THE AMAZING RACE: In this week’s episode, Sho Dozono continues running for mayor. IMAGE: leahnash.com

Sho Dozono’s “running shoes”—hey yo!—are spotless white Adidas kicks.

They’ll probably get muddy between now and May 20, when the businessman and longtime civic booster faces Commissioner Sam Adams and 11 wholly obscure candidates in Portland’s mayoral primary. That’s because Dozono has stumbled—or been pushed—off the “clean money” path he’d hoped to follow into City Hall.

But Dozono announced Monday he is staying in the race, grubbing off-road for private cash just like Adams (although both candidates have self-imposed a casual pace of $500 per individual contribution, with caveats).

He’s stayimg in after state administrative law Judge David Gerstenfeld shoved him off the public financing path by ruling that Dozono’s acceptance of a $27,000 poll had broken contribution limits for publicly financed candidates (see “Curse of the Zombie,” WW, March 19, 2008).

The March 20 ruling overturned City Auditor Gary Blackmer and cost Dozono $161,000 in public money that he had qualified for by gathering 4,000 signatures and $5 contributions—more than twice as many as needed.

Now, Dozono must raise over $4,000 a day to make up for that lost sum—a tough sprint, even for a businessman with as many friends as Dozono—including Mayor Tom Potter, who famously ran as the $25 (per person) candidate in the May 2004 primary.

“Almost all of you said I couldn’t get 1,500 signatures in three weeks,” Dozono told reporters Monday.

Dozono still has some $26,000 in campaign cash; Adams has about $62,000. But the camera-loving commissioner has already dropped $115,900 on videos, staff, polling—and his legal challenge to Dozono’s public financing.

While Dozono may be off-road, he hasn’t hit quicksand. In conventional terms, Dozono’s $27,000 poll looked, at worst, like a bungled attempt to sneak past elections rules. Or more generously, it showed inattention to detail—especially since, as Adams points out, six other candidates for City Council “have managed to find a way to work with [public financing] with little complication.”

Dozono is trying to recast what was a complex legal drama into a simple David-vs.-Goliath tale, in which a sitting commissioner “who thinks he is entitled to the mayor’s job” spent $10,000 on lawyers to knock out his “only competition.”

“You’re the messenger that’s going to take…my message of positive campaign, the future of our city, and a different way than what has been done in City Hall for the last 15 years,” Dozono told reporters.

That “positive, issue-oriented” campaign lasted all of five minutes. As reporters filed out of Dozono’s HQ, supporters handed them a statement quoting Amie Abbott, Dozono’s peppy, punctuation-challenged campaign manager: “Commissioner Adams championed a flawed system that Sho tried to make work and he receive [sic] specific instructions from the Auditor.… Sam Adams’ legal challenge [to Blackmer’s decision to OK public campaign funds] was never done to protect the system; it was done for his own self-interest.”

Further, Abbott wrote, Adams converted “the [Office] of Transportation into his own self-promotion machine and campaign slush fund.” She’s referring to the $420,000 Adams spent on town halls and mailings to promote his $464 million “Safe, Sound and Green Streets” tax package (see “Defensive Driving,” WW, March 5, 2008).

“This kind of a charge is an indication of the desperation the Dozono campaign finds themselves in at this point, and I’ll leave it there,” says Adams.

And a-off-roading we go.