Urban Miss By JOEL KOTKIN
THE votes are all in, and Fernando Ferrer has won New York's Democratic mayoral nomination, narrowly avoiding a runoff (even a nominal one) with Representative Anthony Weiner. That sounds like great news for the Democrats, who can now focus on trying to defeat Mayor Michael Bloomberg. But in truth it's the opposite: what New York's Democrats need isn't hand-holding - it's bloodletting.
Without a challenge from Mr. Weiner, Mr. Ferrer won't have the chance to prove he's not an unreconstructed liberal from the time before Rudolph Giuliani ruled the city. While Mr. Weiner evoked the centrist politics of Ed Koch, promising to cut taxes and streamline bureaucracy, Mr. Ferrer, the former Bronx borough president, is running on ethnic appeals and tax and spending increases.
Mr. Ferrer's message was one that wins primaries and loses general elections. Indeed, chances are that New York, the city that still sets the tone for urban governance, will once again elect a Republican. Sadly, this is not a problem just for New York's Democrats. The failures of urban liberalism weaken the entire party as it gets ready to take on the increasingly vulnerable Republicans.
Democrats have long drawn their moral, economic and electoral strength from the cities. Yet this urban dominance has its negative side. Despite all the self-congratulatory hoopla about an urban renaissance, prevailing demographic and economic trends show a persistent shift from cities toward the ever-expanding suburbs and exurbs.
In virtually every metropolitan region, including New York, the periphery is growing faster than the core. Since 2000 even some cities that had been gaining population - Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis and San Francisco, for example - have lost people.
And the political result? While cities go overwhelmingly Democratic, the party loses national and state elections. In 1952, for example, New York City accounted for almost half of the voters of New York State; today it accounts for less than a third.
It doesn't help that most liberal cities now aspire to become "cool cities" - playgrounds for the ultrarich, nomadic singles and childless couples. By focusing on Wi-Fi zones and loft conversions while schools crumble, liberal cities are essentially ignoring middle- and working-class strivers, particularly those with children.
And despite their indulgence in often demagogic rhetoric about class and race, Democrats preside over the most unequal parts of America. The widest gaps between rich and poor are to be found in liberal bastions like Atlanta, Boston, Miami, New York and Washington.
Worse yet, few Democrats are tackling these issues or their root causes with any success. Some of today's "coolest" Democratic mayors - Baltimore's Martin O'Malley, Philadelphia's John Street, Detroit's Kwame Kilpatrick - have failed to reform bloated bureaucracies and dysfunctional schools, and they haven't made much progress in improving aging ports, roads and sanitation systems.
The flooding in New Orleans has exposed this record of liberal neglect in the starkest terms. New Orleans has had Democratic mayors for decades. While they've created a first-class tourist attraction, they've also produced a city with third-world inequality.
What if the Democrats who control cities made them work for the middle class? By once again making the cities laboratories for progressive reform, centrists like Mr. Weiner could go a long way toward building a Democratic majority. But that means they'll have to stand and fight.
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Joel Kotkin, a fellow at the New America Foundation, is the author of "The City: A Global History."