Providence's mayoral candidates, on bended knee

Published Aug. 26, 2010 at 7:43 a.m.
Wedding Bells
...In a parallel universe, where serial candidate Christopher Young's antics are simply an ingenious bit of performance art — and not evidence of a worrisome and often obnoxious instability — his display at the recent Providence mayoral debate might qualify as a sort of capstone on a brilliant career...

In a parallel universe, where serial candidate Christopher Young's antics are simply an ingenious bit of performance art — and not evidence of a worrisome and often obnoxious instability — his display at the recent Providence mayoral debate might qualify as a sort of capstone on a brilliant career.

After an evening of entertaining remarks — some purposefully funny, perhaps, and others not — Young used his closing statement to propose marriage, on live television, to his girlfriend Kara Russo.

Russo, a long-shot candidate for lieutenant governor, leapt to her feet with an enthusiastic "yes," only to hear a few minutes later from Young — still on the stage and before the cameras — that presentation of the engagement ring sitting on his podium is conditional on his winning the mayor's office.

That wedding day could be a ways off.

But if Young's bizarre proposal took center stage, he was hardly the only one playing the role of suitor that night. With Providence Mayor David Cicilline stepping down to run for Congress, a city staring down severe financial problems, high unemployment, and a struggling school system is looking for a new leader.

And in the home stretch of primary season, three Democrats — lawyer Angel Taveras, State Representative Steven Costantino, and City Councilman John Lombardi — are making the most serious appeals to an electorate finally paying some attention.

The conventional wisdom at the outset of the campaign had Taveras replicating the coalition that vaulted Cicilline to the mayoralty in 2002 — winning well-to-do, liberal East Siders and a heavily Latino South Side while Costantino and Lombardi split the more traditional, white ethnic vote.

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