From the War on Poverty to the War on Cities

(I am hard on the Washington Post, because it is the dominant newspaper in Washington, and what it doesn't report is just as important as what it does report. But it is a good newspaper, one of the best in the country, even if it is part of the local power structure. Today's paper has many many good articles. It took me an hour just to get through the Metro and Outlook sections--and I am a fast reader.)

David Broder's op-ed column today is entitled "War on Cities" and it discusses Bush Administration plans to gut and reorganize community development programs that have been part of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

"Cabinet officers are not usually candidates for mass sympathy. But unless your heart was made of stone, you had to feel for two members of President Bush's domestic policy team, Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson, when they appeared last week before the House Financial Services Committee.

Bush has proposed a major reassignment of responsibilities between the two departments, shifting the largest urban program, the $4.7 billion Community Development Block Grant (CDBG), and 17 smaller programs from HUD to Commerce.

Gutierrez, a former cereal manufacturer and polished business executive, clearly was struggling to explain why a department whose responsibilities range from weather forecasting to export promotion would be an ideal custodian of housing and neighborhood redevelopment. Jackson had an even more thankless task: to appear supportive and comfortable with an ordered change that rips the guts out of his department and is vehemently opposed by the most important of his grass-roots constituents: Republican and Democratic mayors. They were supposed to be joined at the witness table by Clay Johnson, a deputy director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, where this cockamamie idea was born. But Johnson submitted a statement and did not show up.

Probably just as well. The Senate had already signaled what it thought of the idea by voting 68-31 in favor of an amendment knocking the transfer authority out of the budget bill. That amendment was offered by Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), a former mayor of St. Paul, who said he was operating on behalf of the collective wishes of mayors of both parties from cities large and small.

Time was when presidents not only listened to mayors, they sought their advice. HUD has been run by former mayors throughout much of its history, but this is an administration whose political base stretches outward from city boundaries through the suburbs and into the gloriously red precincts of exurbia and rural townships.

For Bush, city voters are no more than an afterthought, so why not put a vital urban program into a department where bottom-line corporate thinking is the norm?"