Eric Bidwell, the dreadlocked T-shirt designer who ran for San Diego mayor, got a lot of support from a campaign manager he never paid – the mayor's own.

Michael McSweeney flattered Bidwell, comparing him to Barack Obama and complimenting his 1969 Dodge Travco RV. (“Still looks in good shape.”)

He helped the 26-year-old get signed up for mayoral forums and let him know logistical details. (“You'll be center stage!”)

And most of all, he tried to get Bidwell to attack Mayor Jerry Sanders' chief rival, businessman Steve Francis. (“You can have a field day ripping him to shreds.”)

The extraordinary relationship the two struck up is documented in a series of e-mails and instant messages Bidwell gave The San Diego Union-Tribune this week.

Bidwell exposed his coaching on live television, and a profusely apologetic McSweeney resigned the next day, saying he had acted inappropriately.

Sanders was re-elected despite the blunder by McSweeney, who was dismissed as a loose cannon. But an exchange in one of the newly released messages suggests McSweeney may have had approval for his actions.

Photo: Crissy Pascual
Dreadlocked T-shirt designer Eric Bidwell found himself in the middle of the battle between San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders (left) and Sanders' chief rival, Steve Francis.

Eric Bidwell, the "revolutionary mayor" candidate, is moving on to his next big thing.

"I'm thinking about hitchhiking to Chile to visit a girlfriend down there for the summer," he told Union-Tribune reporter Ron Powell. "I'm going to take a little vacation."

Of the campaign, he said, "It was a great learning process. I had no clue where it was going to go or how it was going to turn out. But I was really pleased with the way it turned out. I think I'm more disappointed in our political system and community participation than I was before. It just makes me want to fight to make it better even more."

How about a City Council run?

SAN DIEGO (AP) -- A 26-year-old T-shirt designer could turn San Diego's mayoral election on its head.

Eric Bidwell, who's running on a self-described ''revolutionary'' platform, is the dark horse in Tuesday's race against incumbent Jerry Sanders and millionaire businessman Steve Francis. Bidwell may draw enough support to force a runoff between the two Republicans; the top two finishers will have to face off in November if no one wins a majority in the nonpartisan contest.

Without spending a cent, the dreadlocked Bidwell has created some of the campaign's memorable moments. At one of the final debates before election, he told television viewers that Sanders' campaign manager gave him a script of ''gnarly'' talking points to trash Francis. The campaign manager promptly resigned.

To those of us who remember the spirit of protest in Ocean Beach in the 1960s, [mayoral candidate] Eric Bidwell is a breath of fresh air. By playing along with the Sanders campaign and publicly exposing its attempt to corrupt him, he revealed the true Sanders administration in a most powerful way. Maybe he can wake up the apathetic public to what is really going on in our city government.

Mr. Bidwell has displayed the conscience to know right from wrong, the smarts to beat Sanders at his own game and the guts to actually do it. Well done!

The disarming personality of Eric Bidwell, left, is enough to bring a laugh to Mayor Jerry Sanders during a recent mayoral race debate co-sponsored by the Peninsula Beacon. The unconventional Bidwell, 26, frequently hangs out in Ocean Beach.

No suit, no tie and no home: Eric Bidwell is as far from the typical mayoral candidate as one can get.

To Bidwell, the idea of voting for the incumbent backed by establishment and power brokers that got San Diego into its current mess and a wealthy businessman throwing millions of dollars away for a job that pays a little more than $100,000 just seems wrong.

While the majority of media attention on the race for mayor of San Diego has focused on the hostile contest between Jerry Sanders and Steven Francis, who badmouth each other at every opportunity, Bidwell has brought something to the mayor’s race that the two frontrunners seem to be seriously lacking: personality.

Fringe candidate Eric Bidwell stole the show at the last two San Diego mayoral forums by outing Mayor Jerry Sanders' campaign manager (now former campaign manager) for trying to script a Bidwell attack on businessman Steve Francis.

Either the coaching worked or Bidwell's appetite for the attack has grown since last week. At Tuesday's forum, in front of a group called Progressive Grandmothers for Political Action, he was relentless.

His opening remarks featured stock lines panning Sanders (a no-show Tuesday) and Francis, but then Bidwell engaged Francis like no other candidate has to date during these forums, to the point where the moderator told him (politely) to pipe down.

Long shot coached to discredit Francis

SAN DIEGO – Before yesterday, long-shot mayoral candidate Eric Bidwell was known around town, if he was known at all, for his dreadlocks, his T-shirt art and his habit of drawing laughs at debates that would be duller without him.

Now he's known for blowing the whistle on the shenanigans that made Mayor Jerry Sanders' campaign manager, Michael McSweeney, resign.

Bidwell, 26, held up a piece of paper toward the end of Thursday night's televised debate and said, “Lastly, I'd like to address something that is pretty gnarly, which is this monologue that was actually written by the mayor's campaign manager and handed to me this evening bashing Steve Francis.”

Yesterday, Bidwell added in an interview that he met privately with McSweeney at the Sanders campaign headquarters late one night a few weeks ago to review a half-inch-thick report on Francis and discuss how to disparage him.

Bidwell said he went public Thursday because he had the proof in writing for people to believe him that the “underhanded weirdness” was true. The remarks he was handed blasted Francis as a hypocrite – “says one thing and does another” – and his 54-page vision plan as “a complete waste of paper.”