A mayor as president

The prominence of Mayor Pete, not to mention former mayor Bloomberg, and former mayor Castro, and former mayor Booker, has the Upshot recounting the history of mayors running for President. The headline is that big cities have been a lousy launching pad for national executive ambitions -- no one has ever made the jump directly from a mayor's office to the White House. The discussion of the baggage which cities have historically carried among the wider electorate is actually mildly intriguing; these authors wonder whether being a mayor may carry less of a penalty these days as political polarization tracks more closely on a true urban/rural divide with the suburbs trending toward the cities. Intriguing Niskanen Center research from Will Wilkinson pursues the possibility that raw population density now predicts political leanings, yet another axis on which Republicans have hitched themselves to a declining demographic.

In any case, the discussion hit an historical nerve for me, because I grew up in the only (once) big city which has sent a mayor to the White House. I was raised on this civic accomplishment. Grover Cleveland (that's his statue outside Buffalo City Hall) was president twice, another oddity, first in 1885-9 and again in 1893-7. (In the intervening election, he won the popular vote, but not the electoral college. We know about that.) He was a Democrat, which meant in those years that he applauded the dismantling of African American Reconstruction-era political power in a solid Democratic South that provided the base for his national victories. (White Republicans were not much better, though they gave lip service to men like Frederick Douglass.) He ran on lowering government spending, against unions, for corporations, and against government corruption. As far as the last goes, his Democrats seem to have been somewhat cleaner than contemporary Republicans -- and Cleveland seems to have had the administrative chops to run the executive branch competently, no small feat in a dishonest era. No doubt, having been mayor of Buffalo and then governor of New York gave him practical experience seldom seen in less accomplished presidents.

Like many presidents, Cleveland left office deeply unpopular as political winds changed and western and southern populists led by William Jennings Bryan overwhelmed urban Democrats.

We can't neatly map the conflicts of the late 19th century onto our own, but their urgency and ferocity is a reminder that the struggle to make something of our democracy never ends.