Crawford held the seat for 12 years before losing in 2007. There were rumors that John Crawford would announce he's running for Mayor against Republican candidate Paula Hughes, but he announced run for city council instead. What seemed like an ordinary candidacy announcement quickly turned humorous.
Crawford claims to be one of the most disliked city councilmen in history. Mainly because he led the city's smoking ban. Despite that he's giving it another shot. Crawford says “Basically I think government is getting too big. I think taxes are getting too high and I think there are too many regulations on our lives.”
He didn't take the decision lightly. You might remember he put an ad in the paper asking voters if he should run for Mayor or City Council. Half the responses were positive, the other half negative.
Crawford says “There's an old expression that someone can hate another so much that they would not urinate on him if they were on fire. Doctors kind of like body fluid and urine jokes, so I challenged my poster maker to illustrate that old expression. This is the best he could come up with. That's me on the post saying help me I'm on fire, direct that stream this way. The citizen over there just happens to be smoking says forget about it.”
Crawford says the circumstances surrounding the last election were the reason he lost. Crawford says “The last city election we had a perfect storm. We had a republican candidate for Mayor who was under indictment. Which totally suppressed the turnout, so we only had a 30 percent turnout and the moderate republicans didn't show up because they were discouraged because they didn't like the Mayoral candidate. Those are kind of my voters.”
Crawford says he considered running for Mayor, but doesn't want to give up his medical practice and working with cancer patients.
