Be on the lookout for a bad penny

Funny thing, we haven't heard much lately from Sam Adams, Portland's former mayor. Now that the dippity-doo charter change happy meal has passed, I'll bet he's plotting his political comeback in the new system.

For a couple of years now, Creepy Sam, who had decisively flunked out of politics, then out of the nonprofit industrial complex, then out of politics again, has had some sort of gig with the city's current mayor, Dud Wheeler. Adams has been the city's strategic initiatives director, or some such nonsense title. And until quite recently, he's been the face of the occasional get-tough moments in the mayor's wishy-washy meanderings on homelessness. But since the election last month, Wheeler's been doing his own talking, albeit out of both sides of his orifice as usual, and Adams, he of the Jantzen Beach ZipperFest, has fallen eerily silent.

He knows he can't win a citywide election, but in the future, there won't be any, except for mayor. And surely he figures he can come in third for City Council in some ward or another under the zany experimental version of ranked-choice voting we've adopted. Under that solution in search of a problem, third place in a vote by a quarter of the city is all it takes to get a seat on the big sofa for the City Council book club. And so it might boil down to a question of which district Sammy should slip into to have the best shot at making it to third place. He did come in a close third to Chloe Eudaly and Mingus Mapps on a citywide basis.

Then again, a single member of the new 12-person council isn't going to have much power, and they may not get paid much, either. And so what Adams would probably prefer is to be the city manager. To do that, I believe he'd have to be BFFs with the mayor. He's already become that with Wheeler, but that guy's got a huge L on his forehead for the next go-'round, and so the kissing-up would have to be to the next mayor, whoever that might turn out to be.

In any event, you know that the folks at the Weed will be backing Adams 100 percent, whatever he decides to go for. They can't get enough of the guy, and they'll pull as many levers as they can, including painting him as a victim, to get him what he wants.