Kevin Johnson, still the only candidate for office I have ever seen who has a video clip of himself dunking over Hakeem Alajuwon, forced a runoff with incumbent Sacramento Mayor Heather Fargo by emerging as the top vote-getter in yesterday’s primary election in California’s capital city.
Johnson, a friend of DFER, won 47% of the vote while Fargo won 40% of the vote.
As was predicted from the outset, this race was nasty and bizarre at times, including last night when – I’m not making this up – a 30-foot tree branch collapsed and fell on a crowd of Fargo supporters who were sipping margaritas at a Mexican restaurant. (One woman was hospitalized.)
If Johnson doesn’t get enough of the absentee votes to push him past 50%, it goes to a run-off in November.
Great video of Johnson’s speech last night from the Sacramento Bee.
UPDATE: The Bee’s Marcos Breton sums up how I view Johnson’s involvement – both in education reform and now in politics:
For better or worse, it begins and ends with a man who could be sitting on a beach somewhere, or collecting big checks as an NBA TV analyst – but instead chose to invest his time and efforts in his hometown. Tuesday night he was watching the vote count and either way, he made a difference.
From a distance, it sounds like an idyllic story: Johnson, the local star who done good, comes home to fix broken schools and invest in the struggling Oak Park neighborhood where he was reared.
But Johnson’s public life since returning home in 2001 has been even more intense – and competitive – than his life of pitched battle against the best athletes in the world.
The worst the great Michael Jordan could do was dunk on Johnson, or prevent him from winning an NBA title – as Jordan’s Chicago Bulls did to Johnson’s Phoenix Suns in 1993.
But in Sacramento, Johnson made enemies who have played for more than athletic glory. When Johnson took over Sacramento High School in 2003 and turned it into a charter school, he developed bitter combatants in the local teachers union. Parents in east Sacramento decried the loss of “their school.”