Fudge-Turner: Leadership & Opportunity

Fudge-Turner: Leadership & Opportunity

We were disappointed but not surprised when State Senator Nina Turner announced last week that she was dropping her bid to take on Rep. Marcia Fudge for the Democratic nomination for the 11^th District Congressional seat.

The handwriting was on the wall when Turner had no response to the back-to-back images of pretty much the entire Democratic Party establishment, first in Cuyahoga County and then in Akron, standing shoulder to shoulder with the incumbent. It was clear at that point that Turner is not yet quite ready for prime time. She hadn’t raised the money or put together the organization to wage a competitive race. And as she correctly noted, the redistricting agreement reached last month by the Ohio General Assembly aided most political incumbents, including Fudge, even though it was unhealthy for Ohio voters.

My disappointment at Turner’s decision is because it postpones what has already been delayed for far too long: community dialogue about what kind of leadership is needed to move us forward. Many black people decry the one leader at a time syndrome — the Messiah model in its worst incarnation — but we seem to default to it time and again. Marcia Fudge has been in Congress barely three years but many people seemed to think it a crime that someone would step forward to challenge her.

As a community we need to get to a place where we hold our elected officials accountable, where they understand that their job is not merely to hold place, but to advocate and advance our interests, which includes developing talent and opportunities across the board.

Has there ever been a time when status quo was good enough? Marcia Fudge demonstrated in response to the whiff of a challenge that she could assemble a throng to defend her seat. Perhaps that will be impetus for her to claim the seat independently as opposed to having merely been its inheritor.

Lou Stokes held that seat long enough to establish and perpetuate a godfather model of black politics. He served as arbiter of political turf battles within the district and on occasion as spokesman for the black community. He hasn’t been in office for over a decade, he no longer even lives here, and it’s not clear that his perceptions and judgments are in tune with the community [consider for example his outmoded views on county reorganization, his top-down leadership model, and his aversion to transparency].

The departure of Stokes, the unexpected and unhappy demise of Stephanie Tubbs Jones, and the destruction of the inefficient and corrupt county Democratic Party regime [inefficient and corrupt = the worst of all possible combinations] have led to a vacuum in local black politics. The old guard leadership of Stokes and George Forbes is clearly inadequate. Their insistence on retaining power as personal privilege thwarted the development of next-generation political and community leaders.

Our most accomplished and competent civic leaders these days probably reside in the judiciary. They are elected through the political process but are barred by their offices from overt political activity. Carl Stokes was running an electrifying and organic mayoral campaign in his mid-thirties. Today, potential leaders of similar vintage like county councilmen Julian Rogers and Pernel Jones Jr. are still getting their feet wet as public officials. We now have a bevy of suburban city mayors and council people but not a one who steps up on any issue beyond his or her municipality.

Turner’s inability to mount a credible campaign need not mean that critical community questions of leadership, education, economics, equity, housing, development, etc., continue to go unaddressed. The unopposed Fudge now has a golden opportunity to claim her office by setting forth a new model of local community empowerment. She seemed momentarily on that path when she tinkered a few years ago with revitalizing the moribund Congressional District Caucus apparatus, switching it from an effete political arm to a nonprofit organization. But after a promising start, she either lost interest or got too busy.

The recent redistricting that incorporates parts of Akron and Summit County offer her a new chance at reorganizing the caucus as an effective tool for community building, community education, and leadership development. An intelligent recasting of a once-valuable brand would be part of a Fudge political legacy that would demonstrate her worthy of continued active support and not reification by default of opposition.

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For the record, we noted in a previous post that three candidates filed have filed to run in the primary. None have the potential to engage the community as a Fudge-Turner race might have.

And for those of you who read Turner’s statement declining to re-file against Fudge as holding open the possibility that she might run as an independent, don’t hold your breath.

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We commend to you this post by George Packer in The New Yorker dealing with the hopefully-soon-to-be-forgotten Rick Santorum, political reporting, and the routine right-wing demonization of President Obama.

Two excerpts:

… gutter rhetoric is so routine in the Republican campaign that it’s not worth a political journalist’s time to point it out. In 2008, when Michele Bachmann suggested that Barack Obama and an unknown number of her colleagues in Congress were anti-American, there was a flurry of criticism; three years later, when a surging Presidential candidate states it flatly about a sitting President, there’s no response at all. Certain forms of deterioration … become acceptable by attrition, because critics lose the energy to call them out. Eventually, people even stop remembering that they’re wrong. …

The great puzzle of the Republican campaign is that, in an era of unprecedented ideological fervor, the party will almost certainly nominate the candidate who is the blandest, least ideological, and least trusted by conservatives … Romney, forever stuck at twenty-five per cent, understands his situation acutely, … like an actor who normally does investment commercials and is improbably cast in an ad for the Ultimate Fighting Championship. He’s doing a credible job playing an intellectual thug, because that’s the only way to win the nomination.

It would be a mistake, though, to believe that, long after Iowa, once the horse race is over, and if he’s elected, Romney could suddenly flip a switch, clear the air of the toxicity left behind by the Republican field, and return to being a cautious centrist whose most reassuring quality is his lack of principles. His party wouldn’t let him; and, after all, how a candidate runs shapes how a President governs. In politics, once a sellout, always a sellout; once a thug, always a thug.

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Fudge-Turner: What’s Really at Stake?

I start this post fresh from my unannounced but necessary pre-holiday hiatus with renewed energy and a heightened sense of urgency. Real Deal readers should rest assured that even when output slows, inputs continue unabated. It is my hope that occasional time off heralds a sharper perspective upon my return. But you, Real Deal followers, are the ultimate judge of that.

I began blogging in earnest back in November 2009. I had become by turns disheartened, perplexed and finally aroused by the failure of the county Democratic Party to act with swift resolve to denounce and remove Jimmy Dimora and Frank Russo from party positions which made the whole party a convenient piñata for pundits and Republicans.

So I got off my proverbial couch and started going to various Democratic Party functions, asking questions and looking for answers. I visited offices of various elected officials, county and city of Cleveland. And I tracked down and got involved in with a random group of party activists who eventually evolved into an effective but short-lived caucus under the banner Cuyahoga Democrats for Principled Leadership.

[Column interlude: last week evidence of reform was on public display at the county Democrats’ Executive Committee meeting at Music Hall. Not every incumbent was unchallenged, one — Juvenile Court Judge Joseph F. Russo saw his opponent endorsed — and party chair Stuart Garson suffered with good humor when the will of the body contradicted his own preference for an measured and orderly process.]

Looking at Cuyahoga County politics of course requires an examination of black politics, unless you restrict yourself to local Republicans, all of whose significant black players could fit inside a nice-sized powder room.

And when you look at local black politics, you see problems. Big-time problems. Disorganization. Disunity. Disconnectedness. Ineffectiveness. Perpetual Reaction Mode. All of this forms the backdrop for the most exciting political development in the black community in twenty years [Mike White-George Forbes face-off in Cleveland’s 1989 mayoral election.]

By exciting political development I refer of course to Nina Turner’s Democratic primary challenge to Marcia Fudge’s bid for a third Congressional term.

Let me state clearly on the record that if the election were held today, I am uncertain which of these public servants would get my vote. I am neither anti- one or pro- the other. I am pro-Cleveland, pro-Cuyahoga County, and pro-African American community. I am anti-entitlement and anti-establishment where either means the status quo.

My esteemed friend Dick Peery articulated a view in this forum early this month in a comment to my post on Fudge’s then-pending reelection announcement. I don’t know the habits of Real Deal readers with respect to reading comments. [I do know that I love them, read every one, answer virtually all of them, and wish there were more! I know that not everyone has the time or energy to state a reasoned view; I do know that we need a space for intelligent exchange of community views, and that remains for me a constant goal.]

Dick’s thoughts always merit consideration and response. I didn’t answer them in a comment to his comment because I was concerned that the exchange would be out of eyesight for too many readers. In essence he said that an incumbent’s challenger needs to articulate why she would do a better job and why change is necessary.

Lou Stokes became the most important black elected official in Ohio once his brother left Cleveland City Hall in 1971. He established an enviable record in Congress thanks to his skill, his seniority, his party’s majority status, and his place on the Appropriations Committee. He brought bacon home to a community in dire need of it. All of Cleveland respects him, and pretty much all of black Cleveland loves him.

As a pioneer Congressman from a unique urban area, Stokes achieved practically without effort a sort of godfather political status. He didn’t really have a political machine, so to speak, but then he didn’t need one, since he had practically no serious local challenger once he got in office. Some might say the 21^st [now 11^th] District Caucus that he and his brother established functioned as his political machine. Truth is, the Caucus had already reached its political apex by Stokes’ second term, thereafter coasting on its reputation for decades as its power and relevance steadily declined.

Lou Stokes, George Forbes and Arnold Pinkney today stand as rusty ornaments of a time when Cleveland’s black political power was respected for its ability to deliver. But a Lou Stokes-George Forbes power struggle in 1972 was precursor to the eventual departure of Forbes and Pinkney from the Caucus, leaving the Congressman in control of what was increasingly only a symbol of black political power.

The political scientist William Nelson has observed that the decline of the caucus in the aftermath of [Carl] Stokes’ departure from local politics “changed the fundamental goal of black politics from community uplift to self-aggrandizement.”

Nelson’s observation gets to the crux of the matter. What kind of leadership does the black community seek? Can we move from personalities and personal agendas and political fiefdoms to public policies? Answers to these questions have been wanting for forty years. Indeed, the questions don’t even get asked.

We applaud the upcoming Congressional primary as an opportunity to gain a hearing for these questions.

Let’s stop the bogus talk about dividing and weakening a black community that is already laughably and lamentably weak and divided.

Let’s talk instead about why our schools produce such poor results [and about the miraculous results some of our students produce nonetheless]. Let’s talk about why residents in inner city zip codes have a life expectancy so much shorter than their suburban counterparts just minutes away. Let’s talk about addressing the cyclone effects of predatory lending and how we can rebuild our communities. Let’s talk about the absence of jobs in our community and why with six billion dollars or more in major construction activity in Greater Cleveland, black contractors are still fighting for crumbs.

Congresswoman Fudge, State Senator Turner: what strategies do you have for us? Which of you is better equipped to help us rebuild our community?

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Reminder: your scribe is a guest on The Civic Commons radio show today at 12:30PM on WJCU-FM 88.7. Tune in or catch it online either here or via iTunes.