For Baker, it's a blade fashioned from partially treated sewage.
Kriseman's, meanwhile, was wrought with the twisted tongue of one Donald J. Trump.
President Trump struck again Thursday with a series of bizarre tweets referring to the Confederate monuments that are being removed from public spaces as "beauty" that "will be missed." Earlier this week he said there was "blame on both sides" for the violence that happened in Charlottesville over the weekend and that some of the neo-Nazis and KKK members who gathered there were "fine people."
On Thursday, Kriseman railed against those comments.
"By defending symbols of hate and hate groups and referring to white supremacists as 'fine people', Donald Trump has moved the presidency into uncharted territory and has lost the moral authority to govern our nation," Kriseman said in a written statement issued Thursday afternoon.
He noted how his swift action on removing a small Confederate monument was emblematic of the city's overall attitude toward symbols of white supremacy.
"Here in St. Pete, we are committed to being a progressive city that celebrates diversity," he continued. "We will reject people and things that attempt to divide us or reopen old wounds."
It was another occasion for him to criticize his opponent for not condemning anything Trump has said or done.
Baker has long maintained that what goes on in Washington and Tallahassee should have no bearing on city elections, which are technically nonpartisan, even as he remains an active Republican with a large Republican donor base. Kriseman is a Democrat, and Baker's M.O. has been to downplay the significance of party affiliation.
Yet even as he condemns racism and bigotry, Baker has yet to mention Donald Trump by name (and he certainly won't say whether he voted for him in 2016), which Kriseman seems to think ought to be really alarming to the city's voters.
"It's playing with fire to think that voters should ignore the racism and hatred coming out of Washington. Not once, not even one time, has Rick Baker denounced Donald Trump," Kriseman said.
(Baker has spoken out against "racism and hatred," which presumably includes that which is coming out of Washington, but has yet to mention Trump.)
Baker, Kriseman and three of the four other candidates in the race are campaigning heavily in predominantly African-American south St. Pete, which votes heavily Democratic, most of whom probably don't take too kindly to a president calling Nazis and KKK members "fine people."
Yet in his campaign's response to Kriseman's remarks on Thursday, SaintPetersBlog's Mitch Perry writes, rather than come out and bluntly condemn Donald Trump by name, Baker campaign manager Nick Hansen called Kriseman's statement a "desperate" attempt by a "struggling campaign" to deflect from the city's troubled wastewater infrastructure (which the city is currently overhauling) by "playing poisonous national partisan politics."
Kriseman has long maintained that, while party affiliation shouldn't matter when it comes to fixing potholes (or upgrading sewage treatment plants), party affiliation can be an indicator of one's values.
His own positions have gotten him some tough criticism as politics have grown more polarized.
After he removed the small Confederate plaque earlier this week, he said, he heard from people who weren't amused — but he's had it worse during his tenure.
“We've had some people who've called and haven't been very happy" about the monument's removal, he told CL earlier Thursday. "But…quite frankly it hasn't been to the intensity of what I saw after I tweeted about Trump in 2015.”
After he made national headlines by "banning" Trump from St. Petersburg via tweet after Trump (on the campaign trail) notoriously proposed a ban on Muslims, Kriseman said he was at the receiving end of some disturbing messages, including images of his face superimposed onto an image of a concentration camp, with a yellow star Photoshopped on his forehead (Kriseman is Jewish). After the death threats rolled in, a police officer was parked outside his home for a week to protect him, he said.
“That's what this president has emboldened, and that should scare all of us,” Kriseman told CL.
This article appears in Aug 17-24, 2017.