Spring Break
Mayor John Street: Eight wasted years
By: Robert Zaller
Issue date: 5/25/07 Section: Ed-Op
Originally published: 5/25/07 at 1:52 AM EST
Last update: 5/25/07 at 1:52 AM EST
Originally published: 5/25/07 at 1:52 AM EST
Last update: 5/25/07 at 1:52 AM EST
Philadelphia is going to have a new mayor soon. Meanwhile, it's stuck with its old one.
Once upon a time, John Street was a feisty radical tilting the power structure in City Hall. That structure has long since absorbed him. As Ed Rendell's City Council manager, he learned pay-to-play at the feet of a master. By the time he succeeded Rendell in office, the Grand Vizier becoming Sultan by dint of long and obsequious service, he had fully imbibed the culture of corruption that is a rustbelt city's way of making do for its favored sons.
Street, like any long-serving underling, had fantasies of putting his own brand on City Hall. He talked about revitalizing poor neighborhoods. He did raze a few slums until it became embarrassingly obvious that there would be nothing to replace them. He hauled out a few abandoned cars, too, though at the cost of a city worker's life in a tragic accident.
And then there was The Speech. Ah, but how could we forget the new black mayor's boast that "The brothers and sisters are running the city!" (Da capo; he sang it out twice.) Hizzoner lost me right there, and I hope any other soul who still had, as Buzz Bissinger might put it, a prayer for the city after a racially polarizing election of the first order. These were not just a few spectacularly ill-chosen words for a partisan audience. This was the mayor of all Philadelphians unceremoniously reading more than half of them out of court, or, in less polite terms, declaring reverse racism to be official city policy.
What Street failed to mention was that not all the brothers and sisters would be running the city, but only those with ready cash. Street did not invent pay-to-play; he merely practiced it with a particularly high-handed arrogance. Ed Rendell, who spent eight years breaking the backs of Philadelphia's unions as America's mayor, knew how to spread the populist lard while cutting his backroom deals. It's the way successful metropolitan politics have always worked in this country. Street's mistake was to treat corruption as an entitlement rather than as the just reward of backslapping and glad-handing. He forgot that while the public will cheerfully submit to being robbed blind, it resents being poked in the eye on top of it.
Once upon a time, John Street was a feisty radical tilting the power structure in City Hall. That structure has long since absorbed him. As Ed Rendell's City Council manager, he learned pay-to-play at the feet of a master. By the time he succeeded Rendell in office, the Grand Vizier becoming Sultan by dint of long and obsequious service, he had fully imbibed the culture of corruption that is a rustbelt city's way of making do for its favored sons.
Street, like any long-serving underling, had fantasies of putting his own brand on City Hall. He talked about revitalizing poor neighborhoods. He did raze a few slums until it became embarrassingly obvious that there would be nothing to replace them. He hauled out a few abandoned cars, too, though at the cost of a city worker's life in a tragic accident.
And then there was The Speech. Ah, but how could we forget the new black mayor's boast that "The brothers and sisters are running the city!" (Da capo; he sang it out twice.) Hizzoner lost me right there, and I hope any other soul who still had, as Buzz Bissinger might put it, a prayer for the city after a racially polarizing election of the first order. These were not just a few spectacularly ill-chosen words for a partisan audience. This was the mayor of all Philadelphians unceremoniously reading more than half of them out of court, or, in less polite terms, declaring reverse racism to be official city policy.
What Street failed to mention was that not all the brothers and sisters would be running the city, but only those with ready cash. Street did not invent pay-to-play; he merely practiced it with a particularly high-handed arrogance. Ed Rendell, who spent eight years breaking the backs of Philadelphia's unions as America's mayor, knew how to spread the populist lard while cutting his backroom deals. It's the way successful metropolitan politics have always worked in this country. Street's mistake was to treat corruption as an entitlement rather than as the just reward of backslapping and glad-handing. He forgot that while the public will cheerfully submit to being robbed blind, it resents being poked in the eye on top of it.
