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You were wondering, weren’t you, about what Richard Florida thought of our recent mayoral election? Since Mayor Luke Ravenstahl won by nearly two-to-one, everyone’s been asking: “What did Richard Florida, the former CMU prof and ‘creative class’ guru, make of this election while pontificating about knowledge workers from Toronto?”
I regret to say he was saddened. “[T]he political machine continues to hold sway,” he laments on his blog, http://creativeclass.com. The Republican candidate, Mark DeSantis, was “the change-agent Pittsburgh needed to galvanize the region’s forward motion. … He believes in markets, innovation and diversity — a true 3T thinker and doer.”
That sound you just heard was city voters slapping their foreheads. “A 3T thinker and doer? Damn! We could have totally galvanized our region’s forward motion!”
I single out Florida because he offers an (admittedly tinny) echo of what a lot of people are saying. On talk radio, in online debates, and the occasional City Paper column, the verdict is the same:
City-dwellers are resistant to change and hidebound by tradition. Pittsburgh could be such a great city — if it weren‘t for all the damn Pittsburghers.
But maybe the ones who need a change agent are the change agents themselves. What, after all, has changed since the last mayoral election in 2005?
DeSantis ran a campaign much like the one City Councilor Bill Peduto — another favorite of Florida and college-educated “progressives” — conducted that year. DeSantis, too, touted issues like city-county consolidation with an earnestness offset by a technocratic, diffident campaign style. (One of the angriest zingers I saw DeSantis deliver, for example, concerned the Request For Proposals process.)
So like Peduto, DeSantis polled best in affluent East End communities, and got trounced everywhere else — especially in black neighborhoods, where DeSantis lost by margins approaching 10-to-one.
Which is no surprise. The DeSantis campaign didn’t really start until September. His party has scapegoated African-Americans on the national level, and ignored them on the local level, for decades. Why would those voters trust him? This isn’t the first time a white guy has shown up in the Hill District, making promises before an election.
DeSantis did his best. But it would be the height of arrogance — an arrogance I’m pretty sure DeSantis never felt — to think he could overcome that history on his own.
The sad part, actually, is that DeSantis’ campaign may have been the year’s bright spot for Allegheny County Republicans. The GOP didn’t even run candidates for county chief executive or for three other countywide seats. The winner of its designated at-large county council seat, attorney Charles McCullough, is under a cloud of allegations surrounding his use of the money in a client’s estate.
No one, you’ll notice, is rolling their eyes about the corroded “machine” that gave us McCullough.
So the “change agent” facing Ravenstahl in 2009 will have to be a Democrat. Some reformers put their hopes in Peduto, who called off a run against Ravenstahl earlier this year, or in City Councilor-elect Patrick Dowd, who bested another political scion, Len Bodack, in racially and economically diverse District 7. Personally, I think it’s too soon for Dowd — and too late for Peduto, whose abortive run disheartened many supporters.
I’d love to see a liberal, African-American female as the reform candidate, but county Recorder of Deeds Valerie McDonald Roberts no longer lives in the city. So the best bet may be city controller-elect Michael Lamb. When he ran for mayor in 2005, Lamb beat Peduto and the late Bob O’Connor in some southern neighborhoods. The North Side belongs to Ravenstahl. But East End voters, I’m guessing, will support Lamb sooner than South Hills voters will support Peduto.
But in a way, the candidate matters less than the people rallying behind him (or her). For two elections now, local “progressives” have waited impatiently for the city to catch up with their own beliefs. A lot of progressives I know have little trouble crossing party lines. They have a harder time crossing the East End’s borders and finding out why, for example, city-county consolidation doesn’t set everyone’s hearts aflutter.
I make no excuses for Ravenstahl: In some quarters he was probably helped by his indifference (at best) to women and GLBT issues. That’s reason enough to challenge him. But let’s not make excuses for ourselves, either. Because as long as we do, the whining about “dumb yinzers” will be just one more thing that never changes around here.
This article appears in Nov 15-21, 2007.
My take on this is that many Pittsburghers are “we’ll believe it when we see it” types. This causes a problem, because the campaigns that most of the more progressive candidates run are just the opposite–they want people to believe without having much tangible proof that they can deliver.
What the city needs is someone to start making things happen before they run for office. Unfortunately, it takes time to build that kind of track record. But what the people of Pittsburgh need is someone that they can sink their teeth into (in a good way!). Until then, it will continue to be the status quo.
I think that we have to face the fact that leadership involves making difficult decisions for the greater good and we simply don’t want to elect leaders. And when we do, they fail to lead.
Jim Roddey, for example, was a breath of fresh air. Not a career gubernatorial candidate he brought executive management experience to the office of Chief Executive. But then he failed to do the courageous (and necessary) thing which was to create an equitable property tax system which provided sufficient revenues to run the County.
Instead, he left his successor with a “surprise” $40 million deficit, though why the chief bean counter for the County should have been surprised is a bit troubling in and of itself. Now that bean head is Chief Executive, he has his sights so set on being governor that he won’t do the courageous thing by proposing an equitable solution to the County’s budget shortfall. (Never mind that he must have been well aware of the excessive costs of the Port Authority for many years but did nothing about it.) Instead, the burden is ultimately going to fall on the backs of hospitality workers such as wait staff and bar tenders, most of whom make far less than minimum wage as a base salary and, therefore, will likely see diminishing revenues from tips.
All this because he won’t ask property owners to pay an average of $150 more a year in taxes in order to maintain essential county services!
What a strange world we live in when the Democrats are holding the line on taxes.
Even more disturbing is the turnaround on big government. Here is a Democrat who, in two terms of office is prepared to lay off/buy out a total of 1300 employees (many of whom had the most experience of anyone in their offices). He gets away with it, in part, because he plays into the Conservative mantra that big government is bad and big because it is inefficient, and that most government workers are underqualified and overpaid. This is a Democrat talking!?!
The fact is that the cost of everything has gone up. Steel is three times what it was 10 years ago, concrete, oil and aluminum are all more expensive. Someone needs to level with the residents of the County that the same level of service is going to cost more because that is simply the way things are.
Sure, there are inefficiences that exist in the current system. But the potential savings through the elimination of these inefficiencies is far less than what the cost will be to maintain and improve services. And without investment in our infrastructure, which is not money-losing stadiums, we will further continue into the economic slump that the region is facing.
Ten years ago, I could fly directly to Paris, London, Rome and Frankfurt, as well as to most major cities in the US. Today, there are no regular direct flights from Pittsburgh to any of these cities.
That should tell us that we are heading in the wrong direction and have been for a long while.