Mr. Mayor, really?

It's all a misunderstanding, blown out of proportion by the media.
That's the standard explanation by Stockton (CA) Mayor Anthony Silva for any misstep he makes. He made a couple Feb. 27 when he went to Lincoln Unified's Lincoln Elementary School to participate in the annual Rotary Read-In.

Anthony Silva at the end of his 2013 State of the City address

Each year for 23 years, hundreds of business, community and political leaders have participated in the Read-In. Participants show up at area elementary schools to read books to classes of giddy kids, answer a few questions and leave the book behind for the school library.
It's a lot of fun for the readers -- and the kids always seem to enjoy being able to delay doing math or their own reading. Fun and innocent. Until Thursday.
It turns out, Silva didn't bother reading to the kiddos. Instead he told his "life story," he said, which we presume he thought would be much more interesting to a gaggle of third- and fifth-graders than anything Dr. Seuss may have written. And maybe it was. But was it appropriate for the mayor to tell the youngsters about his anti-condom vote as a student member of the Lincoln Unified board decades before? Was it appropriate for him to describe the wound a teacher suffered in the 1989 Cleveland Elementary School massacre as being "large enough to place a video camera inside."?
It's all been blown out of proportion, Silva said, especially by The Record. But Lincoln School Principal Scott Tatum apparently felt disturbed enough about it to send explanatory emails out the next day to parents of the students visited by Silva. Even for Silva, it would have been a stretch to suggest Tatum lacks a sense of proportionality (or propriety).
Silva has a storied track record when it comes to off-the-cuff remarks, although he defends his condom comments as "a passing reference and age appropriate." He also said he "will refrain from using that word again in my future speeches."
Good idea, Mr. Mayor, especially at elementary schools.