Mayor Eric Johnson’s strange Texas Monthly interview says so much about Dallas’ struggles

It’s taken us a minute to process a recent interview Mayor Eric Johnson deigned to grant to Texas Monthly.

We say deigned because the mayor initially declined the request, telling the magazine that “he preferred to speak to national media rather than local and statewide outlets.”

That came as no surprise to us. Every dallas mayor we can recall communicated regularly with the local press corps, even when the going got rough, but that’s not Johnson’s way. (True to form, we got no response to two messages we sent his office last week.)

But what really matters here is the substance of Johnson’s discussion with Texas Monthly, and the important insights it offers into the mayor and the function of City Hall. There is a lot we can learn about both from his comments.

First, Johnson has many valid ideas on policy that we believe are more aligned with most Dallas voters than the progressive faction of City Council members who seem to hold the strongest sway at City Hall these days.

Johnson rightly called out City Hall for getting outside of its core mission of “providing public safety, water infrastructure, and parks and recreation,” etc. Instead the city has veered, with poor results and at high cost, into social welfare work like a senior dental program. Johnson is right that such a program is “a very worthwhile thing, but it is not a critical function of city government.” Another way to put it is that the city cannot afford such a program and make sure we pay cops their pension and fill the potholes.

The problem with Johnson’s interview isn’t his view of how the city should work. It’s what it says about his view of himself.

All of us know Johnson announced he had switched from Democrat to Republican, a choice that might be perfectly fine in a vacuum but that had a sting given he was elected to a nonpartisan office by a lot of Democrats. It was also the sort of announcement that made it harder to build a coalition at City Hall.

So why do it? The assumption was he wants higher political office. But he told Texas Monthly he will never run for political office again. So, does he want a cabinet position? Is he actually done with politics? If he is, why force the rest of us to join him on his journey of political conversion? Your guess is as good as ours, but the idea he is done with politics beggars belief.

Johnson is eager to share his thoughts on the failures of the Democratic Party, telling Texas Monthly such things as the “Democratic Party doesn’t care about victims or supporting law enforcement.” But he’s notably incurious about his new party, saying “I have not read the entire platform from the Texas Republican Party.” That might be a good piece of weekend reading, Mr. Mayor.

Finally, something comes through in the piece that is even more worrisome: the mayor’s sense that you’re either “Team E.J.” or you’re not.

That’s an unhelpful way to view the world when you’re supposed to be the leader. What City Hall needs now is a person who leads to build a team, not a person who thinks he’s a team of one.

We don’t have that leader in Dallas, and it’s a big reason City Hall is struggling.

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