Ballard – Page 2 – Sheila Kennedy

The Politics of Pay

Whatever the merits of Mayor Ballard’s decision to give his staff huge pay raises, the “optics,” as they say, are terrible. The upcoming city budget will be more than painful, thanks largely to the ill-conceived “tax caps,” and the cuts to services will be draconian in some places. Giving your buddies in the Mayor’s office 20% raises at a time like this is simply tone-deaf. (Someone reminded me yesterday that former Mayor Peterson actually cut pay for his office staff at a time of tight budget constraints.)

For all I know, the raises were an effort to keep people from fleeing the administration; Michael Huber–far and away the most effective member of the Mayor’s staff–has already announced his departure, and this is the time in most second terms when people who can leave–who are actually employable elsewhere–begin their job hunting.

Whatever the calculus, this was a bone-headed move that will make it much harder for the Mayor to get the sort of political concessions he will need during the give-and-take of budget negotiations. It is one more bit of evidence–as if we needed any–that the “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” American delusion is just that. Delusional.

Ballard may be a nice enough fellow, but he ran for office proudly proclaiming his “outsider” status. He asked people to vote for him because he wasn’t a “politician”–in other words, because he wasn’t someone who understood how the system worked. Voters bought it; they elected him over two opponents who actually did understand urban issues and politics. The results have been mixed, to put it mildly, and Ballard has relied heavily on outside “advisers” who have had their own interests to advance.

Cities can function with inept leadership when times are reasonably good–when we can afford the learning curve. But when the fiscal belt tightens, we need leadership that understands how cities work, what the priorities must be and how to achieve important goals.

It’s no time for the tone-deaf.

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What is Ballard Smoking?

When the dust cleared after the November elections, Indianapolis was left with divided city government. The Mayor is Republican. The Council majority is Democrat. The challenge for the next four years will be to get along–to make decent policy despite partisan divisions.

An article in this morning’s Star suggests we’re not getting off to an auspicious start.

Indianapolis has been struggling for several months to enact a smoking ban that actually has some teeth. After a couple of false starts, the Council has produced a (bipartisan!) draft, to be voted on tonight. But according to the Star,

“The proposal’s effect on veterans halls and private clubs has become a focal point of debate and has raised the likelihood of a mayoral veto.

As written, the proposal would give those places an exemption from the smoking ban but only with a hard choice: Keep smoking, or allow children on the premises. But not both.

Mayor Greg Ballard said Friday through a spokesman that unless the council removes the restriction on children tonight, he will veto the measure. That statement was his most forceful yet since the council resumed the years-old smoking ban debate two months ago.”

When Ballard first ran for Mayor, he promised to support a smoking ban. When actually faced with an earlier iteration, he withdrew that support, and he’s been a roadblock ever since. The question is: why? The current compromise protects children from the documented health hazards of secondhand smoke, while still allowing adults in private clubs to smoke. That seems entirely reasonable. But my question goes well beyond the merits of this particular ordinance.

If he is to achieve any of his goals, Ballard will have to be strategic in his relationship with the City-County Council. He will have to choose his fights carefully. Is this really an issue on which he wants to spend his small store of political capital? Is the American Legion’s pique so important that he’s willing to start the new term with a fight that will further divide the branches of local government and further diminish the prospects for cooperation?

Wrong on policy, wrong on process, and politically short-sighted. Welcome to the start of a long four years.

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The Devil You Know….

A couple of political truisms–which I have always accepted as “givens”–went up in smoke last night. The first was that at-large candidates win or lose based upon the performance of their party’s mayoral candidate. The second was that in close races, victory is largely a matter of getting your vote out.

In Indianapolis yesterday, the Democrats got their votes out. They took back the Council, including the at-large seats. But enough of those Democrats scratched Melina Kennedy to allow Ballard a second term.

There will undoubtedly be lots of second-guessing and post-election analysis. Here’s my two-cents-worth: the sorts of things about the Ballard Administration that appall so many of us who watch government closely are not the sorts of things that are apparent to the average voter (and the media largely ignored those issues during his term). No one was enthusiastic about him–he never got out of the low 40s in internal polls–but the average voter was aware of no strong reason to oppose him. Meanwhile, Melina Kennedy never gave people a strong reason to vote for her–her ads did not adequately introduce her to the voters before they began attacking Ballard, and the attack ads were, as Paul Ogden has noted, insufficiently specific; they failed to explain what was wrong with the cozy deals they alluded to–they simply attacked.

Given two candidates seen as interchangeable, voters opted for the one with whom they were familiar.

The good news is that a Democratic Council should be able to block the sorts of cozy deals and poor policy choices that have characterized Ballard’s tenure. The danger is that the Council will simply act out of partisanship, rather than principle. In either case, the next four years are likely to be contentious.

A mediocre (at best) mayor and a hostile council aren’t exactly a recipe for progress.

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Underestimating Voters’ Intelligence?

I’ve made no secret of my opinion that Greg Ballard has been an unfortunate mayor–a nice enough guy who assumed office mostly because the incumbent ran a terrible campaign, and whose total lack of background and understanding of what the job requires has allowed him to be “managed” by insiders who’ve been making out like bandits.

He may win re-election (although I wouldn’t bet any real money on that possibility), but I have to wonder about his campaign’s decision to hit Melina Kennedy for decisions made by Bart Peterson. I’ve seen several ads now that essentially say “When she was Deputy Mayor, X happened and X was bad. She was responsible for X. Vote Ballard.”

Granted, in the Ballard Administration the current Deputy Mayor (who actually can define “urban” and “governance”) has been the prime mover of policy, but in most administrations, Deputy Mayors take their marching orders from the guy who won the election. They may be consulted–especially in matters where they have expertise–but they certainly don’t set policy.When I was in City Hall, the two Deputy Mayors disagreed with decisions made by the Mayor on several occasions. They communicated their opinions to the Mayor, and (appropriately) supported his policies publicly.

Deputy Mayors are assigned specific areas and tasked with implementing policy in those areas. If they do a poor job, it is certainly fair to criticize that performance, but trying to blame them for things their boss decided–or worse, for things that “happened” while their boss was in office, as they do in one of these commercials–is just silly.

Wouldn’t you expect that the people airing these campaign ads know that? Wouldn’t you think they’d expect voters to understand it?

Obviously, the folks doing Ballard’s ads don’t think we know that. They also don’t think we understand that tax rates–which Ballard’s ads tell us have “gone down during the Ballard Administration”–are determined by the Indiana General Assembly, and not by the Mayor, who deserves neither praise nor blame for the coincidence.

Granted, I am biased in this race, and further granted, I follow all these issues for a living and as a result, I’m probably more familiar with the way government works than most folks. But I find it difficult to believe that most voters don’t understand who calls the shots in an administration, and I find these ads offensive–not because they are negative (both candidates have run very negative ads), but because they assume that we voters are too stupid to know who does what.

Maybe they’re right. In which case, we are really in trouble.

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The Poll Next Tuesday

Yesterday, WISH TV and Franklin College released the first independent poll of the mayoral election. It had something for everyone–Ballard is polling significantly less than 50%, typically a danger sign for an incumbent. On the other hand, he was ahead of Kennedy. The number of undecideds was huge this late in the race, and the early voters favored Kennedy by a wide margin, suggesting more enthusiasm for the Democrat.

Of course, when a poll has a 4.9% margin of error, any results should be viewed with some skepticism.

Actually, political polling has fallen on hard times. Last year, Brian Vargus–the Political Science Professor who has long been regarded as the local expert on political surveys–came to talk to my class. His message was that most political polling is worthless–that accurate, reliable surveys are prohibitively expensive, and campaigns and media outlets simply don’t do them anymore. That’s why you see such large margins of error.

A good poll will be representative of those actually likely to vote. That means including minority communities that are historically under-polled (Julia Carson routinely polled 15-20 points lower than her vote on election day). It means including younger voters who use cell phones exclusively (and accounting for the fact that they’re less likely to vote). In other words, a good poll requires both accurate sampling and the use of methodologically predictive algorithms.

According to this morning’s news, Vargus raised several questions about the WISH poll, based upon some internal inconsistencies. But even assuming it is reasonably accurate, what it tells us is what politicians have always known: what matters is the poll taken on election day, and that poll depends on who does the best job getting out their vote.

A recent study of 155 elections involving incumbents showed that voters who were undecided two weeks prior to the election broke 80%/20% for the challenger. Evidently, if the incumbent didn’t have them by then, he wasn’t going to get them. That’s good news for Kennedy–if her campaign gets those folks to the polls.

At the end of the day, turnout is the key.

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