"Nobody really wants to deal with it"

This is your 2017 municipal election cycle right here in one quote.

Reform groups like the Orleans Parish Prison Reform Coalition, which loudly denounces Gusman at many of his public appearances, would seem like natural supporters for a candidate challenging the incumbent. But Yvette Thierry, a steering committee member for the group, said reformers could not find a suitable candidate to step into the race.

“We never had an ideal candidate,” Thierry said. “If they ran against Gusman, they would be inheriting all of his problems, and I guess nobody really wants to deal with it.”

We keep hearing about all the great new grassroots political organizing going on around town in the Age Of Trump.  Having attended some of those gatherings, marches, meetings, Facebook threads, etc. I heard a lot of preaching about how making real change begins at the local level. And yet this major local election is an exclusively insider affair with which the various new movements have little or no interface.  Wonder why that is.