BY Larry Platt
Sep. 27, 2024
“She’s a great show horse,” one local politico told me last week, speaking of our mayor’s first nine eventful months in office. He meant it as a compliment. After eight years of grumpy stasis, there’s a new energy in local government. In her public-facing role, at least, Cherelle Parker has been a standout mayor.
Arguably not since Ed Rendell has the city had a more uplifting public leader. In her energy and her exhaustive exhortations that we’re “one city,” Parker performs the role of cheerleader-in-chief beyond the expectations suggested by her own campaign for the job.
Wherever you fall on the 76ers arena question, for instance, she’s aggressively practiced the art of public persuasion — something hard to imagine her predecessor doing.
Moreover, Parker has that Rendellian knack for staging: Showing up to a middle school at ground zero of Kensington’s dystopia via the Frankford El to deliver her 100-day update on her plan to restore order in that neighborhood, or (shakily) riding a bike with activists critical of her traffic safety policies. But she also has an instinct for bridge-building. The bike ride photo op came after a string of tragic deaths on our streets; the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia and Managing Director Adam Thiel set it up to clear the air between the administration and its critics. The resulting conversation had Bicycle Coalition Executive Director Chris Gale crowing that, “This is a big moment for us, the beginning of a beautiful partnership.”
Unlike her predecessor, Parker has been willing to spend political capital. She’s taken on the harm reduction progressives in Kensington, and her own workforce in her call for all of them to return to work in person. She not only ultimately embraced the Sixers arena, but called it “the best financial deal ever entered into by a Philly mayor for a local sports arena.”
This is the lingua franca of an engaged, even activist mayoralty, one that’s willing to defy and even piss off key constituencies. In her public-facing role, Parker pulls no punches, yet has smartly turned proclamations of her own vulnerability into political benefit. For a pol, shakily riding a bike can be disastrous; fall, and that leads the news, maybe in an ongoing loop. It can become a defining image of weakness. (Remember Gerald Ford’s pratfalls? Or Michael Dukakis looking like Snoopy in that tank?) Parker has taken it a step further — often talking openly and from the heart about her own vulnerability in the face of the awesome responsibilities of the office she now holds.
Take 15 minutes and watch this speech last spring to an interfaith group of spiritual leaders. In emotional and extemporaneous remarks, she not only wonders if she’s up for the job, she turns her own feelings of vulnerability into an ask for those in the room to step up and be leaders, too.
“The first thing I felt was how vulnerable I was,” she says, thinking back to being elected as the city’s first female mayor. “Why? Because one person, or one legislative body, I don’t care how great people think they are, they are not sufficient enough in their own individual human presence, they’re not smart enough, they’re not strong enough, they don’t know it all, they don’t have it all together, there is nothing you can do alone that will give you everything you need to move a city, greatest city in the nation, sixth largest city in the nation, birthplace of democracy, a city that, if Rev. Waller was here, he would say, ‘Cherelle, we’re packed with potential and pregnant with possibility.’ A city that great, with this history-making mayor and this council, we can’t do anything without you.”
That’s a JFK-like Ask Not communitarian moment, a stirring call for help and engagement and local patriotism. Time and again in her public remarks, Parker does this — turns her own story or feelings of inadequacy into humble asks for help, all in the service of one another.
This is one of the hardest parts of governing: Finding a public voice that rallies the will of the people to common cause. Parker has that, and it’s a talent born of her upbringing — there’s some church in her, and some plain-talking neighborhood speak. The only thing harder might be aligning one’s government with such highfalutin rhetoric. Mario Cuomo used to say, “You campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose.”
So how’s Parker’s prose been? Let’s take a look.
The great, late civic innovator (and founding Citizen chairman) Jeremy Nowak liked to say that “implementation is policy,” and last year a whole book was devoted to the thesis. Jennifer Pahlka’s Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better ought to be required reading for all in the Parker administration. As Pahlka explained on our How To Really Run a City podcast, if you can’t smartly implement smart policy no one will ultimately know it was smart in the first place.
It’s early, but there have been some glaring instances of distance between policy and implementation in the Parker administration. That first sweep of the Kensington encampment? There was a breakdown in project management chops when the cops showed up earlier than planned, more than one hour before social service outreach workers got there.
Bringing back city workers was one thing — Parker was ahead of Amazon on that front — but doing so without securing workspaces for all of them spoke to a shoot-from-the-hip management style that runs the risk of eroding trust. Not only that; if you’re going to ask your employees to sacrifice for you, sell them on the policy change first. Parker so pissed off her own workforce that, I’m told, there has been a concerted effort among angry (petulant?) white collar Center City workers to brown bag it for lunch, thereby keeping their dollars from circulating in their boss’s local economy.
To be clear, this is not a critique of the mayor’s policies. At the very least, the jury is out on her Kensington moves and she deserves props for doing something. A Kensington Voice story by Emily Rizzo and Sammy Caiola about that initial encampment sweep had this nugget:
On Wednesday afternoon, Annette Mears sat outside her home on Willard Street, which was cordoned off by police for the enforcement initiative.
“This is a good thing,” she said. “It’s letting the dealers know that the citizens of Philadelphia are tired of their crap. We’re tired of being held hostage in our houses or having to look over our shoulders when we leave for fear of getting robbed.”
Mears said about 30 kids live on her block, but parents are afraid to let them play outside unsupervised.
Screwing up implementation runs the risk of losing the likes of Annette Mears, who is clearly rooting for change.
There’s a lot that can contribute to these kinds of missteps — including growing pains. On some level, few are ready on day one to run a $6.4 billion organization with 1.5 million customers. But Parker’s slow and parochial hiring to date couldn’t have helped. What are the chances, after all, that the exact right person for just about every position she’s filled already happened to be right here in Philly? And mostly known to her? And how is it that we still don’t have key positions filled? Still relying on an interim health commissioner, for instance, sends a signal that public health is not a top priority.
This week, the mayor laid out in forceful terms her case for the Sixers arena. Again, she deserves kudos for spending political capital and for painting a vision she believes in. But in the immediate aftermath of her three-hour victory lap Wednesday, insider second-guessing was rampant. The Sixers had essentially opened the negotiations two years ago with a community benefits agreement offer of $50 million. After all the drama, all the protests, all the studies, that number remains … $50 million. It looked like Parker had gotten rolled. When she twice joyfully declared that “the Sixers are staying in Philadelphia” it was a tell: The threat of losing the team just might have loomed large in her desire to make the deal. What first-term mayor in a sports-crazed town wants to lose a major team?
Remember, during the campaign, it was Jeff Brown saying that the job of mayor was chiefly a cheerleading one, and it was Parker arguing that experience in governing is what truly matters. Now, ironically, she’s rightfully being lauded for her out front skills. But where are those governing chops?
The problem, say City Hall insiders, has been a logjam at the top of the administration. Rather than relying on a typical chief of staff, Parker dispersed leadership around three top staffers: Tiffany Thurman and two chief political aides, Aren Platt and Sincere Harris.
All three have stellar reputations, but complaints are coming from inside the house. Decisions large and small are having to be run up the chain, and they’re slow to come back down. The plodding rate of decision-making is far off from Parker’s public image as a doer. She’s expressed lofty goals — like creating 30,000 affordable housing units in four years — but they run the risk of becoming empty promises due to bureaucratic creep.
Which gets us back to the distinction made by Cuomo, Nowak and Pahlka. There is a real difference between campaigning and governing, and having one’s political aides atop your administration could blur that critical line.
It begs the question: Have we entered the world of the permanent campaign? Why in the world would a mayor in her first year need a 501c4 — a PAC — called “One Philly,” composed of undisclosed donors dedicated to furthering her agenda? You’ve already got the job. Used to be, you’d govern well, your comms team (on the City payroll) would help tell people all the good you were doing, and you’d get reelected — even if you bombed a neighborhood in your own city.
Sure, Jim Kenney had a c4 — to get his soda tax through. In New York, former Mayor Mike Bloomberg used one to cleverly blur the lines between his philanthropy, his governing, and his political interests. Gov. Josh Shapiro’s inaugural was paid for by a c4. But this feels different in scope. I was forwarded an invitation that went out a few weeks ago from millionaire and one-time mayoral candidate Tom Knox to a fundraiser in his Center City home.
“To advance One Philly’s mission of promoting the Parker Administration’s platform and policies for the future of Philadelphia, I am hosting a fundraising event …,” he wrote. “Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker will be at the event to support One Philly’s efforts to advance the Mayor’s agenda for our city.” The cost of entry? $2,500 per guest.
Which gets us to:
To be clear: A 501c4 is perfectly legal, if icky. After all, we already pay taxes for a mayor to promote her policies; that’s what all those communications people on the City payroll are for. While Parker never sold herself to us as a reformer, there’s something a bit perverse when the mayor and other elected officials not named Jared Solomon are silent about the clown show at the sheriff’s office … while raising millions for an unaccountable propaganda operation.
“The knives are definitely out,” one City Hall insider told me last week, referencing a number of recent stories that point to the dysfunction that can come from government in the shadows. One was an article about the private life of Mustafa Rashed, which we won’t even link to because I can’t for the life of me understand why it was a story in the first place. Rashed was not a city employee, but, rather, the paid spokesman for Parker’s campaign. Another was the piece about Managing Director Adam Thiel’s freelance moonlighting — a legitimate story, given that managing director is the most 24/7 of all city jobs. Finally, there was the story about Parker showing up on a Saturday at the home of an election official in the City Commissioners’ Office, prevailing upon said worker not to resign. All vastly different pieces, but all likely placed in the public realm as a result of some form of palace intrigue or another.
That’s a red flag. “When senior staff is jockeying for position to be the last voice in the room with the mayor, people get targeted and pushed out,” said a City Hall insider.
So far, the Parker administration — while passionate and activist — has not exactly been transparent. Cherelle Parker doesn’t have to turn into famed reformer Richardson Dilworth. But she also ought not be James Tate, who ended political reform in the 60s by resurrecting machine politics, driven by the power of unions.
Do you feel you have a handle on what your government takes in and what you get from it? Now that the mayor has made her arena decision, perhaps she can steal an idea from Phoenix, where the city manager puts citizens first with one of the best, most interactive dashboards of city performance anywhere. At any given time, you can get a real time snapshot of your city’s health on 150 key performance indicators across government services. You feel like you have similar access to your city’s report card?
Fact is, being a show horse can be splashy, but all style and no substance gets you … Eric Adams. Here’s hoping that Mayor Parker, who has exhibited impressive oratory skill, comes to see that, ultimately, only transparency and the blocking and tackling of getting shit done bridges the gap between poetry and prose.
MORE COVERAGE OF THE MAYORAL ADMINISTRATION
Ideas We Should Steal Festival
Real Estate Development for Good
Civic Health with Connor Barwin
Criminal Justice with Malcolm Jenkins
