jimmyv5 said:
The man was created flawed and remains so. Yikes.
When Roger was a County Supervisor in the 1970's I was a reporter working full time in the press room at the County Building. He used to have reporters come into his office once in a while for closed doors sessions that mostly consisted of him ripping into other elected officials in the city and county. But, every word out of his mouth was an obscenity which ensured he'd never be quoted in the papers. During that time I also got an anonymous call alleging some things similar to what later got Roger removed from the Mayor's office (I worked for a small news service that did not have the resources to do investigations of that sort).
By the time he became Mayor I was working for Congressman Duncan Hunter. A big deal at the time was the groundbreaking for the new border crossing at Otay Mesa and Roger had made Otay Mesa development a big deal for his administration. His mayoral administration really was a bit of a steamroller and heaven help anyone who got in their way. Well, one day my boss told me to attend a meeting at Hedgecock's office to discuss the Otay Mesa groundbreaking. It was myself, a PR woman representing the Otay Mesa property owner's association and Hedgecock's top aide.
The meeting was a real eye opener as the aide kept being annoyingly adamant about how Hedgecock needed to dominate the groundbreaking ceremony and I was somewhat surprised at his candor being that I worked for Duncan Hunter. It really began to annoy me until about half an hour or so into the meeting when this guy asked, "So does anyone know what Hunter's office is doing with this thing?"
It was then that I pointed out what he must have missed during the introductions: that I was from Hunter's office. There was a big look of shock and surprise when this guy realized he'd been plotting the course of his steamroller in front of another politician's aide. I might have also mentioned to him that the groundbreaking was being organized by the Federal General Services Administration in San Francisco and that I was the local point man in charge of creating the program for the ceremony (which was a big deal attended by the US Ambassador to Mexico and press from all over California and Mexico).
I was not a Hedgecock fan before that meeting but afterward I made darn sure that he was not on the speakers list for the big groundbreaking event and even after Duncan Hunter came to me and said Hedgecock had called him asking to be put on the list, he was not added.
What was sad was that on the surface Roger seemed like an ideal leader: his mayoral campaign brought together some communities that had never before had an impact on local politics, but many of those communities are ones that has spent most of radio career attacking. I've always felt he would say and profess to believe whatever he thought his adudience wanted to hear and had no firm personal beliefs, beyond advancinghimself. I've never been able to respect him as a radio talk show host in any way other than how you'd have that weird respect for someone who pulls off a big con and gets away with it.
But even have a couple decades of pandering to his audience, politically he has not made a difference. San Diego city politics have continued to move away from what has been Roger's public agenda (but ironically sort of toward what had been his professed agenda when he was Supervisor and Mayor).
But again, you have to begrudgingly give him his due for going straight from being an alleged corrupt mayor to becoming a very successful talk show host. With his power to re-invent himself when needed, I wouldn't be surprised if his national syndication turns out to be another very good deal for Roger because what he really does is show business, not politics, and Roger has always been the consummate showman.
