As a Jersey-born and raised Democrat, it was interesting to watch the difference between the recent performances of the black mayor from the north of my home state (Cory Booker of Newark) and the black mayor from the south of my home state (Michael Nutter of Philadelphia). I come from Central New Jersey, about five miles north of the dividing line for sports and media allegiance. Culturally, I’m a New Yorker living currently in the Philly suburbs. New Jerseyians of the New Yorker persuasion tend to see South Jersey as an alien and backward place, and Philly as a strictly second-rate city. I’ve come to love Philadelphia, if not its sports teams, but I’ll probably never shake a certain arrogance about New York. I’ll always be a Jersey Boy, and, no, that doesn’t include people from the southern half of the state, which might as well be Ohio for topography and culture.
Yet, I am much more attracted to the politics of Michael Nutter than the politics of Cory Booker. I should probably qualify that. I think Cory Booker is a much better mayor than Michael Nutter, judging by the results. I just like how Nutter has no qualms at all about blasting Mitt Romney and the work he did at Bain Capital. And I am nauseated by Cory Booker’s discomfort with the same attacks. Nutter is telling anyone who will listen that Mitt Romney will screw urban-dwellers in a very uncomfortable place, which is the plain truth. When Romney made an appearance at a West Philly school last week, Mayor Nutter let him have it.
“I don’t know why this guy’s here,” said Nutter. “[He] has suddenly somehow found West Philadelphia, somehow now wants to talk about education.”
“If you’re going to talk about education, it’d be nice if you had an education record,” Nutter said. “It’d be nice if you had an education platform. It’d be nice if you seemed to know something about education. You can go wherever you want to go — that’s the beauty of the United States of America. But the man’s got no record to run on.”
As for his time at Bain Capital, the mayor was blunt:
“Mitt Romney’s economic philosophy for a short term profit for himself and his investors ahead of long term growth for the companies bought and sold were devastating for the communities where he and his partners invested,” said Nutter, who then went over the numbers: Claiming Romney bought a company in Marion, Indiana in 1994, fired the workers, hired them back at a lower cost, then ultimately fired them all again.
Nutter called Romney a “corporate buyout specialist,” whose specialty included buying companies, bankrupting them, laying off workers and shipping jobs overseas.
Cory Booker, on the other hand, said that he was personally offended by attacks on ‘private equity” before he retracted his comments and said that attacks on Romney’s work at Bain Capital were fair game.
I hate to say it, but these different attitudes about the financial sector may partially explain why Booker is a better mayor. Booker understands how thin-skinned the money folks on Wall Street are about any kind of criticism. To be successful as mayor of Newark, Booker needs those folks to invest in his city. And it won’t hurt to have them as friends should he pursue higher office. That’s something former Philadephia Mayor Ed Rendell seems to have internalized, and it helps explain why he managed to become the first Philadelphia politician to become governor since the late 19th-Century.
Booker and Rendell are clueless about the politics, but they’re more successful politicians than Michael Nutter will ever be. This is why the Democratic Party can never become the party of the 99%. You can’t alienate investors and simultaneously do the best you can for your constituents. Mayors, in particular, are reliant on Wall Street, as they generally have limited budgets and rely on state and federal legislatures they don’t control for supplemental funding.
To fix the problem with money in politics, we have to be cognizant of two things. First, people with money to invest will always be very important and very powerful. Their power needs to be limited, but no party can govern effectively by treating them as unvarnished enemies. Second, the movement for reform must come from outside the party system because everyone who has been elected has, by definition, learned to succeed in the system as it exists. Their motivation to change rules that they’ve mastered is always going to be quite limited. Bad rules make for bad Democrats. Better rules will make for better Democrats (and Republicans, for that matter).
Still, I love Michael Nutter’s attitude on the campaign trail. That’s one area where he has something to teach to Booker and Rendell.
People with money to invest are powerful to the extent that they can differentially withhold those investments. This affects not just electoral politics but also public interest advocacy.
And that makes reform from the outside through the current “professional” channels so very difficult to achieve.
It is instructive that both Nutter and Booker have evicted their local Occupy movements. And the police brutality involved in both cases was not minimal.
Given this, how is this change from outside the system going to happen?
I would describe the police’s eviction of Occupy Philly as involving no brutality, let alone minimal. I think one woman was injured by a horse, but that’s about it.
Tarheel, you’re asking the question nobody outside Occupy and a few lonesome bloggers wants to touch or even be seen in the same room with — not pols, not the media, not pop economists, nobody. When you ask the question, do you acknowledge that it is identical to “by what scenario can the system be brought down”? Do you see any “reform” that can rein in the hydra that controls the economic, tax, political, judicial, electoral, media realities right down to the municipal level? Is there any reason to spend time or energy trying to modify one of the heads when the others will simply rescue it?
Would a realistic person find any path to real change, to democracy, outside a commitment to revolution, in whatever form that might take?
Are you kidding me? Nutter is a friend of the 1%, just like Booker is. After all, both want to privatize public schools. And that’s just the start. Both are New Dems/DLC’ish. I think Nutter is smarter in one respect. When push comes to shove, Nutter will back the 1%. He’s just banking on them to realize campaign season has started. Booker can’t seem to get that through his head. Also, the Democrats gave up being the party of the 99% long before Roberts was confirmed to the Supreme Court.
Of course he is. Or was.
But you need to take your analysis deeper. Mayor Rendell was nearly universally seen as a very successful mayor. He left office with high approval ratings and was much beloved by the city. Nutter had a totally different economy to work with, but he’s not popular and not beloved by anyone. I would say that Rendell was by far the better friend of the 1%. There are many lessons to be learned from that. But when you are governing a city that is a quarter empty because of job loss, you can’t get very far by alienating business owners and investors. It might make people feel good, but it won’t reinvigorate the local economy.
But when you are governing a city that is a quarter empty because of job loss, you can’t get very far by alienating business owners and investors.
But you also need tax money to run the city. And the city is just more than Center City and Rittenhouse Square. Of course Rendell was more beloved. One, his mouth didn’t have much of a filter, especially when camera crews were around. Two, people could see themselves tailgating(eating .. drinking .. you name it) at the Eagles games with “Easy” Ed. That goes a long way in the city, and this area.
I think the reliance of politics on money has always been a hidden flaw in the democratic process the world over, not just in America. President Obama’s going after small donations from ordinary people is a very novel solution to this dilemma, but the fact is that that’s not where 90% of the money is, and everyone knows it. So the attraction to follow in Obama’s footsetps on that is not really there so far.
Part of the problem with both these mayors, and all mayors and governors, is the federal system itself. With the federal government leaving local governments to fend for themselves, a good official has no choice but to abase themselves before the undeserving rich, begging for some crumbs from their tables, as Booker so shamefully demonstrated. The alternative is to raise local/state taxes and fall behind in the race to the bottom to other places willing to cut even more social/education/infrastructure outlays in order to create a “friendlier business climate”. The federalist dream has become a nightmare with no escape hatch.
I understand what Booker thought he was doing (besides a misguided and stupid attempt to grab the pulpit to promote his own personal fortunes) but still despise him for it. I can’t blame local officials for bending over before the unelected plutocracy, but there is an alternative: just STFU about national politics.