Ever since the beginning of the mayoral race — which seems like decades ago at this point — Mayor Karl Dean has been something like the sun in this campaign galaxy, with varying degrees of gravitational pull on all the other candidates. Sometimes that force has been subtle, but it is increasingly less so. 

The entire field had the same essential dilemma with relation to the current mayor. None of them were selling anything all that different from Dean. And anyway, the sort of people who host big fundraisers and make up business councils have had a pretty good eight years. An overt campaign for Change wasn't likely to do so well in those relatively small, but influential circles. 

So we get Linda Eskind Rebrovick, Dean plus some gadgets, or Charles Robert Bone, Dean plus more and farther and wider and jingles. Whatever his campaign's other shortcomings, Howard Gentry might have been offering the biggest contrast from the current state of things, with his consistent focus on things like poverty — a crisis that has persisted right on through the It Storm.

And now we find ourselves in the runoff, with two candidates who aren't all that different from Dean, nor as different from each other as they're straining to appear. So we get a discussion chock full of inherent contradictions and cop outs.

If you missed Monday night's debate, WPLN has a good report (with some audio) here and you can watch clips from News Channel 5 here. The self-conflicting rhetoric has been on display throughout the race, but it's getting particularly obvious now. 

Take Megan Barry's new emphasis on "Karl Dean and I" accomplishing this or that, a trend Joey Garrison picked up on in his recap of the debate for The Tennessean. One of Barry's strengths vis-à-vis her opponents has been that, in a race where no one was overly critical of Dean, she had the most legitimate claim to his successes, and his policies, projects, and big buildings. As a council member she had supported and voted for them. But the problem is she refuses to own any of his failures. 

For the most part, the extent of her criticism of the Dean administration has been to point out that it has frequently failed to include and effectively communicate with the community and council members. She has said that if elected, she would be more proactive when it comes to community involvement. Perhaps she would be. But she could have done more to bring that about while she was on the council, as an at-large member unencumbered by zoning requests and the like. And despite the scoffing from the army of Democratic flacks and operatives that spin the debates live on Twitter, it's fair to point it out. 

Still, the problem is worse with David Fox, whose rhetoric is afflicted by this problem in more ways than one. He consistently attacks Barry for what the past eight years have lacked but has rarely, if ever, extended that criticism to Dean. On the flip side he is calling for fiscal conservatism, lower capital spending, and decreasing the debt, but apparently supports the big-ticket Dean projects that led to the spending and debt that has him preaching caution. He did come closer to being critical of Dean in this week's debate, saying that he was "astonished" by budgets that included withdrawals from the city's rainy day fund in times of economic growth. 

But that only makes it more odd that he has little bad to say about the biggest projects over the last few years. if you're worried about spending and debt, surely the half-a-bilion dollar box — with undulating green roof! — spanning three city blocks downtown gives you some heartburn? If debt and spending bothers you, should you not be somewhat irritated that we built a new stadium for a minor league baseball team in exchange for a little rent and a renewed commitment to the guitar-shaped scoreboard? Fox has said "there's a time and a place for everything," but it's a hard sell when coupled with his concerns about spending. 

When you want to be the new person but you're a lot like the old person, sometimes you say things that don't add up. 

Full disclosure: Megan Barry is married to longtime Scene contributor Bruce Barry. David Fox is married to longtime Scene food writer Carrington Fox. 

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