Richard's Rules and Ruminations

In high school and college I came up with four rules (that I unfortunately violate) to run my life, each based on a specific experience:

1. Always know the higher allegiance of the person you're dealing with.
2. Don't f*** with people who are taught how to kill.
3. Always shoot twice.
4. Always compliment women on their new hairdos.

I discuss from time to time my two additions--

Making hard choices;
Being honest and direct and not fooling yourself;

to the eight principles from the Main Street Approach:

Comprehensive
Incremental
Self-help
Partnerships
Identifying and capitalizing on existing assets
Quality
Change
Implementation.

This comes to mind for a couple reasons. Today's Post has an article, "Ehrlich Gives Md. GOP Footing," speculating about the possible Republican realignment of state politics in Maryland, using Virginia as an example, but conveniently not discussing the most current election (discussed in a blog entry last week).

It brings to mind my Main Street principles #9 and #10 in terms of "electability"and questions about putting the best candidates forward to run for office. I raise this because it turns out that the politics in the states of Maryland and Virginia really matter in terms of the success of the center city of Washington, DC. (Of course, it's not like I don't complain about DC candidates from time to time with the lament "is this the best we can do?")

Now, for a decade or more, I've been politically disaffected on national issues, but I've learned that it is absolutely not true that "who gets elected doesn't make a difference," a rostrum frequently repeated by those of a more progressive bent.

Well, it does make a difference. With the right governor in Maryland you get more transit in the Washington region, and with the "wrong" governor you get toll road highways in the Washignton region.

It comes down to good candidates or not. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend wasn't a good candidate, but she was thought to be electable (cf. Democratic campaigns during the most recent primaries for the 2004 U.S. presidential election). It turns out she wasn't. Now it didn't help that the Governor at the time expended little energy to help her (and he wasn't that popular towards the end of his term anyway).

But did that Governor help his, at the time great legacy of a strong state policy centered around compact development ("smart growth") by not working to ensure that the party would offer the best possible candidate to make the best case for Maryland in the future?

I say no. Governor Ehrlich and the Republicans felt that "smart growth" wasn't an ideologically pure state policy, but a tool of anti-development DEMOCRATS, so that much of the smart growth initiative was junked at the state level. Certainly the current administration in Maryland is not hot to trot about transit, unless it can be used to further other development desires (i.e., extending the WMATA system to BWI Airport is about making more land way more valuable).

If Townsend (or Kerry) weren't great candidates, they shouldn't have been annointed by the respective party machines. Continued losses are unacceptable.

Yet in their own way, the organizations and institutions of the Democratic Party aren't much different than the Bush Administration valuing loyalty over anything else, including competence and accountability. The political scientist Robert Michels wrote about this in his classic work Political Parties (1911) which includes a discussion of the "iron law of oligarchy."

While written about political parties, the book is considered to be one of the foundational tomes in organizational sociology. And the principles pertain to most any institutions, including the unsuccessful U.S. automobile manufacturers.

I suppose it seems contradictory that I pay so much attention to this, but it comes from my history of being born and schooled in Michigan, where I benefited greatly from the seven decades of automobile manufacturing wealth that enriched the state university system in Michigan.

Yes, I am against sprawl and ride a bike and militate against automobility, but at the same time it's tragic to see U.S. industry fail to compete, in the same markets, against successful companies.

I don't think this bodes well for the future of our country, irrespective of peak oil and other likely exogenous changes to the social and economic paradigms that rule the nation.

This comes up also in terms of the proposal to let 1,000 flowers bloom so to speak with regard to rebuilding New Orleans, see this article from the New York Times, "All Parts of City in Rebuild Plan of New Orleans."

Because making hard choices isn't politically expedient, the proposal is to give every neighborhood a go at rebuilding, and then see what happens after a year, and then make the hard choices about focusing resources.

But who will be willing to invest in such a climate in the neighborhoods where the success indicators are limited, given the scarcity of capital and the likelihood of failure (cf. Rolf Goetze, Building Neighborhood Confidence or "Targeting Investments for Neighborhood Revitalization" by Galster, Tatian, and Accordino).

In weak markets, investments in the center city need to be focused because there are so many market distortions that favor suburban development. Resources are limited, especially when you have a society now where (1) suburban-based Congressional districts now comprise the majority of seats in the House of Representatives; and (2) where the Presidential administration doesn't care too much for the needs and wants of cities, perhaps because of how the changes in (1) are reflected in other changes in national political developments.

In any case a friend of mine has written a paper that he calls "Planning for Contraction," but it's really about why we need to plan for contraction, because it's more about peak oil projections and the necessity of moving to a societal morphology that is organized around maximizing efficient energy use, rather than ignoring efficient energy use as is still the case today.

A quick look at the planning literature finds few examples of planning for contraction, although there are some instances of it in the field such as Youngstown 2010 in Ohio. (The same process was happening in Niagara Falls, New York but I imagine it's been scuttled since there is a new mayor. I can't seem to find the documents I once reviewed, although I have printed copies somewhere.)

In any case, making hard choices and being honest and direct and not fooling yourself seem to be principles that will be increasingly required as we move forward in planning for the future of our communities, the country, and our world.

Index Keywords: car-culture; politics-elections; civic-engagement