Democrats Can Win by Confronting Crime
By Thom Hartmann, The Hartmann Report, Substack
Recent column from liberal talk radio guy who lives in Portland, Oregon. The pretext is the election of progressive Dem Cherelle Parker as mayor of Philadelphia, who won her recent election with a tough on crime platform. You know that one: remove all homeless camps, hire more cops, and let them crack heads on petty crime, but do so while-- and, please note, this is how this plan is supposed to differ from the longstanding Repug recipe for mass incarceration that it otherwise resembles-- do crackdowns while at the same time aggressively expanding affordable housing, treatment programs, and taxing the rich to fund a tax base that will pay for all this stuff. Of course, lefties and progressives have heard all of this before and don't trust the cops or the rich. They expect this plays out, instead, as a big show of expensive sweeps, throwing a lot more people in jail, but never getting around to the affordable housing and treatment programs or-- most crucially really-- taxing the rich, as has been more or less the pattern since forever; or at least the 1980s. Hartmann's conversation includes many important details and sounds an alarm that rings a strikingly familiar bell with early results in Seattle's recent city council elections, where it appears number one the electorate wants the homeless encampments and drug dealing and petty crime to go away. They'll support longer range housing solutions but don't want to wait another minute to get people off the streets and away from their homes and neighborhoods. Hartmann's most salient point would be that Dems need to come to grips with this electoral fact or expect more Repug austerity coming to a city government near you. My sense is he is not wrong.
