Now that a grand jury finally indicted Mayor Sheila Dixon, she must do the right thing for those who elected her and the rest of the city. No leader, however forceful and dynamic — and Dixon deserves both attributes — can effectively lead a city and mount a criminal defense.
Baltimore doesn’t exactly run like clockwork. If murder statistics for the new year can serve as an example, Maryland’s biggest city gets knocked down just as it dusts itself off and moves forward. A crashing economy demands the best face Baltimore can put on to attract private economic development.
It’s a city that needed all of her — and now it needs none of her. Our mayor slogging through a sordid corruption case would damage the city Dixon says she loves.
She has stipulated actions cited in her indictment. The only question for trial is whether those actions technically are criminal. They definitely are unethical.
Ethics alone demand she resign for the good of the city. America’s standard for criminal conviction is the toughest in the world. It must not become the lowest standard for holding public office.
The most pathetic part of these charges is their venal pettiness. They lay bare the status of Baltimore as no-headquarters town.
We pay our mayor $148,000 a year, plus expenses, and she betrays us for a couple of fur coats, a PlayStation and a shopping spree? Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich would laugh at her.
Worse, the charges indicate how lowly she holds in esteem doing the people’s work. This is a mayor with an uncanny ability to appoint smart people to help her govern and a leader who inspires real hope in regenerating a downtrodden place. She makes us envision its renaissance, not its decline and fall.
How could she do this to us? How could she let living beyond her means be her epitaph, like so many who ruined us on Wall Street?
These charges are not about indicting her for having a boyfriend, as she has claimed. They are about abusing public trust.
It does not matter if she is not held criminally liable. We deserve more than an elected official who parses the law to her own benefit and wants the mayor’s office to support a Park Avenue lifestyle on a North Charles Street budget.
So leave, Mayor Dixon. Cut a plea. Take your punishment. Join the pantheon of rehabilitated Maryland politicians. We will mourn your loss of potential, tossed away for a pittance.
Then we shall get on with fulfilling your vision for Baltimore without you.
