And now there are two.
The quixotic mayoral candidacy of Harold Harris has been extinguished in its infancy. Harold is a nice guy, and in the immortal words of the old bal player Leo Durocher, nice guys finish last.
And Harold did. Finish last, we mean.
To be fair, Harris did well for a newbie, garnering over twenty-eight hundred votes, or nearly twenty-two percent of those cast.
Alas, it wasn’t enough. Harris finished third out of three, leaving incumbent Mayor Wade to face Roberto Torres. The latter finished second, only a few hundred votes ahead of Harris. Wade got over fifty-three percent of the vote, an impressive feat in a three-way race.
Lining up
Wade’s showing in the primary means he should have no problem defeating Torres in the general election in November. But who is Torres, this erstwhile Toledo politico? And why is he running for mayor now? Against an almost unbeatable incumbent?
Second question first. Unless Wade can pull off another coup at the ballot box, this is his final term as mayor of Toledo. Of course, we thought this term was his last term, but he champione and won a charter change giving him one more term.
Assuming that doesn’t happen again, there will undoubtedly be a new Toledo mayor elected in twenty twenty-nine. It makes sense for ambitious candidates to line up now to get into the electoral spotlight.
That will be easy for folks like current Councilman Nick Komives and Council President Carrie Hartman.
Their council incumbency gives them a built-in public pulpit.
Ditto former county auditor and current county commissioner Anita Lopez. And former councilman and current council candidate Tom Waniewski will be in the public eye during his campaign and after, assuming he wins a seat.
Where does that leave Roberto “the bull” Torres? On the outside looking in. Unless he runs for mayor now and launches a perpetual four-year campaign to keep himself relevant.
The bull
Now to the first question. Who is Roberto Torres?
We don’t know if Torres goes by the nickname “the bull” but he should. First because he’s full of it. In a prior incarnation in City Politics he was “Robert” Torres. Where did “Roberto” come from?
Torres has also been known to inflate his resume. He apparently served as a staffer for the office of the Judge Advocate General while in the military. He has sometimes indicated that he, himself, served as a JAG. A position which requires being a licensed attorney. Which Torres is not.
The nickname is also fitting because Torres has relished being the bull in the china shop. He was so bull headed while serving under Mayor Jack Ford that Ford didn’t support Torres’ candidacy for Toledo School Board.
On the Board, Torres became an agent of chaos, publicly trying to provoke a disruptive teachers’ strike to break their contract. His anti-labor stance unabated twenty years later, he is currently campaigning against Toledo’s’ project labor agreement ordinance that protects local building trades workers.
Torres has bounced from job to job in cities across the Great Lakes while touting his checkered resume of bridges apparently burned as “experience.” He wore out his welcome in Toledo, so he took his chaos tour on the road.
Now he’s back. The former Robert now Roberto, the former Democrat now an Independent.
But the same old bull.
Let’s see how it plays out this time in the T.
