Otis White

The skills and strategies of civic leadership

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The Skills of Small-P Politics

June 9, 2010 By Otis White

Not long ago, I wrote about Alan Ehrenhalt’s classic book about local politics, “The United States of Ambition.” In it, Alan, a longtime political journalist, documents the decline of deference, the rise of “freelance” politicians who come to office without deep community connections, and the erosion of traditional community leadership.

Alan is not the only one to notice this erosion. Writing from the other side of the desk, Willie Brown, the former mayor of San Francisco and one of the shrewdest political operators around, has also written about the sea change in how communities work. In his 2008 memoir, “Basic Brown,” Brown discussed the decline of what he called the “leadership class” of cities, “a brigade of people of wealth and interest who could be counted upon to support the city, its institutions, and its needs.”

These leaders, Brown said, would respond to almost any appeal that was couched in civic patriotism.

In an afternoon, you could reach a dozen or so people and help a worthy institution get its special fund-raising under way. You really didn’t have to explain very much. You just said, “The museum needs help. Everybody’s pitching in. Will you? And will you call people you know?” They did.

And today?

. . . (T)he people who feel this way are dying away with no one to replace them. It’s not that fortunes are disappearing—we have more billionaires than ever in San Francisco. It’s simply that this kind of local civic spirit is disappearing.

The problem, Brown wrote, was globalism, which has loosened the connections between the wealthy and the places they (or their forebears) made their fortunes.  For example, he said,

I used to keep a Rolodex of real estate developers, builders of big apartment houses and office buildings, whom I could call upon for help with civic matters. These guys have almost all disappeared.  Very few locals are directly involved in local real estate anymore. They don’t invest in buildings; they invest in global real estate trusts. They’re not San Francisco landlords; they’re market investors.

I, too, have written about the decline of long-term business leaders. In a 2006 op-ed article in the New York Times, I focused on the loss of bankers as local leaders, but I agree with Mayor Brown: It’s more than the banks, it’s most of our local businesses. Globalism may (or may not) be good for us as consumers and business people, but it has made communities much harder to lead.

So what do we do? Well, I don’t think we can reverse globalism. And I think Alan was right that the decline of traditional leadership has left many places with a set of “freelance” politicians whom nobody sent and, in a sense, no one is responsible for. So when you subtract traditional business leaders and deeply connected politicians, it leaves us . . . on our own. And that may be OK.

It means that if communities are going to be led in the future, the leaders will have to be us.  You and me. Average people without corporate backing or generations of civic involvement. People who care about their communities and are willing to work to make them better, but can do so only part time because they have day jobs.

But if this is going to work, the part-time leaders will need to learn a few skills. First, they’re going to have to learn how power works and how to accumulate it to do important things. Second, they’re going to have to master the skills of “small-p politics,” how to introduce new ideas, build interest in them, remove obstacles, gain approval from permission givers and drive the ideas forward. This isn’t the “big-p politics” that we associate with campaigns and legislative chambers, the stuff you see on CNN or C-Span. Small-p politics is quieter, more patient, far less glamorous—in other words, it’s grunt work. (In an earlier posting, I called it “removing the boulders” and “building the wall.”)

So while I agree with Alan’s analysis and understand Mayor Brown’s frustration, I think the days of depending on the few to lead us are over, and we need to get on with teaching power and political skills to the many. And, oh, Mr. Mayor, it’s time to trade in that Rolodex for a database.

Photo by Wally Gobetz licensed under Creative Commons.

Rereading a Classic About Community Leadership

May 10, 2010 By Otis White

In 1991, I read Alan Ehrenhalt’s brilliant analysis of who runs for public office, “The United States of Ambition.” (Note: Alan is a friend and occasional colleague.) The book begins with a description of candidates of the 1990s and how they were different from candidates in the past, and continues with chapters profiling the changes at the local, state and federal levels, including who runs for president.

When I reread “The United States of Ambition” recently, I was surprised by how much I remembered of Alan’s book—and a critical part I had forgotten.

Here are three most important things I remembered:

  • Few political analysts spend much time looking at who runs for office, Alan wrote, but a lot could be learned from looking at this “supply side” of politics.
  • The key change was in what Alan called “the decline of deference” and the rise of “freelance” politicians who represented no one but themselves.
  • This change in who runs for office, Alan said, resolved an old debate between sociologists and political scientists on who makes decisions for American communities. In the 1950s and 1960s, a number of sociologists studied cities and towns around the country and came to the conclusion that most important decisions were made by a handful of people, the “power structure.” Political scientists did similar studies and found that important decisions were made by shifting coalitions, not cohesive groups. Alan’s answer: The “structuralists” (sociologists) were describing the past, while the “pluralists” (political scientists) were describing the future.

It’s a smart book that’s brilliantly reported and well written. If you like local politics, you’ll be fascinated by Alan’s description of how places like Concord, Calif., Sioux Falls, S.D., Greenville, S.C. and Utica, N.Y. changed, sometimes overnight. At the center of the stories are the politicians. One year, elected officials are people with deep connections to a traditional group of community leaders. Then an election comes along and, bang, the voters put in a group of politicians no one had recruited and few had even heard of before they ran. (You’ll particularly enjoy the story of how in 1974 the voters of Sioux Falls tossed out a longtime mayor who sought and followed advice from a group of business leaders, replacing him with a “shaggy-haired, 27-year-old disc jockey who had run because a listener dared him to on a weekday morning call-in program.”)

The United States of Ambition

The “mutiny of 1974” wasn’t peculiar to Sioux Falls, Alan wrote; it was part of a generational shift away from people who served on school boards, city councils and county commissions out of obligation to the community and toward candidates who ran for office because they loved the game of politics. These new-style politicians, self-motivated and self-sufficient, excel at campaigning.

The skills that work in American politics at this point in history are those of entrepreneurship. At all levels of the political system, from local boards and councils up to and including the presidency, it is unusual for parties to nominate people. People nominate themselves. That is, they offer themselves as candidates, raise money, organize campaigns, create their own publicity, and make decisions in their own behalf. If they are not willing to do that work for themselves, they are not (except in a very few parts of the country) going to find any political party structure to do it for them.

And this is a dramatic break from the past, Alan added:

. . . (T)he successful candidates a generation ago were those who bore the stamp of approval of the town’s informal leadership organization. “When we were kids growing up,” a Sioux Falls businessman in his forties recalls, “everybody knew who would win the elections. The person who had been in Rotary and had been endorsed by the Chamber of Commerce always won.”

These were the things I remembered from my first reading: the decline of deference and the sudden jolting changes as a new, “freelance” type of politician emerged in communities.

What I had forgotten was Alan’s caution that this new style of “unbossed and unbought” politician—which independent-minded Americans tend to like—carried a risk. The risk: That in overthrowing the “power structure” we would settle for no power at all. Here’s how Alan describes the downside of the truly independent political leader:

(P)ower can evaporate. When it breaks loose from those who have held it in concentrated form, as has happened in American politics over the last generation, it does not necessarily change hands. It may be dispersed so broadly that it might as well have disappeared into thin air. And leadership, which ultimately depends upon the existence of power, may disappear along with it.

The irony of pursuing office in the 1990s is that one may reach a position of influence, find no established elite or power structure blocking its exercise, yet discover that it is more difficult than ever to lead.

In the cities he profiled, that’s what he found: Newcomers with “no strings attached” also had no ability to pull strings to get things done. “Unbossed and unbought” sometimes meant unmoored and adrift. ” . . . (T)he mayor who doesn’t owe anybody a thing doesn’t have many tools to govern with either,” Alan wrote. “Candidates nobody sent can be very appealing; leaders nobody sent can be dangerous.”

The result, in city after city, were elected officials with too few connections and little in common to work together.

We have replaced governments that could say yes—and make it stick—with governments that offer a multitude of interests the right to say no. We have elected and empowered a generation of political professionals whose independence and refusal to defer makes concerted action, even when necessary, quite difficult.

I think this is exactly so, and it’s why I believe leadership has become the single most important factor in communities today—because it’s so easy to stop things and so hard to move things forward. We can’t depend on a power structure or elected officials to lead anymore. The first doesn’t exist in most places and the second often can’t deliver. It takes a broader group of people working together, using new skills to lead our cities and towns.

I’ve already talked a little about what those new skills are; we’ll talk more about them in the future. But the need for new leaders and new leadership skills is greater than at any time in my memory. Thanks to Alan Ehrenhalt for telling us why.

Photo of sign by Mark Sardella licensed under Creative Commons.

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About Otis White

Otis White is president of Civic Strategies, Inc., a collaborative and strategic planning firm for local governments and civic organizations. He has written about cities and their leaders for more than 30 years. For more information about Otis and his work, please visit www.civic-strategies.com.

The Great Project

Otis White's multimedia book, "The Great Project," is available on Apple iTunes for reading on an iPad. The book is about how a single civic project changed a city and offers important lessons for civic leaders considering their own "great projects" . . . and for students in college planning and political science programs.

For more information about the book, please visit the iTunes Great Project page.

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