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Perspectives Dick Polman
Paul Davies PAUL DAVIES from C1 ington to listen to House Speaker John Boehner. He has bailed Nutter out of a few jams. (See Dad Vail Regatta, ethnic parades, and the SEPTA strike.) But campaigns are not his strength. If only the election could be held in a backroom. State Sen. Anthony Williams could mount an interesting campaign, but he has said he’s not running. Some wealthy backers bankrolled his bid for governor because they liked his support for school choice. But donor limits in Philadelphia require more than three rich guys to fund an election that’s just months away. All eyes have now turned to City Councilman Bill Green. He had said he wasn’t going to run against Nutter, but he is now rethinking that position. Some say they believe Green will ultimately wait until 2015, while others say his time is now. “It’s not a question of will he run, but when,” said Terry Madonna, a pollster and public-affairs professor at Franklin and Marshall College. Former Mayor John F. Street, who is opposed to Nutter and was encouraging Katz to run, says Green is “the strongest candidate.” Any candidate faces the difficult prospect of trying to unseat a sitting mayor. That’s not easy in Philadelphia. Just consider: W. Wilson Goode was reelected after the city dropped a bomb on the MOVE compound, and Street was reelected after a federal bug was found in his office. Nutter has avoided any major scandals, but the term heard most often to describe his administration is disap-
Dana Milbank
The Republican establishment is terrified that Palin’s cult of personality could ultimately saddle it with an unelectable nominee. Who else can match her celebrity? candidate will need $35 million), publishing ghostwritten books, all the while insisting that the timing has nothing to do with 2012 (Gingrich, Jindal, Perry, DeMint), and worrying about the grizzly in the room, Sarah Palin*. The asterisk refers to the fact that nobody has a clue what she’ll do. Nor, in all likelihood, does she. Right now she’s making piles of money and sounding off whenever she wants, on whatever. She can shape conservative minds by dropping a pungent phrase on Facebook. She can dwell happily within the friendly confines of Fox, where she is a paid contributor. (Gingrich and Huckabee are on the Fox payroll as well. Not to digress, but I do want to ask a question: If MSNBC ever had three prospective Democratic presidential candidates on its payroll, wouldn’t conservatives be screaming nonstop about “liberal media bias”?) Anyway, we were talking
pointment. Many still want to see Nutter succeed, but they also voice frustration by his inability to make the proverbial trains run. The criticisms vary depending on the constituency. Nutter’s relationship with City Council has been rocky. City workers are upset by the slow pace of contract talks and Nutter’s call to end the DROP perk. Homeowners have been hit with a 10 percent increase in property taxes, while property values have dropped. Increases in the sales and parking taxes have left many city businesses more uncompetitive with the surrounding suburbs. Proposals like the failed soda tax have only added to the economic uncertainty.
To his credit, Nutter has cleaned up pay-to-play politics and overhauled departments. Nutter’s popularity in the African American community is much lower than in the white community, a poll earlier this year showed. Street attributes that mainly to the Police Department’s stopand-frisk policy, which has targeted mostly blacks and spurred a recent lawsuit against the city. Part of Nutter’s broader problem stems from high expectations and the recession. He campaigned as a reformer and tax cutter who was going to bring major change to City Hall. But tax increases and a bureaucracy largely intact were not the changes voters had hoped for. To his credit, Nutter has cleaned up pay-to-play politics and overhauled depart-
LM OTERO / Associated Press
about Palin. It remains to be seen whether she will trade her cushy life for the rigorous accountability of a presidential campaign, during which it would again become clear how little she knows. On her new reality TV show, while grooving on Alaskan nature, she says that she would “rather be doing this than in some stuffy old political office.” Nevertheless, her prospective rivals are sufficiently spooked — by her popularity within the conservative base, by a mood surge that could propel her to early primary victories — and the Republican establishment is terrified that her cult of personality could ultimately saddle it with an unelectable nominee. Who else, on that aforementioned list, can match her celebrity? How many people on that list have you even heard of? A new national poll reports that Palin is deemed qualified to be president by only 27 percent of the electorate, which helps explain why a few establishment Republicans are so willing to dis her with impunity. (Most are too afraid to cross her publicly, fearing a grassroots backlash.) First prize these days goes to Peggy Noonan, the former Reagan speechwriter, who spoke directly to Palin in a Wall Street Journal column: “You should go have a life, build a string of accomplishments, then enter public service. And you need actual talent. You have to be able to
ments, notably Licenses and Inspections and the Department of Human Services. In an interview Friday, Nutter eagerly defended his record, rattling off a list of accomplishments centered on his goal of making the city “safer, smarter, and more sustainable.” He pointed to increases in population and job growth. Nutter cited several changes, including eliminating the Clerk of Quarter Sessions and a partial fix of the Board of Revision of Taxes. But in increasing taxes two years in a row rather than making deeper cuts, Nutter failed to address the biggest issue plaguing City Hall: reducing the size and cost of city government, while making it more efficient. Critics say he blew a golden opportunity to use the economic crisis to negotiate union contracts that reduce pension and health-care costs and to streamline the government. Nutter argues that the police contract provides such reforms, but others say the savings are minimal. Any election-year debate about Nutter’s tenure would center on his results. But before there can be debate, there needs to be a challenger. Katz studied the issues and the polls. He concluded that — despite Nutter’s weaknesses and voter anger at incumbents — there weren’t enough votes for a Mayor Katz. Street, on the other hand, says there is a clear path to victory against Nutter. “I don’t know who’s for the guy,” he said. As mayoral opponents, Katz and Street never did agree on many issues. Time will tell who is right about the next mayor. E-mail deputy editorial page editor Paul Davies at pdavies@phillynews.com.
DANA MILBANK from C1 gage assets, and he approved the plan in full. “If we’re really looking at another Great Depression,” he recalls saying, “you can be damn sure I’m going to be Roosevelt, not Hoover.” By tea-party doctrine, that’s heresy. But Bush, in Decision Points, doesn’t back off at all from his defense of the auto-industry rescue and the federal ownership of financial companies — even though those positions today would make him a pariah in his own party. “The strategy was a breathtaking intervention in the free market,” he writes of the TARP bank-bailout program. “It flew against all my instincts. But it was necessary to pull the country out of the panic. I decided that the only way to preserve the free market in the long run was to intervene in the short run.” In an extended booklaunch interview with Bush, NBC anchor Matt Lauer referred to a Pew Research Center poll that found nearly half of Americans hold the false belief that TARP was passed under President Obama, while only 34 percent know it originated under Bush. “Oh, yeah?” Bush replied. “Fifty percent of the people were wrong.” He defended his rationale for supporting TARP: “Do you adhere to your philosophy and say, let them all fail? … Or do
bring people in and along. You can’t just bully them, you can’t just assert and taunt, you have to be able to persuade. Americans don’t want, as their representatives, people who seem empty or crazy.” Still, it’s not too early to discern the shape of the Republican race. In one scenario, the finalists are Palin (tea-party grassroots favorite) vs. the
you take taxpayers’ money and inject it into the system in hopes that you prevent a depression? And I chose the latter.” Bush didn’t shy from his position when interviewed by Rush Limbaugh. “If you had it to do over, would you do the TARP bailout?” “Yeah, I would have,” Bush told Limbaugh. “I didn’t like it at all, but when you’re president you get faced with stark choices, and I couldn’t have lived with myself had the country gone into a deep depression, and people’s lives would have been affected.” Limbaugh, declining to challenge Bush on this,
“This was one ugly way to end a presidency.” Even then, the ideologues were opposed. Bush quotes “one Republican senator” — Jim Bunning of Kentucky — as saying the TARP program would “take away the free market and institute socialism in America.” He recalls his own party’s efforts to defeat TARP, and a public letter written by conservative activist Grover Norquist saying only “Dear President Bush: No.” Bush acknowledges that he undertook “the most drastic intervention in the free market since the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt,” but he says it “helped spare the American people from an economic disaster of historic proportions.” He defends the “automakers’ rescue” with federal loans: “I had to safeguard American workers and families from a widespread collapse.” He concedes that the AIG bailout was “basically a nationalization of America’s largest insurance company.” But, he adds, “that was a hell of a lot better than a financial collapse.” In one of his few pieces of advice for those who remain in Washington, Bush recommends that “Congress should not infringe on the Federal Reserve’s independence in conducting monetary policy.” As Sarah Palin and other conservatives lash out at the Fed, it’s another reason to pine for Bush.
Setting aside ideology? Those are fightin’ words in Washington now. changed the subject to Democratic culpability for the subprime-mortgage disaster. Bush resumed his defense of his interventionist economic policies when he sat down with Lauer for an interview, this time on the Today show. “The lesson there is that I had to set aside an ideology,” he said. Setting aside ideology? Those are fightin’ words in Washington now. Bush was fiercely ideological, too, but in this instance he felt the competing pull of responsibility. “I felt like the captain of a sinking ship,” he writes in the memoir, adding:
Dana Milbank is a Washington Post columnist. E-mail him at danamilbank@washpost.com.
non-Palin (establishment favorite); in the other likely scenario, a Palin surrogate will face off against the establishment designate. That takes us to February 2012; by that point, perhaps the finalists will be able to explain, with specifics, how they would cut the deficit without raising anybody’s taxes, and how they would tame “runaway govern-
ment spending” without touching the popular entitlement programs that all citizens, conservative and otherwise, have come to take for granted. How many of you think we’ll get specifics instead of bromides? Can I see a show of hands? E-mail Dick Polman at dpolman@phillynews.com.
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DICK POLMAN from C1 The core answer to that one is pretty obvious. It’s ego. There’s always the chance, however remote, of having one’s face chiseled in granite for eternity, with generations of grateful Washington tourists paying homage. Why else would Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin* (I’ll explain the asterisk), Newt Gingrich, Tim Pawlenty, Haley Barbour, John Thune, Mike Pence, Mitch Daniels, Bobby Jindal, Rick Perry, Jim DeMint, and Rick Santorum even remotely contemplate spending the next 14 months cruising the back roads of rural Iowa? Granted, everybody on that potential list would insist that they seek only to fix our problems and restore the nation’s greatness. But here’s the problem: President Obama’s reelection prospects will markedly improve if the economy bounces back; the GOP’s prospects are strongest if the economy stays in the pits. Which means that any new Republican, by definition, is likely to be saddled with the same headaches that currently plague Obama — notably, the need to cure serious economic ills by making tough choices that are tantamount to political suicide in an ideologically polarized environment dominated by special interests and a trash-talking 24/7 cable and digital news cycle. You think Obama has problems with his liberal base? Just imagine how the tea-partyers would react if a new Republican president publicly contemplated a tax increase, as part of a broader plan to close the deficit. Many in the conservative base would assail such a move as a betrayal of Ronald Reagan (forgetting, of course, that Reagan himself signed a succession of tax increases), and there would be heaps of denigrating snark from the identically blond anchorwomen on Fox News. But candidates at the start of a race never foresee such a fate; right now, the likely Republicans are too busy playing the ritual game of peekaboo (the peripatetic Romney: “I haven’t made the decision”), raising scads of money (Romney is strong on Wall Street; just for the opening round in Iowa and New Hampshire, a
Sunday, November 14, 2010
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