Business sits on the losing side of elections

Entry: Monday September 18, 2006

is the headline story in today's Post business section.

I was talking yesterday after an advocacy meeting with a friend-neighborhood activist about planning theory. He's a student at UMD (but with a "regular" job already). One of the first articles you read discusses the discipline and having a coherent body of discipline-based theory to have a theoretical foundation, common structure, and definition.

But planning is mostly circumscribed, a response to zoning laws and regulations and developer plans. The kind of work that Derrick Woody and Karina Ricks did on H Street is a rare opportunity I expect for most planner--H Street Strategic Development Plan--and they are considered stars in the city and I presume the profession.

Derrick has worked on other studies beyond H Street such as DUKE: Draft Development Framework for a Cultural Destination District Within Washington, DC's Greater Shaw/U Street, and now they are both involved in the Great Streets program, which I hate to say, has some Peter Principle aspects, at least as far as the city is concerned, and not fully understanding the underlying issues and how to address them. One of these days I'll write up a short paper with some diagrams explaining the learning that the city hasn't learned about urban revitalization. As usual, it has meta-lessons.

So we started talking about "the political economy of place." Since I beat readers over the head with the article City as a Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy of Place, you probably know about it... but it lays out the difference between "the exchange value of place" vs. "the use value of place."

Business interests are solely about "the exchange value." And the disconnect, with regard to growth and congestion, and the focus on big projects, gets bigger and bigger. Major growth machine proponents such as Steve Silverman in Montgomery County or Scott Bolden in DC (although he ran a campaign as a populist) got crushed. Crushed.

So Mr. Lecos misses the point. From the article:

If there is a lesson, it's that "the business community has no more unanimity of purpose than the broader community as a whole," said William D. Lecos, chief executive of the Fairfax chamber.

There is unanimity of business purpose for the most part. It's just increasingly at odds with voters in an increasingly zero sum political and economic environment. Another thing the article kind of misses is that with the rise of a more global economy and the acquisition of formerly locally-owned businesses mostly rolled up into larger enterprises based elsewhere (which is mentioned in the article) is that capital that is seemingly based locally is in fact not "place-based." So it should be hardly surprising that large businesses based locally:

Prominent local firms such as the Carlyle Group, Danaher Corp., Capital One Financial Corp. and Lockheed Martin are not represented among the Board of Trade's directors.

They don't care. And this is discussed in Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place. For a discussion of the Growth Machine thesis (urban sociology), as well as how I link the Urban Regime thesis (political science) to the Growth Machine theory as a stronger explanation of how the , see "A superb lesson in DC "growth machine" politics from Loose Lips (Washington City Paper)." From the piece:

In discussing Atlanta, Stone writes: "Land use, transportation, and housing formed an interrelated agenda that the city's major economic interests were keen to advance;" and

By looking closely at the policy role of business leaders and how their position in the civic structure of a community enabled that role, he identified connections between Atlanta's governing coalition and the resources it brought to bear, and on to the scheme of cooperation that made this informal system work. In his own way, Hunter had identified the key elements in an urban regime – governing coalition, agenda, resources, and mode of cooperation. These elements could be brought into the next debate about analyzing local politics, a debate about structural determinism.

The problem with Marxian analysis of the political economy of place is that there are no good proscriptions. So I guess all we can do is work to improve things on the margins, as well as to build the capacity for quality citizen engagement on the issues.

Getting back to civic engagement, Adrienne Washington of the Washington Times misses the point, in the piece "Vote shows victory goes to the best campaigner" which laments how in her opinion the better candidate lost to the better campaigner in the DC Democratic primary for mayor. I like Linda Cropp and I have a great deal of respect for her, but there is no question that she was an extremely business-agenda focused candidate. The point Adrienne Washington misses is that I think what mattered are the issues to the voter motivated enough to go to the polls on election day. Her sentiment gets in the way of analysis.

I say this because, not that I am the world's best political analyst, but because Philip Mendelson, the most progressive and least Machiavellian acting councilmember (the second most progressive City Councilmember is far more calculating in his decisions and endorsements) was outspent and outcampaigned by Scott Bolden. There is no question. No question. But Bolden lost in every ward in the city, even in the African-American dominated wards such as Ward 7 and 8 obviously, but also Wards 4 and 5.

So in one case you have the presumably better candidate outcampaigned and in another the better candidate was outcampaigned but still won.

Since primaries tend to get more involved and committed voters, it makes more sense that the issues do matter more, in that election.

Now there is a fascinating piece in the Post today on voting behavior, "In Politics, Aim for the Heart, Not the Head," about how connecting to voters' emotions matter more than the rational arguments.

As a rational-empiricist, this pains me to no end. But I keep learning "in the field" about the imporance of narrative, stories, and "building public will." (It's definitely true about historic preservation. The average person doesn't love the buildings, but the stories and histories of the people who lived there. People don't care about the environment so much, but they do care about the quality of their drinking water. Since rivers provide 70% of all drinking water in the U.S., that is the best hook to get people to address the ramifications of degradation of the environment, watershed, rivers, etc.)

Since winning matters, I have to be far more focused on what works that how I would like to communicate the message.

Speaking of Building Public Will, this link is to a phenomenal paper on the process, which I first learned about at last year's National Trust for Historic Preservation annual meeting.

Index Keywords: Growth-Machine; civic-engagement