Inside baseball

While Parke Skelton was far away from even a phone line last August, some local hatchet men were doing a Goodfellas-level job on Pat McOsker--who at that time seemed Skelton's candidate's most formidable opponent. Skelton must have gone on retreat and relaxed in earnest. The operatives who were doing their number on McOsker didn't identify themselves as being with the Joe Buscaino campaign, but some of them were. Skelton by this point knew his candidate was likely to finish in the runoff and so took his usual vacation unperturbed.

He might have missed a few things while away--like the whole Buscaino ground game--and August may have been when the race was truly decided.

The Buscaino people were like the mole in Tinker Tailor--the art of being Gerald, it is said in the novel if not the recent movie, is always being part of a crowd. They presented a phalanx of unfamiliar faces to beat reporters, and a swarm of more familiar ones (like Tom Lasorda, above) to the neighbor and donor crowd. If you were covering them, it seemed impossible that any one of them you were meeting with or talking to at any given time was actually the top boy.

They really won the race in the primary, when they locked into a first place finish that not only lent them media credibility--first place kinda does that--but also wound up opposing a candidate that refused to go negative, the hapless Warren Furutani, whose fate was sealed by drawing the wrong opponent.

As it happens, Joe Buscaino won by 20 points [UPDATE: a reader wants me to "get it right": 21.38 points, actually]--but as it also happened, three weeks ago the margin seemed more likely to be 30. In between, he only got good press--except for right here at street-hassle--and yet at the time of the election, he was underperforming--you really see this in the election day stand-alone results. Both Parke Skelton and John Shallman do not play the blogosphere--even while the people who are beating them play it like fiddles. I think it's Shallman and Skelton who are out of step. Direct mail, while still a top factor, is an increasingly unreliable path to victory in local races. The Buscaino team--whomever it really was--knows that well, all of them.