Mentally ill or not, he dreams of being mayor

By Ellen Barry, Globe Staff, 10/19/2003

NEW BEDFORD -- Even with the telltale signs of his recent psychiatric hospitalization -- the trembling hands, the five o'clock shadow at lunchtime -- Raimundo Delgado is a natural campaigner.

"Those eyes," he tells an office worker on her lunch break outside City Hall. "Those eyes should be famous!" She looks up and giggles, and he announces his candidacy without even breaking his stride. To a lanky man wearing an African-mask pendant, Delgado calls out in Portuguese, "A luta continua! The struggle continues!" and the man grins in recognition and waves a floppy two-fingered victory sign in the air.

A husky puppy at his heel, a spray of leaves and flowers tucked into his breast pocket, Delgado proceeds to cruise slowly around New Bedford -- so slowly that he is sometimes overtaken by pedestrians -- in a car marked "MAYOR."

New Bedford's elections have always had their share of outsider candidates. But this month, the preliminary race for Mayor Fred Kalisz's job brought out the most unorthodox slate yet: Aside from Delgado, who openly discusses his diagnosis of bipolar disorder, Kalisz faced the commander of a local VFW post; a man who lives without a phone or electric power; a seafood salesman who has run for mayor seven times; and a man with schizophrenia who lives in a group home.

As election day approached, the most bizarre campaign promises came from Delgado, 50, who told the local paper he planned to "create a city underwater" and "free the dogs, the sheep, the goats" if elected. On the night the votes were counted, he was committed against his will to a psychiatric ward at St. Luke's Hospital, a fact that he publicized.

Although many observers describe Delgado as a well-liked political fixture, a dreamer like Don Quixote, others say his run for mayor has become painful to watch. His campaign has posed a strange dilemma in local politics: Friends and family wondered why the local talk-radio station would put him on the air in an irrational state, or why the New Bedford Standard-Times published the details of his psychiatric hospitalization, or why the strange spectacle was allowed at all.

Meanwhile, on the streets of New Bedford, he was winning over voters. Kalisz won handily in the mayoral preliminary, but in the race for city councilor at large, in which he was also a candidate, Delgado received 1,100 votes, enough to appear on the November ballot. Released from St. Luke's, Delgado returned to his campaign, with its platform of dismantling the sea wall in the city's south end and growing a tropical forest on what is presently Route 18. Campaign posters, purchased with Delgado's private money, rushed by on city buses.

"There's a tremendous amount of discomfort because the man is in pain. Anyone who has been in this situation knows what his family and friends are going through," said Ken Hartnett, editor of the New Bedford Standard-Times. "The trouble we have here is that he is a candidate and he's very active and you have to alert people to some of the realities."

On Thursday, the day after he was released from St. Luke's, Delgado had a backlog of political business waiting for him. Striding through City Hall with the puppy, Socrates, at the end of a leash, Delgado promised a $10,000 raise to numerous city employees. He dropped off papers demanding a recount of the preliminary mayoral election, in which he received 215 votes as a write-in candidate. He also requested political asylum in Portugal.

Although some observers poked fun at the idiosyncratic mayoral race, with its anemic 20 percent voter turnout, others saw it as a sad moment in the political history of New Bedford, where fewer and fewer qualified people are prepared to challenge a strong incumbent. Unemployment reached a high of 9.1 percent early this year, almost twice the national average. Michael Zaritt, a Vietnam War veteran who has run for mayor in the last 11 elections, spends his days collecting bottles and cans for supplemental income.

"If these people had jobs, they wouldn't be running for all these offices," said Zaritt, who won 3 1/2 percent of the vote.

In the midst of this bleakness, Delgado drives around with crisp purpose, his car piled with wilting flowers and kibble. In a handsome French-blue shirt and creased khakis, he picked marigolds outside a service station for a bystander's buttonhole, explaining why children would be better educated if New Bedford emptied its schools and sent them all to the public library. He approached a young man and explained that a victory for Delgado would give every citizen a voice in City Hall. "How old are you?" he asked the man, who mumbled that he was 29.

Delgado lit up and gripped his hand. "We need a 29-year-old mayor!"

In the office of New Bedford's election commission, chairwoman Maria Tomasia stared at Delgado stonily when he asked for a receipt for a 40-cent copying fee. She evicted the puppy, charging that it had urinated in her office. In an interview later, she said Delgado's mental state had declined precipitously during this campaign, and that his request to recount 10,000 votes in the mayoral election, when he received 2 percent of the votes, is "frivolous."

"He's been very good for the past seven years," Tomasia said. "He gets a little attention and then goes off the deep end."

In fact, his political resume contains some conspicuous accomplishments. A veteran teacher of French and Spanish at Ashland Middle School, he traveled to the island of East Timor, a former Portuguese colony, on a "fact-finding mission" in the midst of a 1991 crackdown by the Indonesian government. And three years ago, after more than two decades of lobbying by Delgado, Representative Barney Frank proposed to amend the US Constitution so that naturalized citizens would be allowed to run for the presidency. Delgado's proposal has recently taken on new life this week, as legislators mull candidacies by such figures as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Madeleine Albright.

In the midst of these successes, Delgado said, a deep rift has grown between him and his family over the question of whether he is mentally ill. He insists he is not, although he has been on sick leave from his teaching job. He left the hospital with large bottles of psychiatric medications, but would not say whether he intends to take them. "I am a man. I am a human. I demand my dignity," he said. "They refuse to give me the respect -- that I am a thinker, that I am a philosopher, that I am Socrates."

When Delgado asked to spend the night in his spare room, Antonio Casimiro, a 65-year-old retired baker, heaved an enormous sigh and looked at him skeptically. Delgado had called him from the hospital, asking for a copy of Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past" in the original French. In covering Delgado's campaign, the press, Casimiro said, is "feeding on the misery of others." But Delgado was thinking about other subjects. He said he was leaving for the Azores, and challenging Mitt Romney for the 2006 gubernatorial election. Nobody knew if it was true. Ellen Barry can be reached at barry@globe.com