Hey!! This is the argument I’ve been making with progressives since last winter.
Many Obama partisans detected a vague racial appeal in the anti-urban framing. But the attacks also highlighted an overlooked aspect of the Illinois senator’s rise: that in a country forever in thrall to its frontier and small-town heritage, he is the rare White House contender who really is a creature of the big city.
This raises two questions: Is Obama’s ascent a further sign — on top of volatile gas prices, plummeting home values in the exurbs and recent population upticks even in Baltimore and Newark — that our cities are back and that the country is making peace with its non-agrarian side? And would a big-city president address as never before the problems of our urban cores — blighted housing, shoddy public transit, dismal schools?
I know Ronald Reagan lived in Bel-Air, but c’mon, we haven’t had an urban president in memory. The closest is probably John F. Kennedy, who counted Boston as a home of sorts. America doesn’t elect urban politicians to national office. Our presidents are supposed to live in log cabins, chop wood, clear brush, that sort of thing. What have they known of the pulse of the city, the art, the crime, the poverty, the desperation?
It’s interesting to see how Obama has avoided the pitfalls of being an urban politician. It helped that he first became a U.S. Senator, representing all of Illinois. But his Urban Policy, while aggressive, has been downplayed in this election. And when he does discuss it, he frames it as a Metro policy, inclusive of the suburbs.
But casting Obama’s urban agenda in metropolitan terms also has political benefits. Although the country has re-embraced the city, its political battleground remains the suburbs, said Robert Lang, a demographer at Virginia Tech’s Metropolitan Institute. If elected, he says, Obama should find ways to address urban problems in a suburban context — focusing not just on West Baltimore or North Philadelphia, say, but also on suburban North Las Vegas, which has more concentrated poverty than Las Vegas proper. The same goes for spending on public transit. “If he frames something like that as being about metro competitiveness, he can do a lot,” Lang said. “It should be, ‘Hey, suburban guy sitting in traffic, would you like transit?’ instead of ‘I’m going to take your money and spend it in places you don’t visit.'”
It’s just another demonstration of Obama’s instinct to bring people together around common interests, rather than pit them against each other in a battle for resources. People that are expert at division, don’t understand how the new game is played.
Casting city issues as “metro” ones rankles some advocates of the urban poor, who see it as a way to gloss over the despair that remains very much an inner-city phenomenon in many metro areas. The Rev. Jesse Jackson acerbically suggested that Obama was playing down urban poverty to appeal to whites.
That is a perfect example of the pinched vision of Old School progressivism, and of why Obama’s appeal is so much greater than Jesse Jackson’s. Creating policies that help both the suburban commuter and the inner-city guy trying to get to his job in the burbs…that’s the kind of bigger-picture thinking Obama is known for. That is how you create a progressive consensus for change. After all, Obama’s Urban Policy is better than anything we’ve seen since LBJ.
Obama hasn’t entirely abandoned older conceptions of urban uplift. His platform includes Democratic standbys such as restoring funding to the Community Development Block Grant program, which Republicans deride as a money pit; expanding the earned-income tax credit; investing in job training; creating an affordable-housing trust fund; paying for more cops on the street. He talks of creating 20 “promise neighborhoods” modeled on the Harlem Children’s Zone, where an intensive application of services — from prenatal care on up — aims to lift an entire neighborhood…
…a big investment in infrastructure, including mass transit and inter-city rail, that he now also bills as a jobs measure; a network of public-private business incubators; [and] new green-technology industries…
Not to mention, creating a White House Office of Urban Policy ‘that will goad governments within metro areas into working together.’
We shouldn’t be surprised to see an old south-side community organizer thinking seriously about urban issues and urban poverty. Obama’s genius is to package it in a way that doesn’t pit people against each other. That’s why I have all along seen Obama as a true stealth progressive. But he does things his own way. A lot of people, like Jesse Jackson, don’t understand it.
