Kang, Krom and Agran: staying put.
Allow me to take you way, way, way back in time to last Thursday, Oct. 30, when the following was posted here (and it was in the print edition that hit the streets that day, too):
[Irvine mayoral candidate Christina] Shea and fellow incumbent Sukhee Kang are the only candidates for the two-year mayor’s seat. Whoever loses still has two years remaining on his or her council seat. Among the candidates for two open, four-year council seats are outgoing Mayor Beth Krom and councilmen Larry Agran and Steven Choi. But since either Shea or Kang will be promoted to mayor, the remaining two years on the council seat the winner will abandon goes to whoever finishes third in the four-year council race. Thus, if Krom, Choi and Agran are the top three, they remain on the dais with Shea and Kang.
Final results:
Mayor:
SUKHEE KANG 27,534 52.2%
CHRISTINA L. SHEA 25,189 47.8%
City Council (top 3):
BETH KROM 26,762 19.6%
LARRY AGRAN 20,703 15.1%
STEVEN S. CHOI 20,311 14.8%
TODD GALLINGER 16,564 12.1%
MARGIE WAKEHAM 16,436 12.0%
PATRICK A. RODGERS 15,851 11.6%
ERIC JOHNSON 8,088 5.9%
BEA FOSTER 7,780 5.7%
RUBY YOUNG 2,628 1.9%
PARIS MERRIAM 1,666 1.2%
]
OK, so you may have read it somewhere else also that it would be quite possible that the council's current five — Kang, Krom, Shea, Choi and Agran — weren't going anywhere. How should I know what you people read? What, like I'm supposed to scan the local papers? That's not in my job description, mister! And, truth be told, this Tick Tocker was coaxed heavily into leaning in that direction because of the unfair influence of a Liberal OC blogger whose name rhymes with Dan Chimielewski.
Those who were smart pickers like us did so in the face of late-inning rumblings around town that polls showed Agran with “high negatives” that would drop him out of the top three and that breath-of-fresh-independent-air Wakeham was poised to score an upset. To a lesser degree, there was talk of a squeaker win by Gallinger, who was part of the Kang-Krom-Agran slate and had got his name in the papers internationally for a “smear” against his Muslim faith and associations courtesy of Choi.
Silly, rubes: you shoulda asked “that one”–that one being yours truly. The most surprising thing from this end of the bar, based on the Oct. 20 candidate's forum watched … and watched online, was that a seemingly sharp fellow like Merriam finished behind Young, who admitted she was frightened to death, probably did not belong in the race and only ran because when she pulled papers few others had and her son thought it might be a worthy post to go after to keep her busy.
Remember, people, that's how we wound up with George W. Bush.
(My apologies to Ruby if that sounded as if her competence was being compared to Dubya's.)
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.