Standing at the top of the imposing stone staircase leading up to the entrance to City Hall on a blustery late August day, Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson finishes his speech denouncing George W. Bush, a man he calls "the most dangerous President the country's ever had," a leader he believes has precipitated an "incredible moral crisis" for America.
...
"You should run for President," people keep telling him, as they mill around in front of the heavily guarded federal building. Mindful that this is his last year in office, Anderson doesn't pooh-pooh the sentiment or issue exaggerated disclaimers. Instead he answers, carefully, that you need money to run, that you need a state machine backing you--which, in a place as virulently conservative as Utah, known until fairly recently as "the Mississippi of the West," is not going to happen for Anderson--that you need to know when to shut up and not speak your mind. Successful national politicians listen to handlers and spin doctors, and that's something he won't do.
...
Anderson has restructured the city's criminal justice system and, suspicious of the tenets of the war on drugs, thrown the Just Say No DARE program out of the city's schools. Instead of pushing for more and more low-end offenders to be sent to jail or prison, he has built one of the country's most innovative restorative justice programs, for which he was nominated for a second World Leadership Award--in December the judges in London announced that Stuttgart, Germany, had edged Anderson's city for the prize. Mental health courts now channel mentally ill criminals into mandatory treatment programs rather than dumping them behind bars; a misdemeanor drug court similarly replaces punishment with treatment; and the city now has one of the most active victim-offender reconciliation programs in America. People arrested for driving under the influence or soliciting prostitutes are sent through a comprehensive course of counseling rather than automatically being handed criminal records.
...
More than thirty years ago, as an undergraduate at the University of Utah, Anderson studied political philosophy, religious philosophy and ethics. He read books by Sartre and other existentialists, and, he remembers, he had a "powerful epiphany. We can't escape responsibility, there's no sitting out moral decisions, and whenever we refuse to stand up against wrongdoing we're actually supporting the status quo."
We need a system in this country to make people like Anderson electable. It is an indictment on our system of government that someone like George Bush can get elected and someone like Rocky Anderson can't.
"suspicious of the tenets of the war on drugs, thrown the Just Say No DARE program out of the city's schools."
ReplyDeleteWhat kind of paranoid idiot is this mayor? What does the nature of the "war on drugs" have to do with prevention education at the child level? How is this a good idea? I can grant that the "war on drugs" is discriminatory against poor and minorities and thus we need creative decriminalization and better rehab which Rocky has initiated with his restorative justice programs, but that doesn't mean we should stop our education and prevention programs for kids! This guy is totally whack and is rightfully "unelectable."
Rocky Anderson isn't electable because he says and does outrageous things on a regular basis, not to mention that even the liberal papers in Salt Lake City have called him an ineffective mayor. He spends more time on vacation than in the mayor's office doing the job he's being paid to do. You think Bush spends a lot of time out on the ranch? Rocky puts him to shame by a wide margin.
ReplyDeleteThis says nothing of his terrible management skills. The turnover in his office during his two terms as mayor exceeds 250%. Allegations are that he is rude and condescending to employees and a huge religious bigot. Is that really the kind of management style YOU want in the White House? Do you really want someone that tactless and incapable to be elected just because you like his positions?
Let me tell you something: it's more important to do right than be right. Until Rocky Anderson can master the art of doing right, he should rightly be unelectable.