At the Slice of Brookhaven, four large, well-cheesed pizzas sat cooling on tables, waiting to be consumed by supporters and fans of mayoral candidate and professional eater Dale Boone.
Time and time again over the past 16 years, Boone has proved that he could ingest those four pies himself, probably in less time than you could tuck away a single slice. And on Tuesday evening, as the second hour of his meet-and-greet began, it looked like he might have to.
The room was darn close to empty.
Donald Trump has shown us how celebrity can vault you into the upper reaches of American politics. Boone may be about to learn how fickle that power can be.
“I’m not a competitive eater. I’m the defending world champion. There’s a huge difference. I’m the top one,” the 49-year-old Boone said. (For you aficionados, Boone says his top ranking comes through the World League of Competitive Eating, not the International Federation of Competitive Eating. Totally different animals.)
Boone once told a reporter that he was blessed with a large throat and a larger stomach. His Facebook page is replete with plates of food he’s demolished. Wings. Burgers. Russian dumplings. Fried this and sauteed that.
His profession has allowed him to travel throughout the world, to compare societies, and to meet the likes of Bill Clinton and two Bushes — George H.W. and George W. “I’ve been on the Jay Leno show. So I’ve been to Hollywood, to see how that actually takes place,” Boone said.
Over Labor Day weekend, Boone won a hotdog-eating contest on Tybee Island. “That was a good-bye wave. Everyone was upset and crying,” the big man said. Boone has promised to give up his profession should he win on Nov. 3.
“I can be your full-time mayor at part-time pay. I’ll get this thing straightened out,” Boone said. Fighting crime and establishing an independent city school system are on his agenda.
But as Trump may someday find out, fame is no substitute for the low-to-the-ground, blocking and tackling of everyday politics.
The new city of Brookhaven, population in the neighborhood of 50,000, has a stability problem. It’s about to have its third mayor in less than three years.
Mayor No. 1, J. Max Davis, left midterm to make an unsuccessful bid for a state House seat. He was never able to shake talk that city officials had tried to hide away some inappropriate mayoral behavior toward City Hall employees. Something involving a spray can of Lysol.
Davis was replaced in June by Rebecca Chase Williams, a Brookhaven City Council member and former TV journalist. But on Tuesday, hours before Boone brought out his pizzas, Mayor No. 2 withdrew from the special election to fill out the rest of Davis’ term.
Her husband, Dick Williams, the host of WAGA’s “The Georgia Gang” and publisher of the Dunwoody Crier, had broken his leg so severely last week that he required a hip replacement. Family matters take precedence, Mayor No. 2 said.
Rebecca Chase Williams’ withdrawal should have been good news for Boone. Municipal elections are nonpartisan affairs, but labels still matter. Mayor No. 2 is a conservative Republican. So is Boone.
The only other candidate is John Ernst, a 40-year-old attorney of Democratic breeding.
But within a few hours of Mayor No. 2’s withdrawal, DeKalb County Commissioner Nancy Jester, a Republican, endorsed Ernst. (So has Catherine Bernard, another Republican who nearly beat Max Davis in a preliminary round of voting for that House District 80 seat, eventually won by Democrat Taylor Bennett.)
Campaign checks are also flowing to Ernst, though we won’t know the sources or the amounts until next week.
At his pizza party, I asked Boone whether he’d been able to get any help from Davis, the former mayor — another Republican. “I don’t know. I’ve reached out to him,” Boone said. “Nobody has reached out to me. They’ve kind of left me out here in the cold. You learn — I haven’t made anyone mad, I just did what the American dream is. And that’s run for office.”
Boone seems like a nice fellow. But when things get serious, celebrity just doesn’t go very far.
Ernst is a former chairman of the DeKalb County ethics commission. I talked to him on Tuesday afternoon and asked him about the source of his strength among Republicans.
Since 2013, he noted, the Brookhaven City Council has met “secretly” more than 100 times. Attorney General Sam Olens has ruled that many of those sessions were improper.
Then there’s that spray can of Lysol. “It wasn’t the actual event itself. It was the perceived cover-up. That’s where a lot of my Republican support was coming from,” he said.
Jester alluded to both issues in her endorsement.
Brookhaven was created in large part to insulate that portion of western DeKalb from the vagaries of county government. Which has some well-known problems with corruption.
Clearly, you have many Republicans worried that Brookhaven is in danger of becoming a smaller version of the creature they sought to escape. Enough to choose a Democrat and bipartisanship over a well-known Republican — albeit one with a peculiar way of making a living.
In the current, hyperpartisan climate, that may count as something like progress.
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