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Barack Obama and Michael Nutter’s Philadelphia story

Dante Chinni

Posted: 01.09.2009 / 8:21 AM PST

Philadelphia – A year ago, this city was reveling in the recent election of a new leader who promised change. He represented a new generation of African-American leadership that was going to do away with the old politics and bring reform.

Sound familiar?

Now, in January 2009, the city finds itself struggling with a massive $1 billion budget gap, and the mood has soured.

It’s still early in the tenure of Mayor Michael Nutter. But his first year in power in Philadelphia (Patchwork Nation’s “Industrial Metropolis”) should indicate to President-elect Obama the depth of the challenges that come when high expectations are combined with a tough economy.

“If this is a lesson in the first year of Michael Nutter, it is that your expectations will be overblown and your failure to meet them will be overblown,” says Wendy Warren, editor of Philly.com.

Hard times

No doubt, it’s dangerous to read too much into the experience of one politician and one city. But when we first visited Philadelphia at the end of 2007, the feeling was eerily reminiscent of America at large. This was the place where we first heard people talking about change and reform.

Mr. Nutter is, in many ways, a victim of hard times. No one likes to make cuts, but some budget holes demand drastic action.

Nutter’s problem in the city has stemmed from a few suggested belt-tightening actions – the biggest being a plan to close 11 libraries. A group of library patrons and city workers filed suit to stop him.

Eventually, a judge ruled that Nutter does not have the authority to close the libraries himself, and now the City Council will have to decide what to do about 11 branches. An alternative option would be to slash hours at all libraries.

Philly has potentially more problems on the horizon as several city-worker contracts – those for police, fire, and custodians – are up for renegotiation this year.

The budget problems are not Nutter’s fault. He inherited a city that was headed for economic distress, and the national downturn of the past year has made things tougher. But some political observers here criticize the mayor for a poor communications strategy.

“You need to show the people a larger plan, a larger goal,” says one person steeped in city politics who asked not to be named. “You need to give people a sense of momentum and purpose. He hasn’t done that yet.”

One result of the budget cutting is a rise in tensions in poorer parts of the city.

“There are already some hard feelings around the gentrification process in the city,” says the Rev. Ellis Washington, pastor of the St. Matthew AME Church. “The libraries decision does not help the situation.”

Imperfect parallels

Philadelphia is not the United States, of course. And Mr. Obama has options available to him that Nutter does not. After all, even with an estimated $1.2 trillion federal deficit this fiscal year, economists are still calling for more government spending from the future Obama White House.

Meanwhile, big cities, which often include diverse populations and large numbers of less-wealthy people, usually get hit especially hard in economic downturns.

Yet the socioeconomic fault lines in Philadelphia are not unique to the city. In a lot of ways, they mirror those in the national political landscape.

Does that mean Obama is necessarily headed for the same rough first year as Nutter? No. But the president-elect seems conscious of the situation.

On Thursday, even as he pressed for an economic stimulus to save the US from sliding into a deep recession, Obama cautioned that rebuilding the country for “future greatness” is something that “will take time, perhaps many years.”

That’s right: Even getting to the point where we could be great in the “future” might “take … years.”

That’s called building down expectations – perhaps in the hope that the current Philadelphia story doesn’t go national in 12 months.