David Hoppe

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:: "Had enough?"

Bart's weakness

By David Hoppe

For the past couple of days there's been a road-weary van parked across the street with a blue sticker in its rear window. The sticker asks: "Had enough?"

The question doesn't refer to the condition of the van. It's about the city, specifically, the job Bart Peterson has done as mayor for the last eight years.

"Had enough?"

I suspect anyone seeing this sticker can instantly hear the words inside their head. This isn't just a question, it's an accusation.

What a long way we've come in just three months. In May, local Republicans were going through the motions of nominating a candidate to run against Peterson in November's election. When they finally settled on Greg Ballard, a retired Marine Corps officer with a nary a speck of political experience, the city responded with a collective shrug and went on about its business. The same might be said for the bosses in the GOP, who provided Ballard with a pittance for a campaign budget and told him to look both ways before crossing busy intersections.

But that's the way politics is supposed to work in Indianapolis. It doesn't matter what party you belong to. If you can convince the poobahs and plushbottoms that you're one of them and won't do anything to cramp their style - like make their businesses pay taxes - they'll shower you with campaign contributions. Until the advent of email this meant that one candidate could run TV commercials while the other one stapled flyers to telephone poles. The winner of the mayor's race here has usually been a foregone conclusion. This year, Bart Peterson was the anointed one.

That's certainly the way it looked last May. Peterson is smart, funny and helpful to business. The skyline of downtown Indianapolis has been significantly enhanced during his tenure. People agreed he was a shoo-in for re-election.

A higher city crime rate was hanging around like an inflamed sty, but this seemed more a priority item for a third term to-do list than a Peterson deal-breaker. Then, in July, taxes hit the fan. First came the mayor's proposal to raise the income tax by 65 percent. Since this was not only to fight crime, but address the long-ducked issue of police and fire pensions, it had the aura of a principled position. The trouble was the timing. Within days, citizens began receiving property tax bills, many showing stupefying increases.

Peterson can rightly claim to be a victim of circumstance in much of this. He didn't create the property tax mess or the rise in crime. Mayors before him gladly applied band-aids to issues like these, as well as to the city's aging infrastructure, its sewers and schools.

Where Peterson deserves blame is for his failure to trust the common sense of the people living here and adequately convey a persuasive vision for the city. Instead of leading Indianapolis as a whole, he's attempted to manage its various interest groups. His cultural initiative is a good example.

When first elected, Peterson pledged to take the arts out of Parks and Recreation where they've been buried for years, and give our cultural resources their own line in the city budget. Eight years later, this pledge is still unfulfilled. Does this mean the cultural initiative was a bust? On the contrary, Indianapolis has seen its arts community begin to blossom. But this has been accomplished through a series of tactical maneuvers. Lacking the confidence to build a politically sustainable consensus around the arts, Peterson has chosen to avoid confrontation and manage the situation. This may look smart, but it betrays a fundamental weakness of leadership.

It's the same weakness that was on display when Peterson chose to pack the City-County Council chamber with cronies for the presentation of his 2008 budget. This presentation, it turned out, was less an accounting than a pep talk. The cronies inside, recruited to provide a contrived and pointless air of dignity, cheered; outside, people were protesting. Peterson missed a golden opportunity. This was a chance for him to show confidence, to face down the hecklers with a dose of reality and a vision for the future.

"Had enough?" Greg Ballard, Peterson's Republican opponent is the one asking this question. Polls show that most people still don't even know who Ballard is. But so many people are so riled about the way things are going, this question might be all he needs. If his Republican bosses give Ballard the chance to turn that question into a TV ad campaign, we could have something new on our hands -- a mayor's race.