Show ama bama running as a metropolitan leader Teader Alec MacGillis The Washington Post Republicans looking to frame Sen Barack as a candidate outside the mainstream recently settled on a new tack deriding him as an out of touch and corrupt urbanite At the GOP convention last month Rudy Giuliani the former mayor of quite a large city chided the Democratic nominee for minimizing Sarah Palin's Palms experience as mayor of tiny Vasilla Wasilla Alaska Im sorry that Barack feels that her home town isn't cosmopolitan enough The rest of Sen John McCains McCain's as a product of the Chicago political machine And two weeks ago Palin hailed pro America small towns at a stop in North Carolina Many partisans detected a vague racial appeal in the urban anti-urban framing But the attacks also highlighted an overlooked aspect of the Illinois senators senator's rise that in a country forever in thrall to its frontier and smalltown smalltown smalltown small small- town heritage he is the rare White House contender who really is a creature of the big city This raises two questions Is ascent a further sign on top of volatile gas prices plummeting home values in the and recent population even in Baltimore and Newark that our cities are back and that the country is making pe peace ce with its non-agrarian non side And would a city big-city president address as never before the problems of ou our r urban cores blighted d I housing shoddy public transit dismal schools partisans answer both questions in the affirmative with a key qualifier The Democratic nominee they say should be viewed less as the first urban candidate in a longtime long longtime longtime time than as the first begin ital metropolitan end ital candidate a semantic distinction suggesting that the urban resurgence has a ways to go The United States long ago became an urban- urban suburban nation with two- two thirds of the population now residing in its largest metropolitan areas Yet recent presidents have reflected the national mythology that we are all Jeffersonian yeoman farmers the Democrats hailed from Plains Ga and Hope Ark and the Republicans were happiest on the ranch To find a nominee with withas as strong a city pedigree as you have to togo togo togo go back to New York Gov Al Smith the Democratic candidate in 1928 or even further to Grover Cleveland who had been mayor of Buffalo Michael Dukakis was from genteel Brookline not Boston proper John Kerry was more Nantucket than Beacon Hill and John F. F Kennedy was defined by Hyannis Port Franklin D. D Roosevelt's urbanity was bred in the Hudson Valley while Thomas Dewey lived in Manhattan but fled to his upstate farm on weekends By contrast grew up in Honolulu and Jakarta and has spent his entire adult life in big cities college in Los Angeles and New York law school r in in Boston OK Cambridge and 20 years in in Chicago the iconic American city on which settled as his home and launching pad As a community organizer he helped public housing residents take on City Hall he married a native Chicagoan and his campaign is based in a Michigan n Avenue tower His style is as urbane as American politics get blazers with no tie the slow stride across the stage His political base is even more urban than is typical for a Democrat while he struggles with rural voters despite playing up his mothers mother's Kansas roots One of the first interest groups he met with after securing the Democratic nomination in June was an alliance of bicycling advocates Yet has hardly adopted the sort of agenda weve we've come to expect from urban candidates much to the consternation of some of his supporters With his organizer background he could have cast himself as asa asa asa a knight riding to the rescue of cities neglected by Republican administrations Instead he has adopted the framing increasingly favored by many mayors and urban-policy urban types promoting Americas America's cities based on their strengths not their failings Cities he argues arc now melded to their suburbs and taken as a whole Americas America's metro areas are the backbone of regional growth as he put it in a June speech to the US U.S. Conference of Mayors Washington remains trapped in an earlier era he said wedded to an outdated t urban agenda that focuses exclusively on the problems in our cities and ignores our growing metro areas an agenda that confuses poverty anti-poverty policy with a metropolitan strategy and ends up hurting both emphasis on the metro instead of the city is based in reality Theold Theold The Theold old lines are blurring as employment patterns have scattered across regions poverty is growing faster in many suburbs than itis it itis itis is downtown and more immigrants are settling inthe in inthe inthe the A recent report by the Brookings Institution found that the top metro areas generate three- three quarters of the country's economic output while covering 12 percent of its land area But casting urban agenda in metropolitan terms also has political benefits Although the country has re-embraced re the city its political battleground remains the suburbs said Robert Lang a demographer at Virginia Tech's Metropolitan Institute If elected he says should find ways to address urban problems in 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 doa a lot Lang said It should be Hey suburban guy sitting in traffic would you like transit instead of Im r going to take your money and spend it in places you dont don't visit This approach fits with Chicago which has become the epitome of the new metropolis with its rise high-rise housing projects replaced by mixed-income mixed town townhouses townhouses townhouses houses and its economy dominated by commodities trading aerospace and higher education instead of stockyards and steel mills a brainy city not nota a brawny city says Lang was elected in 1996 to represent a South Side district with many poor residents but after losing his 2000 run for Congress he decided to expand his base beyond the urban working class He engineered the redrawing of his district to encompass the city's Gold Coast putting him in touch with a Chicago elite that would power his US U.S. Senate bid 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 inner phenomenon in many metro areas The Rev Jesse Jackson acerbically suggested that was playing down urban poverty to appeal to whites typical stump speech generally tucks issues such as urban education woes into his broader policy pitch But the politicians who deal most with urban troubles say that the metropolitan framing is a shrewd way to convince off better-off urbanand urban urbanand urbanand and suburban dwellers that the core affects the vitality of the whole When you think of urban you think of poor you think of drugs you think of crime said Jerry Abramson the Democratic mayor of Louisville When you think you realize we are linked together and that the success of one will have great effect on the success of the other 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 asa asa asa a money pit expanding the income earned tax credit investing in job training creating an affordable- affordable housing trust fund paying for more cops on the street He talks of creating 20 promise neighborhoods modeled on the Harlem Childrens Children's Zone where an intensive application of services from prenatal care on up aims to lift an entire neighborhood But can the first metro president banish all of the negative associations of cities as American un-American perilous and snobbish that McCain and Palin have invoked Lang of Virginia Tech is doubtful He suspects that the limits of the urban ascendance would become clear after entered the White House Soon enough he predicts a President may be shopping for a vacation home far from the South Side Im going to look for him to buy some hillside in Virginia Lang said I a Iwonder 1 wonder if he almost has to todo todo todo do that 4 |