Bully Pens

It was back in December at the Heartland Muslim Council's annual dinner that Jackson County Executive Katheryn Shields gave a speech on fear. The speech got more play when the National Catholic Reporter reprinted it in early February. The 1,646-word diatribe on the current culture of terror criticized TV crime shows for making murder look too common and quoted Ben Franklin, who warned that we cannot sacrifice liberty for safety. Shields was talking about society's response to terrorism, but she said something that the Strip remembered weeks later, after a measly stadium vote.

"We need leaders who will exercise political courage," Shields preached, "leaders who will calm unwarranted fears, not encourage them or capitalize on them, grandstanding for votes."

Yet fear was the No. 1 strategy that Shields, the teams and their hired guns in the Save Our Stadiums posse used to convince voters to pass a tax for stadium upgrades.

As you'll recall, the Strip wavered until the last minute on whether to vote for the stadium tax. This cranky cutlet was ready to vote no, despite unsubstantiated threats that the teams might leave. Let Las Vegas have the damned Royals, the Strip wrote on March 30. But then this meat patty melted when three guys in tattered Royals caps walked into the neighborhood bar where the Strip was drowning its disgust over the whole campaign. The town loves its teams, the Strip figured, so let 'em have their rolling roof — to hide the Royals' shameful performance on the field.

So the Strip watched last Tuesday's election results with mixed emotions.

Then it got pissed off.

You see, this bemused burger followed along in fascination as the highly strategized and titanically funded Save Our Stadiums campaign scrapped with sports talk radio and a handful of essentially broke rabble-rousers, most of whom were just average citizens with creative ways of expressing their opinions. The stadium-tax opponents weren't massively organized, and one of them — ten-time bankruptcy filer Richard Tolbert — might not be the best spokesman for an issue involving finances. But the Strip likes to watch an epic David vs. Goliath showdown as much as the next guy. Moreover, this skeptical sirloin had heard lots of regular folks complaining about the stadium deal and figured the race would at least be entertainingly close.

So when it saw the final numbers, with the $575 million tax winning by a sizable 10,254 votes, the Strip knew exactly what had gone wrong. Jackson County voters had done exactly what the Save Our Stadiums campaign had hoped.

They'd become scared.

Campaign manager Pat Gray and spokesman Steve Glorioso had used scare tactics from the very beginning, when "keep our teams" became the campaign's rallying cry. These guys were so shameless that, by the end of the campaign, they didn't even seem to mind exploiting children in an effort to scare people: "For our kids, for their kids, for the community. Keep the teams," read a big ad in The Kansas City Star on April 3, the day before the election. But the teams never said they would leave, and probably wouldn't have if the tax had failed (KC Strip, March 30).

What was it that Shields had said about calming unwarranted fears and not using them to grandstand for votes?

This meat patty guesses she was only being sarcastic with that anti-fear hooey.

Other late-in-the-game efforts to scare up support?

Near the end of the campaign, Glorioso went into overdouche to make sure the tax didn't fail. At the last minute, he tricked the press into believing that opponents were arguing that voters couldn't wear Chiefs or Royals gear to the polls. In an e-mail to the media on the Friday before the election, Glorioso reported that Shields and Kansas City Mayor Kay Barnes were asking for clarification from city election officials because, he claimed, opponents "have insisted that voters displaying any insignia of either team should be blocked from voting on April 4."

He turned up the heat: "This is an outrageous suggestion by opponents of the issue that voters who may unknowingly attempt to walk into their polling place on Tuesday with a team hat or jersey be turned away. We expect election officials to respond to the Executive and Mayor by the end of the day so voters are given clear direction on what they will be allowed to wear when they vote on Tuesday."

The Star, radio and TV news stations dutifully reported that Shields and Barnes had gotten their clarification, and voters could wear their stylish Chiefs jackets and Royals T-shirts.

The funny thing was, the top sirloin of local media had spent weeks listening to endless arguments by the opposition. The Strip kept its car radio locked on sports talk. It had received plenty of "Inquiring Minds" e-mails from Craig Davis of the No! I Can't Afford It! committee as well as every installment of the Neighborhood Action Group's electronic newsletter.

And the Strip had never heard a word about any stupid team gear.

When we called up Glorioso to ask him exactly who had dared to make such an outrageous suggestion about team attire, he told the Strip that it had been anonymous callers to Shields' office and the local election board.