I woke up on Wednesday to learn I’d been “memed.”
A screenshot from WBRE-TV’s coverage of Tuesday’s Scranton mayoral “debates” hosted by the University of Scranton captured my downcast reaction to watching a high school dropout try to “match wits” with a Harvard-educated incumbent.
It was like watching a clownfish climb a tree, or a chirpy Chihuahua demand a free double-shot at Starbucks. The “contest” between Mayor Paige Gebhardt Cognetti and former Scranton School Board President Bob Sheridan lasted an hour, but felt longer than college.
Friends who saw the meme on antisocial media texted me screenshots asking, “Was it really that bad?”
“No,” I replied. “It was worse.”
Mostly for Sheridan, whose candidacy itself is an insult to taxpayers still recovering from his eight-year reign of error on the school board. Not only did Sheridan not run away from his ruinous record, he bragged about it, and, to the best of his limited ability, tried to rewrite the scandalous history of what then-state Auditor Gen. Eugene DePasquale blasted as the “most fiscally irresponsible” district he had ever encountered.
Paige passed on numerous opportunities to expose Sheridan’s bottomless hypocrisy and documented incompetence. The rules of the debate prohibited direct interaction between the candidates, but Sheridan broke that one from the jump. Paige was in a precarious position, likely shy about being seen as a bully beating up on a weak opponent. Besides, Sheridan was beating himself with nonsensical answers and promises to restore the patriarchal “bliss” that was pre-Paige Scranton.
Sheridan’s “platform” includes giving unions an office in City Hall, which would be “wide open” with lockers for constituents to “check” their guns. He would “keep the unions happy” with unsustainable contracts, pave away the scourges of potholes and stormwater, give every kid in the city a swimming pool and restore the zoo and amusement park at Nay Aug.
Most importantly, Sheridan chirped, he would “turn the page on Paige.” (See what he did there?)
Sheridan would pay for his fantasy Scranton with tens of millions in federal COVID relief money, the same one-time wellspring that bailed out the school district he helped scuttle. Irony isn’t dead. It’s running for mayor of Scranton.
Sort of. As I’ve previously noted, Sheridan is the Democratic Machine’s “canary in the coal mine.” The scope of his certain loss to Paige will inform the Machine’s effort to unseat her in November. Former Scranton Sewer Authority Executive Director Gene Barrett attended Tuesday’s debate as a spectator, but he will run as an independent. After the primary, count on the Machine to back Gene.
It’s a general rule of politics not to get in the way when your opponent is beating himself, but there were a few instances where Paige should have clapped back. A pair of the most glaring were Sheridan’s lame invocation of a moldy rumor about whether Paige lived outside the city while mayor and criticizing her early departure from the school board for a job in DePasquale’s office.
To the former, Paige might have explained that before buying a house in Scranton, she and her husband, Ryan, lived at Summit Pointe Apartments, which despite its “deceptive” name is IN SCRANTON. (So is half of the Viewmont Mall, for you hardcore conspiracy theorists out there.)
To the latter, Paige might have pointed out — as she has said several times in other settings — that Bob Sheridan and the incompetence, cronyism and Machine politics he represents were her motivation to run for public office in the first place. DePasquale was so impressed with Paige’s watchdog work on the school board that he hired her to monitor school district mismanagement statewide.
In a sense, the Machine made Paige. For that alone, Scrantonians owe Bob Sheridan a public service award and a swift kick in the rump come May 20.
The two Republican candidates for mayor also squared off on Tuesday. Their debate was also a lopsided grind, with business owner Lynn Labrosky emerging as the clear front-runner for the party’s nomination.
Her challenger, accounting executive Patricia “Trish” Beynon, came off as passive and unprepared. She offered broad observations on “government transparency,” affordable housing and an “open City Hall,” but provided no specifics on what she would do, or how.
“I’d like to know what’s actually going on in City Hall behind closed doors,” Beynon said. “I don’t feel that we have enough transparency. We don’t know where our tax money is going all the time. We don’t know what’s going on behind closed doors. I think people need to know. They need to know where the tax money is going. They need to know who they can rely on.”
Rely on Labrosky to win the nomination. She showed discipline, confidence and poise in her answers to questions. Her defense of Keystone Sanitary Landfill owner Louis DeNaples as a “small business owner” earned some murmurs, but she wears the “lifelong Scranton resident” badge more convincingly than connivers like Sheridan. Her subtle “othering” of Paige (born in Oregon) will no doubt resonate with nativist voters.
Labrosky didn’t demonstrate a grasp of details or offer many specifics, but she did distinguish herself as a serious candidate who’s in it to win it.
Such an outcome is not inconceivable. Barrett is unlikely to beat Paige, but every vote he takes from the mayor in November will count as a vote for Labrosky. Mike Mancini, the other independent candidate, could also contribute to a cumulative loss for Paige.
That would be just fine with the Machine, which would burn down the city to rid itself of “Harvard Barbie.”
Critics tagged Paige with that sexist, self-owning nickname when she first entered politics. The high school dropout who inadvertently inspired her participation in public life reflected the impotent, beta-male bellyaching behind it at Tuesday’s debate.
In a spray of sentence fragments painting Paige as out-of-touch with the police and fire unions, Sheridan chided her for “waving her hair” at a firefighter’s funeral.
The condescending crack — uttered without any hint of self-awareness or social impropriety — drew groans from the audience and made me a meme.
Thanks again, Bob, just for being you.
A meme circulating of Times-Tribune columnist Chris Kelly. (SUBMITTED)
CHRIS KELLY, The Times-Tribune columnist, thinks it’s cruel to ask a clownfish to climb a tree. Contact the writer: ckelly@scrantontimes.com; @cjkink on X; Chris Kelly, The Times-Tribune on Facebook.