WHEN President Obama sits down for brewskis today at the White House to try to make peace with Harvard Prof. Henry Louis Gates and Cambridge Police Sgt. James Crowley, expect Fernando Ferrer to be smiling.
Ferrer, recall, is the former Bronx borough president whose 2005 mayoral bid derailed over an episode that resonates with Gates-Crowley affair. Hunting for votes with the Sergeants Benevolent Association, Ferrer said he didn’t believe the 1999 shooting of Amadou Diallo was a crime, adding that the cops in the case were over-indicted.
Those remarks cost Ferrer his African-American base, and dogged his campaign until it went down to embarrassing defeat. All because he forgot one of the cardinal rules of city politics: Thou shalt avoid enflaming tensions between race agitators and cops.
It’s a lesson Obama either forgot or never learned. Otherwise, he would’ve never slammed Sgt. Crowley and the Cambridge PD as “stupid” on prime-time TV.
The fact that Obama would make such a mistake calls into question a claim his boosters have been making for months: that he is America’s first modern “urban president.” Start with his treatment of that all-important urban issue, schools.
The residents of Washington, DC, are stuck with one of the nation’s worst public-school systems. But hundreds of poor children — mostly African-American — had found a ticket out at local private schools, thanks to DC’s school-voucher program. That is, until Obama’s Democratic Senate buddies killed it. And the president — who sends his own daughters to one of Washington’s toniest private schools — sat on his hands.
The head of DC Parents for School Choice, Virginia Walden Ford, says that the inner-city families harmed by the voucher program’s demise are “the heart of DC,” adding that Obama “has not weighed in in a way that indicates that he understands that we want the same thing he wants for his kids.”
Then there’s Obama’s much-touted White House Office of Urban Affairs. To head it, he tapped former Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrión — who’s enmeshed in allegations of ethics violations and involvement in a pay-to-play scandal. This is a big Obama priority?
So far, all the office seems to have to show for itself is a recent “Urban and Metropolitan Policy Roundtable” at which Obama gave what was billed as a major urban-policy speech. In those remarks, he used the word “schools” exactly zero times, and only mentioned police to talk about the stimulus.
Philadelphia got a shout-out for its support of “urban agriculture,” and Kansas City got a plug for “transforming a low-income community into a national model of sustainability by weatherizing homes and building a green local-transit system.”
After the meeting, the White House announced that Cabinet officials and policy types will visit cities to hear from the locals about ideas such as “transformative thinking on mass transit and livable communities” and “urban gardens that foster healthy living and community development.”
Urban gardens? Before digging a rutabaga patch in Central Park, most people want to make sure they can safely jog there. In Washington, people care less about “transformative thinking on mass transit” than getting from point A to point B without their Metro train plowing into the back of another.
Unfortunately, our “urban president” seems to see cities from the perspective of interest groups: the Al Sharpton “blame cops first” crowd; the teachers unions who don’t care if kids are stuck in terrible schools; greenies from Riverkeeper. Not surprising for a former “community organizer” from Chicago’s South Side.
But now Obama is a chief executive. In cities, that means providing for the preconditions that allow for urban success: low crime, a thriving economy, good schools, safe and timely transit — not the grand “holistic” transformation being dreamed up at the White House.
As New York City political strategist Hank Sheinkopf puts it: “When you’re a candidate for president, you’re laden with big ideas and more air. But in cities, people are looking for specificity.”
“On Obama’s platform,” Sheinkopf added, “he could not be elected mayor of New York.”
If Obama isn’t a guy you’d elect as mayor, what does it say about him as an “urban president”?
clyne.meghan@gmail.com