If you watch the evening news tonight, this is the picture you are likely to see, a photo of a Kincaid for Mayor sign on top of a burned out home in Council District 2. But here’s the kicker: It was distributed to the media by Mayor Bernard Kincaid. If you’re waiting for the clever twist, there is none, except that it is the first campaign gaffe of this election year.

Here’s the story.

A few weeks ago, Councilor Carol Duncan (the councilor formerly known as Reynolds) finds a Kincaid campaign sign in the city right of way, she says. This was odd, as the mayor has made many public pronouncements against the practice. The usual sound byte from him is that “you can’t be the chief lawmaker by first being a law breaker.”

Duncan doesn’t like the mayor much anymore. She helped him campaign once, but since then their relationship has soured. Several years ago she was bargaining for a seat on the airport authority. The mayor taped a voice mail she left for him and played it for the media. His point was that Duncan was practicing political extortion, but to the press and just about everyone else, it appeared that Kincaid had lost his cool and pulled a juvenile political prank on the councilor. (Keep all this in your head, because we’ll be coming back to it shortly.) Many folks at City Hall, including some of his own staffers recognize the stunt as one of Kincaid’s worst mistakes: He took an eager ally and turned her into an enemy.

Since then, Duncan and Kincaid have often been at odds, culminating last year when he removed her from the airport board, a seat she prized since the airport is in her district. Instead, he gave the seat to Steven Hoyt. Duncan vowed then to work against the mayor this election.

And then she finds his sign in the city right of way.

According to Duncan, she picked up the sign and placed it on top of the burnt out heap of a house you see in the picture. She says that she reported the house, on 73 Street and Oporto Madrid Boulevard, for demolition and removal more than two years ago. The mayor had done nothing about it.

The sign sat perched atop the burnt house for about a week, she says. Last Thursday she took the sign to City Hall and placed it next to the mayor’s car in the basement parking area. She asked her assistant to email the mayor about the sign. Tuesday afternoon, she showed me the email her assistant had sent as well as a reply from the mayor, thanking her.

Then comes Tuesday. During the mayor’s comments at the beginning of the City Council meeting, he tears into Duncan for putting the sign on top of the house. He then accuses her of putting his signs in the basement. To many of those present, including Councilor Duncan, it wasn’t clear what basement he was talking about. Many thought he meant the basement of the burned out house in the picture. They get into a shouting match, in which she calls him a liar .

But we’re not done yet.

Before the media in his after-council press conference, Kincaid produces still frames from the parking garage security tape showing Duncan removing the sign from her car, putting it next to his car and then leaving the garage.

Kincaid tried to insinuate that there was something untoward happening, but what was truly amazing is that the mayor didn’t seem to hear the echo of the tape-playing incident from six years ago. He took what was a largely unnoticed bush league political stunt by a city councilor and turned it into a lead story for the evening news, replete with a photo of his campaign sign on top of neighborhood blight.

If he had only worn his old “Mayor” baseball cap, it could have been the perfect gaffe.

— Kyle Whitmire