Insurgent campaigns have insurgent agendas

From Laurence Aurbach of the PedShed blog:

Last night the insurgent candidate for Governor, Jack Markell, won the Delaware Democratic primary. Markell has a particularly strong and elaborate position paper on smart growth.

If Markell wins in November, Delaware could become one of the leading states for smart growth. That would be a real turnaround, because over the past 15 years parts of Delaware have seen some of the most faceless, extensive sprawl anywhere.

Markell's opponent was supported by the state party leaders, but Markell ran against the establishment, spent more money and "was able to expand the voter base to bring younger voters in and generate more excitement than his opponent." Markell will be facing a Republican opponent who ran (but lost) a close race in 2004. Delaware has not elected a Republican governor since 1988.
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I created the Urban Agenda blog in 2005 as a way to think about getting presidential candidates to run on an urban agenda. It was always intended to be a group blog. But this one ends up taking so much of my time-energy that I've never been able to get it off the ground (especially as two of the people I expected to help lead the blog never did so).

It still needs to be done.

To me an urban agenda would be about:

1. linking land use and transportation policies through reconfiguring parts of the US Dept. of Transportation, the US Dept. of Housing and Urban Development, and other agencies such as EPA, Commerce, and Energy
2. urban growth boundaries
3. recentering development and transportation rather than enabling sprawl.
4. providing financial incentives to inch local governments towards making better land use and transportation decisions
5. real support for transit expansion (but monocentrically rather than polycentrically, to disenable sprawl)
6. transit withholding taxes and increases in the federal gasoline excise tax
7. support for rebuilding the streetcar and subway manufacturing industry in the U.S.
8. real reform of municipal institutions, including schools (and yes, this involves some changes to the union-government dynamic).
9. a real focus on education and job training
10. transforming how health and wellness services are delivered beyond the hospital oriented system we have now, to address chronic health conditions ...