If only I could take credit for this bright idea:

To “cover” mayoral candidate Otis Rolley’s campaign event in Canton last week solely via live web-stream,  beamed right to my North Baltimore computer. It was so apt.

Rolley is pitching himself as the web-wise, socially-networked, next-generation challenger who will beat the city’s old political machine with a new one — powered by Baltimore’s tech and entrepreneurial community. The emcee of this “Evening with Otis,” was none other than civic-minded Baltimore power-nerd, the tech entrepreneur Dave Troy, an early Rolley supporter. The gathering took place at Beehive Baltimore, the co-working hub that Troy helped found.

Honestly, though, the main reason I “experienced” the event this way was that, at the last minute — with the snow and the demands of family dinner-time, etc., etc. – I just couldn’t get over there at 6 pm.  Making a virtue of necessity, as we so often do here in New Media Land, I decided to pull up the “Livestream” page that Rolley’s people had made for him and see what I could learn about the man via this medium that is so much a part of his self-presentation .

Searching for specifics

As I tuned in, well past the middle of the webcast, a man was asking a question:

“You were talking about . . . the idea of a world class city,” he said, “and I was wondering if you could do some defining of what that is . . .  are you looking to sort of innovate, or looking to sort of benchmark, or a sort of a combination of the two?”

Sheesh. A well-meaning, but vague, softball question, what would he do with that? Rolley waded in.

“It’s a combination of both . . . It’s a safer city, it’s an open city, it’s a city where there’s  ease of access to educational  opportunity, to economic development and economic wealth creation . . .  it’s a city where you can access arts and culture . .  .  without fear for personal safety, as well as fear of a kind of lack of opportunity  . . .”

More words followed: “like to see 50,000 new jobs . . . it’s goals and objectives, but it’s also being innovative . . . great schools…healthy neighborhoods.” Words and more words.

Then, I noticed the little box where you could type in a question. Some people had entered a few. I could ask him something specific! Now I was dropping the role of reporter and shifting to citizen mode. A reporter would never alter reality this way. Ahh, well, so be it.

Within minutes they were asking him “a question from online,” my typo-ridden question: “Please talk abou tyour position on he Grand Prix Race…”

(This is the Indy-style car race planned for Labor Day weekend that is lauded by city officials as an economic development tool and dumped-on by critics as a noisome boondoggle.)

Rolley’s answer?

“. . . I doubt the numbers . . . I understand economics, I understand statistics and I doubt the numbers that were given to us as relates to the economic impact of the race,” he said. A long riff on this ensued.

“I think that the impact that it has had already in terms of the central business district, those businesses that are there . . . people are frustrated about the work that was done . . . congestion downtown . . .  You cannot have an argument and say ‘We do not have enough resources to do x, y and z’ but find enough resources to do this! Based on — what? That question has not been answered for me . . . . 100,000 people will come here? Based on what? What is your analysis? . . . When are we doing to get 100,000 people to live here, to work here . . .  That’s a long way of saying I don’t feel good about it.”

Wow. Agree with him or disagree with him, he certainly answered the question. And it didn’t matter that it was asked by someone at home in her socks with her feet up on the desk.

((Click on the “otisrolley” below to see the whole webcast yourself. When it opens up, click the small version of the video at the bottom left, to get it in a mode where you can skip ahead and go back, as you wish.))

That felt pretty empowering. Especially with CNN turned on downstairs broadcasting the sound of mayhem in the streets of Egypt, where the government was trying to stifle massive civil unrest by, among other things, shutting down the Internet.

Off to check on dinner and back in time to see Rolley standing in front of that blue background, fielding a question from “Tina” about the Baltimore Development Corporation, the city’s quasi-public development arm.

“I was curious about what role you think the Baltimore Development Corporation would have under your leadership,”  she said. (Audience chuckling nervously here.)

“As a resident, I’m perplexed by their power,” Tina went on. “They seem to be able to make a lot of decisions that they’re not held accountable for. Two examples: creating focus zones that conveniently give a new development, big box development, millions of dollars in tax revenue. And then recently they seem to be in charge of the Inner Harbor landscape where they have the say of the trees that may or may not be removed for the weekend of car racing.”

Rolley’s answer began like this:

“Legally and officially the Baltimore Development Corporation is a subsidiary of the Baltimore Department of Housing and Community Development. (A pregnant pause.)  It does not act as such. The mayor of the City of Baltimore should demand  that it act as such . . . I don’t think that the BDC needs to be shut down, I think it needs to do what it was tasked to do .  . .”

It was a composed-sounding answer. And, whether or not the question was planted, the reply seemed (even when viewed through the computer) to send a buzz around the room – there were gasps, titters and bit of applause. It was as if someone had dared to, not only say the name of Voldemort, but to call him out. Interesting.

Okay, dinner had to be served, but I returned over the weekend to the video, which was available on the web for those willing to slog through it. I was.

More, via the very-small screen, from this stump speech and Q&A:

—  Rolley presented himself as a poor kid who worked hard and made good, saying at one point “I went from a roach-infested apartment in Jersey City to MIT . . . because “I worked my tail off.”

— He really pushed the idea of cutting the city’s property taxes;  it appears to be his centerpiece.

“I think that we are overtaxed in the city of Baltimore…..every different mayor had a different philosophy around issue of vacant properties in our neighborhoods. Mayor Schmoke had a demolition strategy. Mayors O’Malley and Dixon had an acquisition strategy, the interim mayor currently has a combination, with this vacant-to-value initiative.  The reality is that all of them were grossly dependent on the public sector . . . The only way that I feel that we can transform our neighborhoods in terms of dealing with the issue of vacancy is by lowering our real estate property tax rate. If we are to get private dollars necessary to acquire and to rehab those properties, you have to they have to be attractive not just in terms of the neighborhood that they’re in but also attractive to the private investor that is looking at those properties.”

— He talked down big projects like the proposed new Baltimore Arena and talked up support for small businesses and entrepreneurs, particularly technology innovators.

“There is more of a return on investment in investing in small and start-up businesses and investing in our entrepreneurs . . .  we’ve been chasing after Fortune 400 Fortune 500 companies and that is not I think where we get the most bang for the buck in terms of Baltimore.  If I give $10 million to a major corporation to save 100 jobs, nine times out of ten, five years later you find out there’s only 40 of those jobs that really stayed in the city . . . .  But $10 million invested smartly in small start-up businesses, $10 million invested in Greenmount would have a huge return on investment.”

— For this audience, he seemed to be steering clear of big pricey transportation projects such as the Red Line, which he supported as founding member of the Central Maryland Transportation Alliance, and a large-scale ($25 billion) plan to build a comprehensive mass transit system for central Maryland, as he advocated in this Audacious Ideas blog post.

In Canton on Thursday he focused simply on buses, in answer to a question from a Remington resident who complained that it takes him over an hour to get downtown by mass transit.

“There’s a $1.6 bill Red Line that needs to be built and that’s important in terms of the entire system. But there are a lot of improvements that you could make to our bus system that won’t cost $1.6 billion,  that would transform our public transportation in the city very quickly . . .  just using our existing bus inventory, having much more rational stops. It should not take you three hours to get across town. And it’s I think hurting our ability to access educational opportunities for a lot of our kids in terms of attendance rate and employment rate.”

— Then he spun off the transit topic into underlying “issues of race and class.” He hit on that theme several times and clearly wants to be seen as a truth-teller on this subject.

“The problem in Baltimore has been that the majority of the people using public transit are transit-dependent. They don’t own cars and often have not been mobilized and organized  in a way to fight that good fight with MTA, have not felt like the people at City Hall had their back or their front or their sides, because they were being driven around .  I grew up using public transportation. I am more than  comfortable with it, I’m more than comfortable articulating that there are issues of racism and classism in terms of in how we have dealt with public transportation in the city and in the region, calling it out for what it is and saying this is our expectation going forward.”

— Rolley loses his focus at times, often with the easiest questions.

Asked by a questioner:  ”What are you going to ask of citizens, of people, that’s real and functional and says, ‘In order for me to accomplish my goals I need you guys to do X?’”  Rolley couldn’t get my attention with the answer. The woman had been basically saying “Inspire me.”

— He also sprinkles in earthy vernacular once in a while.  He’ll say that officials are telling people something, but  “that’s crap” or “that’s a lie,” or he’ll describe how community associations fight as “beefing” and explain, deadpanning, “that’s a technical planner term!”

— The live webcast experience is only as good as your Internet connection. And mine Thursday wasn’t quite up to the task. Unlike the video version I watched later, the live one froze often, leaving me waiting in frustration for the tiny Rolley on my screen to come back to life and finish his sentence. There was a point (44 minutes and 50 seconds in) when the sound just cut out for a half a minute or so. Once or twice somebody’s coughing blots out a word or two.

— At the end of the event, Troy showed off the technology that he and other Rolley supporters plan to use to raise funds for the 36-year-old candidate. It’s a device made by a new company called Square.

“It allows you to go out into the field with your phone and a credit card reader and swipe a card and take a donation  going directly into the campaign’s account,” Troy said.

— Actually being there would have been better, of course. I could have seen Rolley, seen the faces of the people asking the questions,  chatted with them afterward and perhaps heard them critique Rolley’s claims, or at least react to them. Best of all would have been to hear incumbent Stephanie Rawlings-Blake or other candidates or experts challenge Rolley’s assertions. (We’d all benefit from a full debate on this idea of slashing city property taxes, being pushed heavily by the conservative Maryland Public Policy Institute, lately.)  Still it was, as they say, the next-best-thing-to-being-there. And readers don’t have to rely on my write-up — you can, if you want, view the whole thing yourselves.