CLEVELAND -- Former judge and brutal wife-beater Lance Mason didn’t land a job at Cleveland City Hall as part of some second-chance program for criminals.

The “second-chance” concoction is what’s being peddled by those desperate to justify a hiring that will haunt Mayor Frank Jackson for the rest of his mayoralty. But all the lipstick in the world won’t make that pig look like something it’s not.

Second-chance programs are for the poor kid from Glenville or Old Brooklyn who did six months in prison for a nonviolent drug offense. If run right, they represent good public policy.

But second-chance programs are not for a University of Michigan Law School graduate who in 2014 brutally beat his wife in broad daylight, punching her more than 20 times, slamming her face against a car dashboard, while Lance and Aisha Fraser Mason’s two children watched in horror from the backseat of the same car.

Those two kids get will get no second chance. Every day, for the rest of their lives, they will live with that memory.

Mason served nine months in prison for what he did to his wife that August day in 2014.

In August 2017, the Jackson administration hired him to run the city’s minority business development program. A little more than a year after that, Mason allegedly stabbed Aisha Fraser Mason to death.

This was, at its core, a political hire.

Mason is a product of the local Democratic Party’s Marcia Fudge and Stephanie Tubbs Jones wing. He was extremely close to the late congresswoman and to Fudge, her successor.

That’s why he was hired. And but for Mason’s political connections, it’s impossible to imagine him landing the job Jackson’s administration gave him. That’s especially true given the barbaric nature of his 2014 crime.

Everything about this sordid thing runs contrary to the national awakening over criminal mistreatment of women.

In fact, a Nov. 25 report issued by the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime found that, of about 87,000 women and girls murdered in 2017, about 58 percent died at the hands of a relative or “intimate partner.”

How would the mayor or anyone else defend Mason’s hiring to a roomful of brutally battered females?

Would they have the courage to even try?

It’s 2018 in the real world.

Not at City Hall.

Meanwhile, it’s not too early to worry about where the mayor’s fourth term is headed.

As he was pondering a campaign that would make him Cleveland’s longest-serving mayor, Jackson promised to never become one of those officeholders who stays too long.

“What I don’t want to be is like an old fighter not knowing to get out of the ring,” Jackson told me in the fall of 2016.

If he ever became “an impediment,” Jackson added, “then I’m gone.”

Jackson is an earnest man. Especially now, there are reasons to feel empathy for him as he wrestles with an extraordinarily difficult job.

But thinking beyond the city’s borders has never been part of Jackson’s leadership DNA. And that fourth, four-year term voters graciously rewarded him 13 months ago already seems to lack any sense of urgency or purpose.

More than at any time in the past 40 years, Cleveland now needs a mayor who can inspire, someone who can articulate and help implement a communitywide vision for all of Greater Cleveland’s future. Because absent a truly regional approach to problem solving, any other effort aimed at building a better future would be a colossal waste of time.

The disappearance of good-paying manufacturing jobs made the quality of a region’s workforce more important than ever. And Greater Cleveland’s workforce is utterly ill-equipped to fill 21st-century jobs.

That workforce readiness problem makes meaningful growth all but impossible. It’ is frightening to think where we’d be without our world-class hospitals and the educational and cultural gems of University Circle.

The people who live here deserve better than what they’re getting from their leaders.

Some of those so-called leaders are now behind a phony reform movement that would reduce the size of Cleveland City Council.

That’s not necessarily a defense of council. It’s a recognition that any list of 100 suggestions to make this community a better place wouldn’t include council reduction.

The reduction campaign diverts attention from the region’s real problems. It’s a scheme fathered by people with personal agendas, people who don’t give a damn about this community or its future.

And it’s the last thing Cleveland needs right now.

Brent Larkin was The Plain Dealer's editorial director from 1991 until his retirement in 2009.

To reach Brent Larkin: blarkin@cleveland.com

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