OUT FRONT Is Ron Kirk Up to It?

Ron Kirk has the chance to be one of the great ones. But if he wants to score in the mayoralty big leagues, he first has to cut a cancer from our body politic. He has to take on Kathlyn Gilliam.

11 wouldn’t. even be a contest. Hie mayor has built an enormous reservoir of goodwill. He has the unqualified support of the black middle class, the business community, and most segments of the city. He even has the qualified support of white North Dallas. He’s built up his political capital. Now he needs to spend some of it.

The mayor’s job can be divided into three parts: political, ceremonial, and civic. On the political front at City Hall, Kirk has moved quickly and competently. He’s imposed order on the council, taken control of the agenda, and placed himself firmly in the driver’s seat.

As a ceremonial figure, nobody’s better. The mayor is articulate, quick-witted, and full of bonhomie. Central casting couldn’t find a better representative for our city.

But the mayor’s job in Dallas goes beyond ribbon-cutting or its limited description in the city charter. A Dallas mayor is expected to protect civil order and set a civic vision.

Ron Kirk was elected mayor on the race issue. He made an implicit contract based on the color of his skin: Back me, and my election will create a new era of racial harmony. He didn’t use those words, of course, because he didn’t need to. Voters heard what they wanted to hear. They may have been naive in what they chose to hear, but that was the bargain. Now payment is coming due.

The test is taking place over the future of our Dallas schools, A small coterie of black politicos, led by board member Kathlyn Gilliam and supported by comrade-in-arms Yvonne Ewell, want to get their hands on a good slice of the $680-rnillion Dallas school budget. Gilliam hasn’t spent 22 years (22 years!) on the school board out of the goodness of her heart; patronage and power-grabbing are her full-time jobs. For years Federal Judge Barefoot Sanders has been her patron, i doling dollars in her direction when the school board majority wouldn’t. Yvonne Ewell ran DISD’s East Oak Cliff subdivision as a private fief-dom until she was booted out by the sainted Linus Wright; she got herself elected in 1987 as a way of getting back on the gravy train, These two must bum with envy at the $2 million in taxpayers’ money John Wiley Price gets to spend every year.

It’s classic urban politics, straight from the pages of Tom Wolfe’s Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catcbers-raw, ugly, for big stakes, and cyni-cally played out under the banner of ’”racism.” If Dallas at times seems baffled by all the noise, it’s because Dallas has operated for so long under a concord whose chief aim is clean government. But some people aren’t interested in clean government. They want what’s theirs- and what’s theirs is whatever they can take.

The mayor calls the mob behavior Gilliam encourages “disgusting,” but does nothing to stop it. He may think school business isn’t part of his job. In that, lie would be wrong. Civil order is the heart and meat of his job. The black community in general, and die voters in Gilliam’s district in 1997, have to be given the choice between two visions of black political leadership: Atlanta or Detroit.

Gilliam plays a Detroit-style game, Because she hasn’t had the votes, we’ve so far avoided Detroit-style consequences, But that’s only so far.

Kirk can stop her and her cohorts cold, He can isolate them, and rally the larger community-white and black-behind a better vision of what a racially diverse Dallas can be, He can use some of that enormous political capital to force a confrontation, and to win it.

Is Ron Kirk up to it? In the big leagues only performance counts.