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Mayor Fri Jun 29 2012
Life in the Neoliberal City: Post-Partisanship Wins!
America's big cities (and major metropolitan areas) are the laboratories of policy, if states are the laboratories of democracy. In metro areas and cities, universities, professional organizations, and trade associations and economic alliances are capable of exerting outsize influence and try to implement to approaches to social and economic problems that, again, are more easily identified and addressed because of high population concentrations in relatively small geographic areas.
Tell the nation! Draw near all ye with David Brooks columns bookmarked for other than hate reading purposes: Chicago and America's big cities have achieved post-partisanship! The very post-partisanship our President talked about on the campaign trail. As the post-partisanship machine takes firmer hold of our cities, it will move upward, capillary-attraction speed, to the states, until finally--finally!--we achieve the post-partisanship paradise pundits prattle on and on about.
What does that post-partisanship look like? Let Mick Dumke and Ben Joravsky tell you:
Welcome to part two in our ongoing series on the mayor's millionaire's club, in which we pore over the mayor's daily appointment schedule with the aim of shedding light on how the mayor prioritizes his time--and his far-reaching connections...
[O]nce again, we found that his days were loaded with rich guys, campaign donors, powerful contractors, union busters, charter-school supporters, City Hall insiders, aldermanic brownnosers, and other favor seekers.
But during these three months Emanuel found time for another type of visitor: major funders of conservative attacks on President Obama. As such, the mayor's calendar offers a glimpse of what passes for bipartisanship in Chicago--and shows the ways in which wealth and access, at least as much as party identity or ideology, have come to command the attention of politicians, leaving everyday people out of the conversation.
Meanwhile...
As a whole, appointments with neighborhood groups or community leaders were largely missing from the mayor's schedule. [Amisha] Patel [Director of the Grassroots Collaborative] says her group's requests for a meeting with the mayor have been ignored. She notes that Emanuel continues to find job subsidies for profitable corporations and developers at the same time he's cutting library hours, neighborhood services, and public-sector positions. "Let's talk about job creation but let's do it in a full way."
In fact, like many up-and-coming Republican stars, the mayor has shown a willingness--some would say an eagerness--to take on organized labor, especially the teachers union. He's also an avowed supporter of charter schools, paying them about as many visits, and arguably more attention, as he does regular public schools.
Post-partisanship means staying away from the organized (and thus cantankerous) disaffected and powerless, and hew to the already powerful and wealthy who must know what's best.
If this were just a Chicago phenomenon, it may be dismissed as yet another quirk of Chicago's sui generis politics.
It's not though! Phew, right? Post-partisanship lives to fight another day! In the form of...
Do liberals love the Manhattan Institute? Do they favor the use of vouchers to take resources from public schools? Are they fans of the Wal-Mart Walton family? The answer to those questions is usually an unqualified no. Why then do liberals adore Cory Booker?
Cory Booker made a name for himself four years ago when he nearly defeated Sharpe James, five-term incumbent Mayor of Newark, New Jersey. That mayoral race was not the beginning of Booker's foray into public life.
Cory Booker first came to public attention with a speech at a Manhattan Institute luncheon in 2000. The Manhattan Institute is a leading right wing think tank boasting conservative pundits like William Kristol and Peggy Noonan among its Board members. It gets huge amounts of money to spread the conservative agenda and doesn't give the floor to anyone who isn't a disciple.
Mike Bloomberg! Tom Barrett! Indianapolis' Bart Peterson, Seattle's Mike McGinn, and so many more!
We know now what post-partisanship really looks like. It looks like Mayor Emanuel's visitor logs.
