There’s been no one in the public sphere who has more ably articulated occasional rationales for support of City Attorney Mike Aguirre than Union-Tribune columnist Gerry Braun.
So I was a bit startled, though maybe I shouldn’t have been, when Braun declared in his column Wednesday that Aguirre was going to lose his re-election campaign.
It wasn’t as though Braun denounced the city attorney — he cast it as a dynamic in which Aguirre was the doctor whose tough medicine a sick San Diego simply couldn’t handle. Actually, why ruin his metaphor? He wrote that it was as if San Diego had cancer and Aguirre was its chemotherapy.
I’m no cancer expert, but we all know what chemotherapy does. It has a chance of saving the patient but it kills good cells as well as cancerous cells. The patient suffers tremendously and even after suffering through the treatments, the patient can succumb and die.
Ouch. It’s not the metaphor a crusading public official would prefer.
If even those sympathetic to the incumbent have trouble imagining him keeping his job (whether it’s because of San Diego’s imperfections or his), it doesn’t look good for his chances.