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Posted May 7, 2001
Achingly AloneBy Charles Mahtesian
Clarence Harmon was neither the best mayor St. Louis has ever had nor the worst, yet his recently ended single term in office will almost certainly be memorialized in the annals of big-city politics. In a humbling show of futility and ineffectualness, Harmon won just 5 percent of the Democratic vote in the city’s March mayoral primary.
There was no scandal, no hint of corruption, no widespread breakdown in city services to explain Harmon’s spectacular defeat. He simply lacked a constituency — any constituency at all.
Harmon’s story is peculiar to St. Louis, though anyone familiar with the calculus of urban identity group politics will recognize some familiar themes. More than 80 percent of white voters cast ballots for the eventual winner, white Aldermanic President Francis Slay. More than 80 percent of black voters picked a candidate of their race, too. The twist is that Harmon, who is African-American, was not that candidate. Former Mayor Freeman Bosley Jr. was. Black voters never truly forgave Harmon for ousting Bosley, the city’s first African-American mayor, in 1997. They leapt at the opportunity to send Bosley back to City Hall this year.
White voters, on the other hand, considered Harmon’s main asset to be the fact that he was not Bosley. In the 1997 matchup between Harmon and Bosley, they provided Harmon’s margin of victory. But in the absence of any real or emotional connection with Harmon since then, they deserted him en masse this time for Slay.
Harmon’s lackluster political skills figured prominently in his loss. Formerly the city’s police chief, Harmon approached the mayoralty the same way. He fostered a reputation for integrity and incorruptibility and shied away from being too closely associated with one racial faction or another. In a city that is roughly half white and half black, that’s not an insignificant achievement.
In the end though, Harmon’s race-neutral approach counted for almost nothing. On Election Day, he was utterly and achingly alone, or as close to it as any unindicted big-city mayor will ever be while still holding office. Without a passel of accomplishments to herald and lacking a diehard racial constituency that would elect him regardless, Harmon discovered an immutable lesson about mayoral politics in St. Louis and everywhere else:
Either overtly or tacitly, a mayor must pick a side. He or she can be perceived as being more responsive to one community or another and still win, but it’s close to impossible to win by being equally responsive to everyone.
Charles Mahtesian is a former staff writer for Governing.
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Readers’ Responses:
MAYORS HAVE TO BE POLITICAL
Mr. Harmon, a veteran police officer and the first African-American chief, prided himself on not being a politician. He failed to realize that mayors had to be political. He failed to sell himself or the city. He also had a tendency to miss a great many meetings and to frequently go out of town. He could have developed a constituency; he did not choose to do so.
Lana Stein
NOT A CONSENSUS BUILDER
St. Louis is much more than black and white. We are also red and brown, old and new, young and old, well off and not so well off, men and women and gay or straight, with feet firmly planted in several centuries. Many of us believe Mayor Harmon was a good guy. Giving orders in a police chain of command is much different than building a consensus in a city that is as diverse in every sense of the word as we are.
He did not build a consensus with big business, small business, neighborhood organizations, preservationists or any number of groups in our city. When and if long-awaited decisions were made, they were often reversed. We are part city and part county, surrounded by counties and with much of our daily lives controlled in our state capital. A unique situation. He had no consensus with many of the county offices, with our state or local governments or many of our various development agencies, authorities or districts. In fairness to him, not an easy job, on a good day, and something that is changing and that we hope will be changing more in the future.
You very seldom saw Mayor Harmon at any number of "city" events. He was often behind the curve and fired his director of development who many of us thought was doing a good job. He was unresponsive to citizens and business. Calls, e-mails, letters and forums are often race-neutral, and the concerns, problems and solutions are much the same for all of us.
S. Keith Belk, CPA
The writer is a member of the Manufacturer's Association of the City of Saint Louis, the North Broadway Business Association, the Soulard Restoration Group, the Southtown Coalition and Metropolis.
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Complete index of previous columns
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That’s no typo. Just four years after Harmon took office, 95 out of every 100 primary voters wanted someone other than him in City Hall. The incumbent mayor lost every ward, from the white South Side to the black North Side neighborhoods where he grew up.