LONDON — One candidate, an old-line leftist-turned-globalizer known as Red Ken, called the U.S. ambassador to Britain a "chiseling little crook" and recently acknowledged fathering five children by three women.
The other, an upper-crust conservative with a shock of pale blond hair permanently askew, called the London Underground an "armpit-nuzzling hell" and said he tried cocaine during college but sneezed.
Is this any way to run a city?
London may think of itself as the new global economy's Wall Street and the most urbane of international capitals, but the only two men who have a prayer of running it after the mayoral election today quite often come off as loony and loonier.
Welcome to the Ken and Boris show. It is a contest that has focused as much on the issues as on the larger-than-life candidates who practically have been tripping over each other at down-and-out neighborhood youth centers and arguing about police deployments in public debates that, for once, the public is actually watching.
The reason is not just the general concern over lawless adolescents on street corners, the miserably crowded subways or two-bedroom apartments a millionaire couldn't afford. It's the candidates themselves -- a pair of eccentrics who couldn't be more different, neither of them one of the bland, measured, so very thoughtful politicians who seem to populate so much of the British political landscape these days.
Ken Livingstone, the 62-year-old Labor Party incumbent, is an only partly reformed veteran of the old, hard left, an inclination he has had to square with his responsibility for presiding over the creation of the world's leading banking and financial services center and, in the process, becoming a champion of multinational corporations and globalization.
He has opened the door to a rash of new skyscrapers in London while holding developers' feet to the fire to make 50% of the city's new housing affordable. He made a no-holds-barred successful appeal to bring the 2012 Summer Olympics to London, even while he was striking a deal with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to buy subsidized fuel for the capital's buses and planning a citywide celebration next year to mark the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution.
