promise with his intelligence, candor and articulate approach." Wolfe, a mostly uniform supporter of the GOP and longtime foe of [former Democratic Columbus School Board member Bill] Moss, would hold fundraisers for Ginther, even after a corruption scandal involving a political associate who is currently in federal prison.

John F. Wolfe supported Ginther because he knew that he could be trusted as a Democrat to protect the city from the Antifa supersoldier left flank of the party. All these years later, it’s turned into a solid investment for the local hobgoblin class.

My vendetta against “Mayor Suburbs” started in October 2019, when, as a resident of The Bottoms, I read about him walking around my neighborhood and having the audacity to say it wasn’t good enough for his kids.

From Bethany Bruner and Holly Zachariah of dispatch.com in October 2019:

"It's not a place where I would want my children to grow up," said Mayor Andrew J. Ginther, who recently purchased a $525,000 house in the Knolls on the Northwest Side.

That Mayor Suburbs was dumb enough to say this on the record to a newspaper reporter shows that he has no actual political talent. Nothing about the city that he has run for the last decade has ever been good enough for his children, which is why he lives where he does and sends his kids to an elite private school despite being a former Columbus Public School Board member.

But the insults from Mayor Suburbs didn’t stop there. Just months later, he took a bunch of money from companies with millions of dollars in city contracts to stage his “State of the City” speech at West High School.

From Bill Bush of dispatch.com in February 2020:

The mayor raised $74,500 to stage his speech, much of it from firms with multimillion-dollar city contracts. The money transformed part of the crumbling West High — with its shattered windows above an emergency exit to the auditorium — into multiple large video screens, lights, sound system and control panels.

The broken windows in the auditorium were good enough for local students, but they weren’t good enough for one evening featuring Ginther and his corporate cronies.

Ginther, after being shamed by the local paper, promised a $10 million investment in the Sullivant Avenue corridor, headlined by, you guessed it, a handout to the local police department in the form of a new substation and “community center” for them to peddle copaganda to the overpoliced neighborhood with constant police helicopter traffic.

The other money includes three murals, some decorative wallpaper for utility boxes, and curb bump-outs that haven’t done much to change Sullivant Avenue from the kind of desolate environment expected of any urban stroad.

But the venture also funded a nice artist from Clintonville to come paint a mural under the I70 underpass which divides Franklinton and the Hilltop and always looked like a good trash-strewn place for a pedestrian to get mugged or run over by an uninsured motorist.

Gotta say… that’s about as good as an underpass is going to look for something involving an interstate highway.

That would normally be the end of the story until car exhaust dilapidated the mural in a couple more years. But it’s campaign season in Columbus, which means that Mayor Suburbs’ operatives—“Team MAG” (Mayor Andy Ginther) as they’re known in City Hall parlance—wanted to turn a standard function of government into a campaign photo-op.

This is how I found myself in the Hilltop on Thursday night to witness Mayor Suburbs take a stroll down Sullivant Avenue with my own two eyes.

This was a city-funded event, which is why you see city vehicles, city employees, city-funded civic groups, and the delicious Dos Hermanos food truck in the distance handing out free (read: taxpayer-funded) tacos to help generate a crowd for what eventually turned into a campaign stop for Mayor Suburbs.

Mayoral challenger Joe Motil, who carries the complete and total endorsement of The Rooster, also appeared and worked the crowd in the type of retail political display that Ginther would set himself on fire to avoid because he hates interacting with the city’s everyday people.

Ginther, like usual, was late to his scheduled appearance. I honestly didn’t think he would show, but then, like a mirage of an oasis in the middle of a desert, I turned and saw Mayor Suburbs in his typical mismatched, ill-fitted outfit.

My God! I thought. This must have been how medieval peasants felt whenever they saw the king’s chariot tumble through the commoners’ market. Mayor Suburbs appeared to be an actual person and not three out-of-state real estate developers in a trench coat as had long been rumored on the internet.

After interacting with exactly one couple, the Mayor’s team whisked him in front of awaiting local television channels to give his little quips to be viewed by the kind of voters cursed enough to watch local television broadcasts.

I then got to hear the Mayor give a stump speech for the first time, which you can hear in part below:

You gotta respect how as mayor of a city as big as Columbus you can just say things like “crashes are down 50 percent” and “extreme speeding is down 92 percent,” and most people will just take it as gospel truth.

Those statistics only make sense to you if never spend any time on Sullivant Avenue outside of a car, which describes everyone in Ginther’s political circle.

In the moment, I thought about pulling a “Boo, Been Konop, Boo!” remix on his ass:

Ultimately, I didn’t feel like ruining what I’m sure was a cool moment for the muralist that he’ll remember for a long time.

After speeches from Mayor Suburbs, the muralist, and some Hell-bound bureaucrat from ODOT, we got to see what the taxpayer-funded, thinly veiled Ginther campaign stop was really about: Getting some action shots of Mayor Suburbs taking a stroll down the most well-lit section of Sullivant Avenue like that’s something he does on a regular basis while a city employee (in the yellow jacket) and his campaign team (the other two holding cameras) filmed propaganda videos:

You’ll notice that event organizers reduced Sullivant Avenue traffic to one lane in each direction, as it should be anyway.

It’s another example of how Ginther never has to actually live with a lot of the asinine infrastructures inflicted upon residents by city leaders. He should have had to shoot this propaganda while motorists sped past him at 40 miles per hour with nothing but a six-inch concrete curb protecting him like Franklinton and Hilltop residents have to do as soon as his entourage left the area.

Even after all the improvements to the overpass, it’s not a place where most people will feel comfortable taking a leisurely stroll!

The finished propaganda product got turned around in a couple of hours. If you look closely, you can spot a certain deranged sewer blogger looking at his phone:

I was respectful enough to let Mayor Suburbs have his little taxpayer-funded campaign junket in peace. But what most irritates me about his stature is that he never has to face media questions for any longer than he wants.

He doesn’t really have to campaign. He doesn’t have to debate his single mayoral challenger. Ultimately, he knows most Columbus voters don’t pay attention to local politics, and they have largely enjoyed the slop fed to them by the well-oiled political machine that is the Franklin County Party as long as their property values continue to climb.

I waited until he and his team were headed back to their taxpayer-funded SUV before I made my move. I wanted to see if Mayor Surburbs, as I suspected, would run like a bug from fact-based questioning from a resident of his fair city.

I wasn’t disappointed:

Nothing in my line of questioning was wrong or disrespectful. Mayor Ginther is on the record as saying the Sullivant Avenue coordinator isn’t a place he’d want his kids to grow up. He is a former member of the Columbus Public School Board that sends his kids to an elite private school instead.

It’s questioning in a public space during a campaign stop!

And yet… He can’t even be bothered to give some standard political non-answer. He runs like a bug before folding his jacket and climbing into his taxpayer-funded SUV.

In retrospect, I gave his propaganda event more respect than it deserves. I won’t make that same mistake again.

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