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Cleveland's apathetic politics: Brent Larkin
Brent Larkin, The Plain Dealer By Brent Larkin, The Plain Dealer
on August 11, 2013 at 4:17 AM, updated August 12, 2013 at 10:29 AM
In today’s Cleveland, Frank Jackson will barely break a sweat in winning a third term as mayor.
In the old Cleveland - the one that still had a sizable middle class and a large stable of political talent - Jackson would be in a fierce fight for political survival.
That’s not saying a mayor with Jackson’s record, which contains significant strengths, couldn’t be elected 25 or 30 years ago.
But it’s a certainty he’d be in a whole lot more political trouble than right now, running against a sincere but relatively unknown businessman in Ken Lanci.
Jackson has been a responsible fiscal manager. And he’s rightly staked his legacy - and the city’s future - on a plan designed to dramatically improve public education.
But crime, bad schools and troubled neighborhoods wear down the popularity of all big-city mayors, even the good ones.
And in a different Cleveland, this mayor’s problems would have been exacerbated by:
• Attorney General Mike DeWine’s stinging report suggesting a failure of leadership and “systemic failures” in the Police Department played a major role in the chase that resulted in 13 officers firing 137 rounds that killed two people last November.
• A Fire Department scandal that led to the indictment of 13 firefighters.
• Mismanagement of the Water Department so acute that a few years ago Cleveland surely owned one of the worst-run water systems in the country.
Those are legitimate and potentially damning issues for Lanci to raise, but the city’s broken political infrastructure is Jackson’s best friend in this election.
From block clubs to ward clubs, politics used to permeate almost every aspect of city life. Now it’s almost nonexistent. There’s no real competition for City Council seats because there’s little or no interest.
And there’s little or no interest because of Cleveland’s vanishing middle class.
In the decade between 2000 and 2010, Cleveland’s population dropped by nearly 80,000. But the number of residents at or below the federally-defined poverty level actually increased by more than 9,000. In just a decade, that poverty rate jumped from 26 to 34 percent.
Because poverty breeds a sense of hopelessness, it drives down participation in the political process.
“I agree, politics is different now in Cleveland,” said Arnold Pinkney, a consultant to the Jackson campaign and a candidate for mayor in 1971 and 1975. “The middle class has left, more so in the African-American community than the white community.”
In the 1970s, when nearly three-quarters of a million people lived in the city, competitive and crowded elections for mayor and City Council were the rule, not the exception. And as recently as 1989, the campaign for mayor was teeming with political heavyweights. That year’s mayoral primary election included Mike White, George Forbes, Benny Bonanno, Tim Hagan and Ralph Perk Jr.
“If you look at the firepower in the 1989 race, you could arguably say that was the high point of political contests in Cleveland,” said Councilman Jay Westbrook, first elected in 1979.
Of the six longtime veterans of Cleveland politics I spoke with for this piece, all agreed Jackson benefits immeasurably from the decline of political involvement in the city.
“But Frank didn’t create this climate,” said consultant Jerry Austin, who ran Jane Campbell’s two campaigns for mayor. “There’s no Democratic Party structure left in the city. It’s terrible for Cleveland.”
And it’ll be terrible for Lanci unless he figures out a way to energize an electorate into voting against a mayor who has something Lanci lacks - a political base.
Three times in the past 50 years, nontraditional candidates who did not even live in the city have changed their residence and made legitimate, albeit unsuccessful, runs for mayor.
Seth Taft did it in 1967, and businessman James Carney in 1971 and 1973.
Taft brought to his mayoral campaign not only a magic political name, but a 20-year record of involvement in high-profile civic causes.
And Carney had spent years as both a powerful political insider and the city’s most prominent businessman - someone who bankrolled dozens of political campaigns and spent hundreds of millions building downtown office towers and hotels.
Lanci shares Taft and Carney’s residency problem. What he doesn’t share is their history of involvement.
To have a chance, Lanci desperately needs to convince voters he’s a credible alternative.
But he can’t do that if they’re not paying attention.
Brent Larkin was The Plain Dealer's editorial director from 1991 until his retirement in 2009.
