By Mark Lassiter

On Tuesday, December 1, a potentially historic mayoral election will take place in Atlanta, Georgia. The November 3 election led to a runoff between City Councilor Mary Norwood, a white woman running as an Independent, though some say she’s Republican; and Georgia State Senator Kasim Reed, a Democrat who has the support of both the local hip-hop stars and the old-school civil rights veterans.

As we consider the possible future under either of these candidates, it pays to recall the quartet of mayors who have made the Atlanta brand what it is today.

In the procession of Atlanta’s last four mayors—each dynamic in their own way—there can only be one Maynard Holbrook Jackson. He was a brilliant, world-class diplomat, the pioneer who, when he was first elected in 1973, made history by becoming the first African-American mayor of a major southern city. With this, he faced the burden of high expectations of migrants who walked the1.5 miles from the Greyhound Bus Station on Luckie Street, to City Hall looking for their promised job.

Jackson blazed the trail for local business people who had never been invited to the table to bid, partner or share lucrative city contracts by putting affirmative action programs into place that gave a much larger portion of city business to minority firms. He was about the business of change, and business was good.

Most of all, Jackson filled a room with his extra large personality. Always hands-on, he rejected (and corrected in red ink) city hall staff memos with typos, and he always remembered your name. The evening Mayor Maynard Jackson greeted my mother by name, after just one prior introduction, she nearly fainted.

His popularity and credibility drew star power. When the city faced a string of unexplained child murders in 1979-80, Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. showed up to bolster the cost of the investigation.

Jackson’s successor, Andrew Young, was elected mayor in 1981, after having held Georgia’s Fifth District Seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, making him the first African American since Reconstruction to be elected to Congress from Georgia. He had been forced to resign as an Ambassador to the United Nations in 1979 for defying U.S. law to meet with a representative of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), then considered a terrorist group. Ever the diplomat, Young was a great conciliator who could reach across the hall for a council vote or across the ocean for the kid of Olympic votes that Chicago could only dream about. While Young led the way in bringing the 1996 Olympics to Atlanta, the road had been paved by Maynard Jackson’s relentless pursuit of excellence.

After Young’s two terms, when Jackson returned for his second tour of duty (Atlanta has a two consecutive term limit) in 1992, Atlanta had hundreds of homeless people sleeping outside in downtown, and the first cracks were showing in the infrastructure after the economic boom of the eighties.

The dishonored Bill Campbell, elected mayor in 1993, and later sentenced to prison for tax evasion, left a mountain of debt, corruption and mistrust for Shirley Franklin, Atlanta’s first woman mayor, to fix. The AAA bond rating of the Maynard Jackson era was a distant memory and the century-old sewer system was on the verge of collapse. Franklin—who during both the Jackson and Young administrations, was responsible for the day-to-day operations of all city departments including the airport and zoning—rolled up her sleeves and did the dirty work of tackling the mountain of problems she inherited.

Jackson, Young and Franklin put their indelible thumbprint on Atlanta by expressing their affection for the city in their own terms. The Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (HJAIA), the economic engine for the entire region, became Jackson’s crowning achievement, and his name was added to it after his death in 2003. Today, HJAIA is undergoing a massive expansion that will ensure its position on the international map in 2012.

Come Tuesday

Fast forward to 2009, and the art of this Atlanta mayoral campaign. Forget all the things you have heard about race. The contest for Mayor in Atlanta is more about the collective mediocre effort in campaign branding, strategy and message. This mayoral campaign also reflects the huge tracts of formerly apathetic voters that Jackson could inspire and that Young had the star power to be recognized by. The dismal twenty per cent turnout on November 3, 2009, a picture-perfect November day, is a long drop from the creative energy of the historic evening over thirty years ago when a rotund Maynard Jackson donned boxing trunks and sparred in an exhibition match against a lean and talented gentleman from Louisville, Muhammad Ali, with Julian Bond as the referee.

Forget the issue of race for a moment. Take a step back and think about the improbable campaign lessons of candidate Barack Hussein Obama, who not only had to introduce himself to a skeptical audience and deliver his message in a crystalline transparent tone – he had to define race in his own terms. Simultaneously, he was forced to moonwalk through the minefield of American racism, with the worldview of a child who was raised in Hawaii by white people, educated as an adult in Cambridge, Mass, while going on to date and marry a sista girl from Chicago. All this while, according to Sarah Palin, he was consorting with terrorists.

The Obama “Yes We Can” campaign broke new ground for brand identity, social networking and online giving. It was also the greatest, and largest, revival tent ever erected on the side of a road. Unfortunately, in Atlanta, the advisors to all the candidates running in the November 3 election forgot to take notes. The front four—Mary Norwood, Kasim Reed, Lisa Borders and Jesse Spikes—either were too low on funds, overlooked the intelligent creativity of the Obama campaign, or did not have the personality to duplicate a fraction of charisma and brand equity carried by Maynard Jackson. Who among them owned the worldly ambassadorship of Andrew Young or the pure tenacity and hard-earned wisdom of Shirley Franklin?

Mary Norwood has tap-danced around eight years of inaction on The Atlanta City Council into the post position. However, she has assembled an effective media campaign and positioned herself as the agent of change, via a well-crafted message and effective visuals. She took the risk of filming a television spot at the scene of a crime, and it resonated.

A month ago, candidate Kasim Reed had Evander Holyfield stand with him during a press conference to announce his plans to fight crime. Holyfield is no Ali. Holyfield stayed much too long in the ring and has his own set of issues. Does the former champ really need a house that huge? C’mon man!

Of course, to assess the recent mayoral race outside of context is a fatal error. Take the youth vote and the political consciousness of college students. The college student movement of the sixties, which was mobilized around politics, was also deeply concerned with wars in foreign countries. Today, that same urban college demographic faces violence which has disrupted lives around the campuses of Georgia Tech, Georgia State and The Atlanta University Center, and to date has not demonstrated a comparable concern with our two ongoing overseas wars. This is not the Atlanta of 1976 or 1996.

After 36 years of Black Mayors, countless entrepreneurs and business owners have forgotten that they owe their positions to the fact that their companies benefit from execs with relationships to a Black administration. The illusion that there was a ‘machine’ comes back to haunt the current Black candidate. Each former mayor built a coalition around his or her priorities and none built a machine which could both deliver to constituents and insure a successor. For whatever set of complex reasons, here in Atlanta, we are left with extreme voter apathy – and the sobering, distinct prospect of a fifteen per cent voter turnout for a mayoral runoff on a chilly and windy December first.

Mark Lassiter votes early and often.