Fun fact: Philip Kingston once let us bury him in ice for our summer jobs story. (Photo by Danny Fulgencio)
It probably wasn’t even the most interesting race this election season (I mean, voter fraud is under investigation in council districts 2 and 6, and then there’s the surprise upset in the Dallas ISD District 2 race), but for some reason, all anyone can talk about this week is incumbent Philip Kingston’s hearty win over challenger Matt Wood.
It started, of course, with The Dallas Morning News, which seemed a bit schizophrenic over the whole ordeal. The editorial board has not been kind to Kingston this election season, and threw heavy support behind Wood. True to form, the city daily’s election editorial kicker flung more arrows in Kingston’s direction.
“Until voters do more than lap up Kingston’s rhetoric — and instead look at how he does business and what he actually accomplishes — this district will pay a price,” it stated.
Everyone else who covered the race had a decidedly different take, painting Kingston as the scrappy sharp-tongued David taking on the money-grubbing Goliath of Dallas’ “political old guard,” as East Dallas has always been wont to do on election day.
DMN columnist Robert Wilonsky’s take on the whole thing lauded how Kingston’s reelection reaffirms our commitment to fighting the political dynasty that has ruled at City Hall in recent years. “District 14 didn’t just vote for Kingston. They voted against the mayor. They voted against a toll road next to the Trinity River. They voted against handing over Fair Park without asking questions first. And, most of all, they voted against the old way of doing business in Dallas. They voted against piping down,” he wrote.
It was Dallas Observer columnist Jim Schutze, a longtime East Dallas resident and vocal Kingston supporter, who brought the history needed for true context to the whole discussion in the sharply headlined piece “Morning News Boo-Hoo Over Kingston Victory Tells the Tale of the City Council Election.”Wood put in a creditable performance for an unknown who had never held elective office, but Kingston still beat him by more than 13 points – a trouncing by any measure. And, anyway, Wood wasn’t the real opponent. The real opponent was the city’s old guard. By those standards, the old guard took not a trouncing but a brutal beating,” Schutze wrote.
Even the typically food-and-society-obsessed Culture Map took a swing at the daily’s coverage with Kingston supporter Teresa Gubbins writing, “The Dallas Morning News jumped on that bandwagon with a set of negatively biased stories. If you want to see how tone-deaf out-of-touch the newspaper is with what’s happening in Dallas, then its coverage of the Kingston-Wood campaign is a great example.”
D Magazine had a decidedly weird take by declaring Kingston “50 percent more cocky” in a piece from editor Tim Rogers.
To me this is all proof that, once again, we are clearly the most interesting neighborhood in Dallas.
