A campaign not about winning

When Kaufman finished filing, he was out the door and onto The Block. He promised to do this when he alerted everyone he was running. It is conceivable that this is the reason he got so much attention in the first place, but naturally this is only a guess.

We used to have an expression in America: You can’t fight City Hall. Then, with the emergence of television and its love of the visual, the expression was amended: If you stage your fight imaginatively enough, you actually can fight City Hall.

Or run for it.

So, after decades of campaigns in which he’s run with almost complete lack of media attention, or votes, Kaufman mentions The Block, and he gets his mug all over the place Friday night and Saturday morning.

“We hit every porno shop and strip joint down there,” he happily said at the end of the day. “Had some decent conversations, too. One bartender, a woman, said she agreed with everything I said. Who knows, maybe I won a vote or two.”

Friday afternoon, after his little tour, Kaufman called to express great enthusiasm for his campaign kickoff. It’s always nice to hear enthusiasm from someone in his position. He was calling from Union Memorial Hospital, where he was undergoing dialysis, the kidney treatment he has three times a week for four hours at a clip.

“I’m doing great,” he said. “All I need is some votes and a kidney.”

He’s had kidney trouble since that attack two years ago by a tenant of his, “a guy,” Kaufman said, “who only wanted $20 for his next fix and couldn’t see any further than that. He thought he’d killed me for it.”

Kaufman, 76, said this with far more sadness in his voice than anger. It’s one of the reasons he opened his campaign with the tour of The Block. He thinks there should be legally sanctioned “red light districts” for the sale of narcotics and for prostitution.

“You legalize prostitution,” he said, “and you have it in a quiet, safe place, with the oversight of the health department. You’d have less spread of venereal disease, of HIV. Fewer of the girls getting beaten up or cheated out of their pay. Fewer of their customers getting beaten up. It’s simply a more civilized scenario for something that’s going to go on whether it’s legal or not.

“You legalize drugs, it’s the same thing. You tell the police: No arrests in this area. You set aside an area where there aren’t too many homes. You have a kind of flea market for drug dealers. The dealing’s going on, whether we like it or not. But this way, you again have health department oversight to assure the drugs are pure. You have reasonable prices. Addicts would have no reason to steal and dealers no reason to kill each other. You wouldn’t have people arrested for the victimless crime of using a drug. And you wouldn’t have the need for so many police — or you could use them for other resources.”

This, as he well knows, has about as much chance of actually happening as his getting elected mayor. It is also beside the point.

“Of course I’m not going to win,” he said. “I don’t know what I’d do if I did win.”

His campaigns have never been about winning or losing. They’re about talking things out. He’s always ranting about social justice, about economic fairness, about the grotesque disparity between the nation’s rich and its poor, about a health care system that’s the disgrace of the industrialized world. And nobody listened.

But now he wants to talk about legalizing prostitution and drugs, and suddenly he’s got reporters and TV cameras following him.

“It was nice to get some attention,” Kaufman said. “I kidded everybody that they came out so they could see the porno shops and the strip joints. You think that’s why I got all the coverage?”

What the hell, if we can pay so much attention to Paris Hilton, it’s a short walk from there to The Block.

Please send news tips to Michael Olesker at olesker@baltimoreexaminer.com