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HOWEY: No easy road to go
On Election Night, Gov. Mitch Daniels was in Chicago when the stunning news reached him: Indianapolis Mayor Bart Peterson had lost to Greg Ballard. Most believe that it wasn't so much voter validation of Ballard, but anger and repudiation of the incumbent.
Peterson lost when the doors of perception swung against him. He was blamed for the property tax crisis, aggravated by the fiscal need to raise income taxes by 65 percent to keep the city's bond rating from declining, an event that would have cost the city millions of dollars in interest. A week after the election, Standard & Poor's upgraded its Indianapolis rating to AAA.
Peterson's defeat was quickly followed by an Indianapolis Star/WTHR-TV poll that showed Daniels trailing the two Democrats challengers — Jim Schellinger and Jill Long Thompson — though within the margin of error. His approval rating was a “dismal” 40 percent.
Now, less than a year before the 2008 gubernatorial showdown, some of the basic premises surrounding a theoretical successful Daniels re-election campaign lay exposed in the wreckage of more than a half dozen mayoral defeats.
Look no further than Greensburg, where Mayor Frank Manus was defeated despite some 4,000 jobs coming with a new Honda plant that was announced in the summer of 2006. Or Anderson, where Mayor Kevin Smith had put together one of the most impressive economic development programs in the state that helped this rustbelt city land the Nestle plant.
In West Lafayette, Mayor Jan Mills lost despite a new Toyota plant coming nearby. Jeffersonville Mayor Rob Waiz stood beside Gov. Daniels in announcing MedVenture Technology's relocation from Kentucky and a big expansion of Jeffboat. Waiz lost in the primary to former mayor Tom Galligan.
Franklin Mayor Brenda Jones-Matthews was defeated by an independent despite helping bring in Japanese companies like Nishina and KYB Manufacturing. Gov. Daniels joined Jones-Matthews in 2005 to announce the expansion of Japanese-owned NSK Precision America that brought its corporate headquarters to Franklin.
The defeats of these mayors and others like Al Huntington in Madison and Kevin Burke in Terre Haute — all of whom helped land new plants or job expansions — is an all-too-real reminder that big economic development gains are not enough to power the presiding executive to further terms.
The reasons mayors go down in defeat are many. Conventional wisdom suggests that if a mayor lands an economic gem like Honda, this surely has the power to neutralize a feud with a firefighters union or a water utility dispute. In Mayor Manus' case he found himself boiling over local water issues and other insensitivities.
In Indiana, solid economic gains no longer ensure re-election. The perception game becomes prescient over solid facts. Many observers believe the property tax “crisis” that continues to be extensively covered by the Indianapolis media spilled over into cities where there was no such crisis.
The re-election campaign of Gov. Daniels is based on an array of big economic gains like Honda, Toyota, Dreyfus, Nestle, MedVenture and dozens of others. The new Colts stadium will be unveiled in September 2008. Major Moves construction will begin in St. Joseph County, Lakeville, Westfield and Kokomo. The Norwest Regional Development Authority is beginning to fund marinas, parks and transportation in Lake and Porter counties. The hope is that with thousands of new jobs - Major Moves was billed as the “jobs bill of a generation” - unemployment will dip below the national average and personal income will increase.
“There have been thousands and thousands of jobs announced all over the state,” said Michael Davis, political director for the Indiana Chamber of Commerce. “It's more perception than reality.” Even with the new plants, many old-line manufacturers are closing. This will continue no matter who is governor.
The perception problem facing Gov. Daniels is that the property tax crisis - born out of the administration's greatest political miscalculation to date when he didn't get behind Sen. Luke Kenley's proposals unveiled last March - seems to be overriding just about everything else. How he handles the property tax reforms between now and March 15, as well as the Kernan-Shepard Commission government reform report, could determine whether he will join Joe Kernan as an Indiana governor who couldn't win a re-elect.
Daniels, who trailed Kernan by more than 10 percent in early 2004, will have plenty of themes to bring to voters, like a two-hour trip from Elkhart to Indianapolis with no stoplights. Or expanding Wi-Fi thanks to the telecommunications reforms of 2007,. This will allow a resident of say, Wrights Corner, to conduct business via the Internet with someone in China. Or the extensive trails systems being built on discarded railroad tracks.
Before Daniels arrived on the scene, a number of reformers wished for a governor who would make the hard policy choices without an obsession with re-election. Those notions are closer to reality now than they've ever been.
And I'll never forget something the Governor told me on the way to Tipton where he helped break ground on a new 1,000-job transmission plant: “If I lose, it will be a long time before this state takes reforms seriously again.”
Howey is publisher of Howey Politics Indiana at www.howeypolitics.com
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BAYLOR: Dear Pat
“I can’t help but wonder if we’ve made a mistake in settling down in New Albany. This place is nuts.”
The words quoted above are real. I didn’t make them up. They were spoken to me by a friend who wasn’t raised here, like you and I were, you in the city, and me in the county.
Perhaps neither of us is able to see the counter-productive political dysfunction holding sway hereabouts quite as clearly as someone who views our home turf with clear, unprejudiced eyes — the type of person far too many natives persist in dismissing and deriding as an “outsider.”
Pat, we don’t know each other that well, and during the time since you were elected to represent the 4th council district, we’ve had a few heated debates over politics, policy and public affairs. Let’s forget those. The reason why I’m writing you today is because of my friend, who came here from somewhere else because he and his wife believe in our city’s largely untapped potential. In spite of our differences, Pat, it’s always been my view that at some level, you genuinely “get it.”
As such, what are we to tell my friend — tell him, and her, and “them people,” as your caterwauling council colleague Dan Coffey has oft times referred to anyone who is educated, artistic, productive and capable? Are we to follow Coffey’s lead and turn away the new blood — the sort of people that any community needs to build, grow and prosper — or shall we harness, integrate and welcome them to a city that values their presence and benefits from their labors?
I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right, Pat. It isn’t about newcomers alone. It’s about those who already live here — most importantly, about their children. It’s a cliché, but children are the city’s hope and its future. In the past, our best and brightest tended to leave town, because we couldn’t offer the sort of economic, cultural and lifestyle opportunities they regarded as necessary to stay. This needs to change, and in some respects, it has.
Surely we can agree: When it comes to education and educational opportunities, that selfishness, resentment and spite have no conceivable place in the discussion.
And yet, Pat, since you’ve served on the city council, can unbiased, neutral observers reach any other conclusion than this one:
New Albany’s city council, as permitted by its members to be dominated by a regressive, anti-intellectual faction led by Dan Coffey and abetted by Steve Price, has consistently stood against education, and educational attainment, and sustainable economic development flowing as a natural consequence of education?
I’m trying earnestly not to exaggerate the Coffey-led council’s anti-educational bias, which in practice might better be referred to as an aversion to human progress in virtually any quantifiable form, except you and I both know the malignancy is there, and profoundly damaging.
My question to you, Pat: If you know better, and I think you do, then why, at this late juncture, is your name so closely linked politically with theirs?
Consider last week’s tragicomic school closings. If ever there were a time for this pointlessly fractured, hopelessly divided council (and that’s just the eight strong Democratic contingent) to come together, call a special town hall meeting, posture, grandstand, point fingers and squawk, this was it: Neighborhood schools being closed in three downtown council districts, hampering if not outright crippling revitalization prospects and economic development for decades to come.
Predictably, none of it occurred. As a body, the council was silent, and the only way to explain its timidity is outright malice on the part of its movers and shakers. City Hall came out forcefully against the school closings, and almost certainly, that’s why the Coffey-Price “let’s pretend to be Democrats and hope that we all fail” faction refrained from comment.
That they fail as individuals to see any value in progress merely seals the deal on their crass political absenteeism. Either way, it’s another black eye for a city already ill disposed toward insight.
Understood: Times are hard. The business climate is tough, and yet quite a few people, many of them from elsewhere, have invested in downtown New Albany. To cite one example, the new State Street branch of Wick’s Pizza has been its best performing store in metro Louisville. Wick’s is situated in Coffey’s council district, and yet he hasn’t missed an opportunity to speak and act against such development, to bad-mouth entrepreneurs, and to urge future investors to stay away from New Albany.
Pat, is this really leadership?
(No, Roger, it isn’t.)
I know you believe that. I know you’re better than that. I know you have what it takes to lead. But Pat, here’s what bothers me.
Why do you tolerate it, and why do you persist in voting with Coffey and Price?
Sorry, no; you can’t explain it by saying that the issues upon which you’ve been marching lockstep with the council’s ward heeling looters — sewer rate votes, audit envy, public safety and dollar-and-cents issues —are somehow different in nature from the spiteful, repugnant, self-debilitating attitude toward the city’s future displayed by these same congenital “no” voters. The non-governing principles prefacing book burning and tea parties are exactly the same.
Pat, it’s eloquently simple even though it’s excruciatingly hard.
When the time finally comes for last call — not a quick pint before the trip home from the warm pub on a cold, desperate and anonymous night just like all the rest, but the punching of the big ticket and the cosmic bow prior to that most irrevocable of all curtains falling, how will posterity judge your political legacy?
Was it progressive or regressive?
Was it Dan Coffey’s legacy … or yours? -
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