When being Quintonian is too Clintonian: KC Mayor Quinton Lucas, please stop parsing
During his appearance on MSNBC Tuesday night, the chyron under Quinton Lucas said, “Kansas City, MO mayor says staffer gave green light for Operation Legend without his knowledge.”
That is what he says — sort of. Though as always with Lucas, it’s more complicated than that, because there are levels of knowing, and shades of green lights.
“There’s a difference,” he tells me, between the U.S. attorney calling you or your staff and vaguely signaling that “Oh yeah, there’s this thing coming through,’’ versus “Let’s have a chat about some new operation that looks like a citywide federal warrant check.’’
So he did know, but only fuzzily. He did say yes, but only in passing, without knowing what he was approving. And cannot really be seen as having thrown his staff to the hyenas when he said they got out ahead of him, because there’s a sense in which that’s true, too. Got it?
I don’t, because he can’t both have learned about Operation LeGend on Twitter, along with the rest of the world, and also have gotten a heads-up the day before.
He can’t both have signed off on it and not signed off on it.
He can’t both support Kansas City Police Chief Rick Smith and agree with those who want him gone. Or assure us that he wants local control of our police department while leaving questions about whether that’s really the case.
He can’t be a role model for COVID-19 mask absolutists, except when he’s not, and I’m still not sure about that story that as he was getting out of the Lake of the Ozarks maskless and soaking wet, he happened on a group so eager for a photo that he couldn’t say no.
My point, Mr. Mayor, is that even dextrous you, nimble as you are, can’t actually sit on multiple sides of an issue simultaneously. Or say opposite things to opposing groups without damaging your credibility.
Maybe each of the above positions is defensible, but all of them at once, no. And more and more, you remind me of Bill Clinton without the sex crimes.
‘Nothing going on” with Monica Lewinsky
To be Clintonian is to leave everyone who meets with you with the happy impression that you completely agree with him, or at least did in that moment.
To be Clintonian is to be a master triangulator, and to parse words in such a lawyerly, less-than-forthcoming way that what your listeners heard might not be what was said at all.
The classic Clintonian dodge had nothing to do with the draft: He argued that he’d told the truth when he testified to a grand jury that “there’s nothing going on” between him and Monica Lewinsky. Sure, because that did not mean that nothing had ever gone on between them: “It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”
I couldn’t help but be reminded of that equivocation more than a year ago, when I asked Lucas whether the keys had been in the ignition when he was arrested on suspicion of DUI in Lawrence and he said well, that depends on how one defines “in the ignition.” Those charges were dropped, and since he wasn’t even driving but had decided to sleep it off in his car, rightly so. But I never did understand which part of “key in the ignition” was open to interpretation.
So much has been thrown at our mayor since his swearing in almost exactly a year ago, including a 40% increase in homicides and a pandemic. In the main, he’s done a good job at a historically difficult time, especially with his early stay-at-home order. He works hard for his hometown and is a natural on television.
But trying to make all sides your side doesn’t work indefinitely, which is why Black Rainbow KC organizer Ray Billis sees Lucas’ yes-and-no support of Operation LeGend, which sent more than 200 federal agents to this area, as that of “a Black mayor who is impeding progress, who is speaking out against what the Black community actually wants.”
In trying to have it both ways on Kansas City’s police chief, Urban League CEO Gwen Grant sees him as “doing the Quinton Shuffle. You never know where he really stands.”
In trying to finesse those issues and more, his former City Council colleague Alissia Canady, who is running for Missouri lieutenant governor, says that as she sees it, he’s doing a commendable job, despite a character defect he’ll most likely only work on when he has to: “He’s always trying to protect his ability to move forward, and as long as one side doesn’t know about the other, that works.”
(Remember when Clinton explained that he’d decided against becoming a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, “to maintain my political viability within the system”?)
Alissia Canady thinks he’s technically honest
Canady, who says Lucas has reached out to her for advice on standing up to pressure, sees him as having been completely sincere in that moment kneeling with the protesters against police brutality, and equally so when he got back to his office, saw all the messages he’d gotten from spouses of police officers and decided to dash off a supportive letter to police.
And on Operation LeGend, “if I deposed him, I think he’d say he didn’t know it was going to be called that,” and so is being technically honest when he says he didn’t know. Did I mention he reminds me of Bill Clinton?
Since Clinton grew up with very little and became the most powerful man in the world, that’s not what I’d call a devastating critique. But whatever it was that made our 42nd president such a pleaser not only dogged and complicated his life at every turn but will outlive him, too.
So much possibility squandered — not only his, but America’s — we all said at the time. Not quite one full year into Lucas’ first mayoral term, his promise is already as clear as how easily it could all go to waste.
Operation LeGend “continues to be a somewhat malleable mission,” says our somewhat malleable mayor. On Chief Smith and police reform, pushing him to pick a side “in some ways presents a false choice.”
No ‘public spat” about KCPD Chief Rick Smith
“I’m not leading a protest on the steps of the police department,” Lucas tells me, but that doesn’t mean he’s not pushing for reform. “This is the institution in which I have to operate,” so he’s trying to accomplish what’s possible, like getting rid of city marijuana offenses and arrests for parking tickets, on the theory that one way to improve relations between the cops and the community is by reducing the number of interactions they have.
“I’m not going to get into a public spat about the police chief’s continued employment,” either. Yet “some of us who consider ourselves progressive in some ways have been able to do a lot.”
No, Lucas says, no one’s ever made the Clinton comparison before, but “I do get it.” On how whether or not a key is “in the ignition” could ever be ambiguous, he laughed at his own ingenuity. “That’s good!”
And though he can and does defend each individual decision, he does understand the big-picture impression that he’s a world-class parser. Why is that, does he think?
“This isn’t to go into therapy, but I went to Barstow,” the Kansas City private school where he was often the only Black kid in class, “from the time I was a little kid, so I’m very good at probably seeming inauthentic.” And might as a result be inclined to “keep your cards close to your vest.”
For him as for Clinton, his intellect was his ticket to the Ivy League, and then to leadership positions back home at a young age. But could we please let the parallels end there? The single most important thing you could do to maintain your viability within the system, Mr. Mayor, is to do whatever it takes to check that Clintonian impulse to keep all of your options open.
This story was originally published July 30, 2020 at 9:27 AM.
