By Chris Tucker, KERA 90.1 commentator.
Dallas, TX – We'll start finding out today whether Laura Miller can translate her solid victory into lasting accomplishments. But, already, she has made history. Nobody has ever taken this kind of path to power in Dallas.
Groping for a precedent, some have compared Miller's victory to that of Wes Wise back in 1971. Yes, Wise had a media background, as a TV sportscaster. Yes, he beat Avery Mays, who was the candidate of the downtown business crowd back when downtown didn't even need rebuilding.
But such comparisons miss what's truly singular about Miller's victory. Wise spent his media career talking about the Dallas Cowboys and the SMU Mustangs. Miller spent hers trying to expose corruption and cronyism at City Hall. Now the best investigative reporters have guts and stamina, but even more important, they possess, in the depths of their DNA, a deep, abiding suspicion. They are certain that inside those halls of power, somebody's running a con game, and they live to drag these malefactors kicking and screaming into the light of day.
Miller did this as well as anyone in recent memory, often exposing genuine abuses. Sometimes she cried wolf, and sometimes the wolf turned out to be little more than a pampered Park Cities poodle. But her aggressive, let's-get-to-the-bottom-of-this mentality carried her to the Dallas City Council, where she built a large, loyal following by insisting, again and again, that city leaders and their business pals were just too cozy.
Whether it was the downtown sports arena, the Trinity River project, or the 2012 Olympic bid, Miller pounded away at her constant theme of treacherous fat-cats building their mansions of glory while the little guy's dreams were swallowed by potholes. She routinely questioned not just the tactics, but the ethics and the honesty of some of the city's most prominent and wealthy citizens.
And in the end, she won. She beat what's left of the business establishment. She beat The Dallas Morning News. She beat a flock of old-Dallas icons like Roger Staubach and Ebby Halliday. And she did it by invading and conquering North Dallas, the very heartland of the conservative white voters who elected mayors like Starke Taylor, Jack Evans, and Steve Bartlett.
And so Miller stands alone, as the woman who put an end to the Old Dallas Way of getting elected. She is the city's first true anti-establishment mayor.
Whether she can make the difficult transition from outvoted gadfly to coalition-building leader remains to be seen. Her campaign had the deeply moralistic tone of a reform movement, but the moral high ground can be a slippery perch. She has set the ethical bar so high that she leaves little room for error and the often, messy compromise of politics. Some of Miller's truest believers may grow disappointed as they see her give and take to assemble the magic eight votes needed for action. She blazed her own trail to the mayor's office; now that she's there, keeping the revolution alive will take all of her impressive energy.
Chris Tucker is a Dallas writer and the former editor of D Magazine.