Word: democratics
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Fifteen months after getting locked up in a Wisconsin jail for mail fraud, the 69-year-old Democrat has been transferred to a Salvation Army halfway house on Chicago's West Side to serve out the remainder of his sentence...
What makes these mayors' governmental pragmatism possible is that they have also developed a flexible, post-ideological approach to politics. Cities that once thrived on straight-ticket Democratic machine politics, where labor unions and social-welfare programs were considered untouchable, are led today by some of the nation's most nonpartisan and politically unpredictable politicians. On school vouchers Cleveland's White, an African-American Democrat, is sparring with his city's traditionally Democratic teachers' union and the N.A.A.C.P. Goldsmith alienated his party's establishment by firing patronage appointees who stood in the way of his efforts to privatize. Says...
...prime article of faith among the new mayors is that city employees must become more efficient. Rendell, a Democrat and a tough-talking former prosecutor, is widely credited with saving Philadelphia by going eyeball-to-eyeball with the city's powerful public-employee unions shortly after he took office in 1992. Rendell offered workers a contract that froze wages for 33 months and cut back on paid holidays. After a 16-hour strike, the unions capitulated. Under Rendell, a city that was cited five years ago by City and State magazine for setting "the standard for municipal distress...
Although a liberal Democrat, Milwaukee's Norquist has also taken a tough line with city workers. He was faced a few years ago with a standoff between his public-works and fire departments over the painting of firehouses. The fire department wanted the buildings painted in the summer, when its trucks could easily be kept outside, but public works said too many of its people would be on vacation. Norquist allowed the fire department to engage a private contractor to get the project done in the summer. "The good news for the public-works department is they learned from this...
...Chicago, Daley has taken on his city's most intractable problem: a $3 billion school system that former U.S. Education Secretary William Bennett once called the worst in the nation. Two years ago, Daley, a Democrat, convinced Illinois' Republican state legislature to hand him authority over the schools. He ousted the city's entrenched educational bureaucracy, installed a school board that put nearly 20% of the schools on probation for low performance and got approval for $850 million in bond issues to build new school buildings and renovate old ones. The Daley regime's hard-hitting reforms, which included cutting...