Dragging Down Dayton for Political Gain

Ellen Belcher penned a very prophetic column just before the NCR announcment:

Dragging Down Dayton Gets the Region Nowhere

This passage was particularly good:

Here’s the thing, though. The animus toward Dayton — covert and overt, conscious and unconscious — is poisonous.

Is anybody better off if — borrowing from the Rush Limbaugh school of politics — Dayton fails?

Ned Hill, an urban affairs professor at Cleveland State University, said that sourness about cities isn’t “just self-defeating. It’s self-fulfilling.

And one can see how this sour poison is working in the NCR argument. It's an excuse for various people with political axes to grind to attack the Democrats and the left in general and Rhine McLin in particular. So one has politically motivated Dayton bashing becuase its important for certain political agendas to drag down Dayton.

This is the case for any bad news on about Dayton. Is it raining today? It's that damn Mayor McHats fault. Dayton has gloomy winters? Rhine McLin should resign posthaste.

There are probably issues with McLins' leadership and Dayton governance. In fact this blog is critical of Rashad Young, the city manager who serves at the pleasure of the mayor and city commission. Yet the undercurrent of the critque is dominated by right wing ideology and a very thinly veiled racism. In fact racism is apparently a bigger deal here than people want to admit, and is behind the high degree of bile and venom to the anti-Dayton/anti-McLin remarks.

Of course if a white male Republican, say another Mike Turner, was mayor, or if a bunch of conservative Republicans controlled the city commission you'd hear nary a word. The reason why is the political agenda would be to minimize urban socioeconomic problems because the goal would be to make the conservatives look good.

And one would see attacks from the left and the Democrats, the way presumably anti-Perdue people posting on Atlanta-centric forums are minmizing NCR's economic impact or questioning if it was really worth the money Perdue paid them to move

So political obsession and partisanship screws up peoples minds, leading to a sort of low dishonesty.

Dayton was identified over a decade ago by urban affairs expert David Rusk as a city beyond the point of no return, so problems have been around for a long time now, beyond the ability of Republican Mike Turner or Democrat Rhine McLin to addresss in any substantive way.

And a problematic Dayton is due to the people who live there...and here...as it's due to the suburbanites anti-urban, racist, classist and fearful attitudeds toward the city. This has led suburbanites to essentially cede the city to the underclass, which is white trash as much as it's black ghetto.

The result is the city is a socioeconomic bantustan, a behavorial sink ruled by a minority woman, who then becomes the target of potshots by suburbanites who helped create and enforce the conditions of economic & social exclusion, the consequences of which become ammunition for the ongoing dragging down of Dayton.

This place is really sick, and perhaps Nuti saw that after he became CEO of NCR, saying 'no thanks' to the bad karma that is Dayton and Vicinity.