If you live OUTSIDE New Albany, this trend should enthuse you: "Is Mayor a Dead End Job?"

Deaf Gahan may be agoraphobic, but he's also ambitious, and for a while the rumor mill emitted regular signals that he'd seek higher office.

But Deaf hates a contested race against his betters, and the Democratic Party somehow found younger cannon fodder to challenge Ed Clere and Ron Grooms, so it appears New Albany is stuck with the deadendanchorweightgenius of the flood plain, at least until someone defeats Gahan's imposing Elsby-sized sack o' cash.

We're undaunted, right?

Let's gather those HazMat suits, and we'll reason together in preparation for 2019, when there'll be one chance in the spring, and if necessary, a second in the fall to return Dear Leader to a purely workmanlike career in veneer.

Meanwhile, too bad about Pete Buttigieg's restricted political mobility. He seems actually competent.

Is Mayor a Dead End Job? by Aaron Renn (Urbanophile)

We constantly hear that it’s the era of cities. Benjamin Barber wrote a book called If Mayors Ruled the World. Mayors are touted as pragmatic problem solvers who are taking on the challenges politicians at other levels of government are afraid to face.

One would think that if mayors were that much better than state or federal officials, then mayor would be a great stepping stone to higher office. However, that does not appear to be the case ...

 ... One such young mayor who has gotten huge attention is Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana.

Renn outlines the problems facing Buttigieg, then concludes:

A bitter irony is at play here: At a moment when the faces of the Democratic Party are 67-year-old Chuck Schumer and 77-year-old Nancy Pelosi, when so many novice Democrats are banging at the gate, spurred into action by powerful social currents and opposition to the president, one of the party’s most talented young politicians has nowhere to go.

Indiana is a red state and mayor hasn’t generally been a great route to higher office. Two Indianapolis mayors after Richard Lugar ran for statewide office and lost. But the pattern is clearly more widespread.

Looking around, you hear about lots of people who’ve acquired the monicker “Mayor for Life,” but not nearly as many former mayors who moved up to higher office at all, much less proven to be dynamos there.

Wonderful.

"In fact, things have been going badly wrong in America since the beginning of the 21st century."

Clear-headed, incisive and damning. Speaking for myself, the past two years have brought the greatest civics (and history, and economics) lessons for me since college, perhaps exceeding it.

Near the end, the author observes:

The abstraction of “inequality” doesn’t matter a lot to ordinary Americans. The reality of economic insecurity does. The Great American Escalator is broken—and it badly needs to be fixed.

But if inequality is the straw breaking the escalator's back ...

Read this essay.

Our Miserable 21st Century, by Nicholas Eberstadt (Commentary)

From work to income to health to social mobility, the year 2000 marked the beginning of what has become a distressing era for the United States

On the morning of November 9, 2016, America’s elite—its talking and deciding classes—woke up to a country they did not know. To most privileged and well-educated Americans, especially those living in its bicoastal bastions, the election of Donald Trump had been a thing almost impossible even to imagine. What sort of country would go and elect someone like Trump as president? Certainly not one they were familiar with, or understood anything about.

Whatever else it may or may not have accomplished, the 2016 election was a sort of shock therapy for Americans living within what Charles Murray famously termed “the bubble” (the protective barrier of prosperity and self-selected associations that increasingly shield our best and brightest from contact with the rest of their society). The very fact of Trump’s election served as a truth broadcast about a reality that could no longer be denied: Things out there in America are a whole lot different from what you thought.

Yes, things are very different indeed these days in the “real America” outside the bubble. In fact, things have been going badly wrong in America since the beginning of the 21st century.

It turns out that the year 2000 marks a grim historical milestone of sorts for our nation. For whatever reasons, the Great American Escalator, which had lifted successive generations of Americans to ever higher standards of living and levels of social well-being, broke down around then—and broke down very badly.

The warning lights have been flashing, and the klaxons sounding, for more than a decade and a half. But our pundits and prognosticators and professors and policymakers, ensconced as they generally are deep within the bubble, were for the most part too distant from the distress of the general population to see or hear it. (So much for the vaunted “information era” and “big-data revolution.”) Now that those signals are no longer possible to ignore, it is high time for experts and intellectuals to reacquaint themselves with the country in which they live and to begin the task of describing what has befallen the country in which we have lived since the dawn of the new century ...

"What Should Become of America’s Slums?"

It's hard to find just one paragraph summarizing this article, but here goes.

“We take both approaches. There’s the mobility model, which gets people out of concentrated poverty, and there’s the redevelopment model, which tries to make [poor] neighborhoods better,” he told me. “We do both of those things. They both can work.”

My gut feeling is that listening comes first. I can't speak for Austin, but in New Albany, there has not been a dialogue, and without a dialogue, no one is listening.

What Should Become of America’s Slums?, by Alana Semuels (City Lab)