Mayor: The Best Job in Politics

The City in the Twenty-First Century

by Michael A. Nutter

In 2007, after serving almost fifteen years on the Philadelphia City Council, Michael A. Nutter became the ninety-eighth mayor of his hometown of Philadelphia. From the time he was sworn in until he left office in 2016, there were triumphs and challenges, from the mundane to the unexpected, from snow removal, trash collection, and drinkable water, to the Phillies' World Series win, Hurricane Irene, Occupy Philadelphia, and the Papal visit. By the end of Nutter's tenure, homicides were at an almost fifty-year low, high-school graduation and college-degree attainment rates increased significantly, and Philadelphia's population had grown every year. Nutter also recruited businesses to open in Philadelphia, motivating them through tax reforms, improved services, and international trade missions.

Mayor begins with Nutter's early days in politics and ultimate run for mayor, when he formed a coalition from a base of support that set the stage for a successful term. Transitioning from campaigning to governing, Nutter shares his vast store of examples to depict the skills that enable a city politician to lead effectively and illustrates how problem-solving pragmatism is essential for success. With a proven track record of making things work, Nutter asserts that mayoring promises more satisfaction and more potential achievements—for not only the mayor but also the governed—than our fractious political system would have us believe.

Detailing the important tasks that mayoral administrations do, Nutter tells the compelling story of a dedicated staff working together to affect positively the lives of the people of Philadelphia every day. His anecdotes, advice, and insights will excite and interest anyone with a desire to understand municipal government.

Genres: Politics

200 pages, Hardcover

Published January 3, 2018

Reviews

[Fernando Moura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mr. Nutter's book is a simple, but inspiring story about public service and the challenges of being in a chair that requires high levels of responsibility and resilience. A book I would recommend for anyone thinking about studying public administration or for people that are thinking about running for office.

[Curtis · Rating 4 out of 5]

- “Anderson asked if I would be his campaign manager, and at first I declined, because I think it’s really important in life that you know what you don’t know—and I knew nothing about managing a political campaign.”
- “My attitude at the time was not some messianic belief that I was the only one who could save the city, or the only one who could run, but more modestly that I’m a public servant and I should step up.”
- “When you watch a campaign, it is a window into the soul of how that candidate will govern. It really is your first indication of what they will be like in office. The candidate is the one constant between campaigning and governing.”
- “We held our money in reserve for some time, because we made a decision that once we went on television, we weren’t going off of television. The race was coming down to Tom Knox and the other candidates, and we knew that we could never match Knox dollar for dollar. My strategy with television, and staying on once we went on, was that you have to do a certain amount of “breakthrough” messaging with any campaign. You also have to give people a consistent message. In an effort to save money, some candidates would go on and off television—they’d break through initially and thereafter get forgotten, because they had disappeared from the airwaves. Then they’d come back on television and have to reestablish their identity from the beginning. I wanted a consistent television presence and message, and I wanted to be seen all the time.”
- “One of the fundamental rules in the political business is define yourself before someone does it for you.”
- “You know that you’re making movement in a campaign when the other candidates start paying attention to you.”
- “As a candidate, when you start attracting fire from opponents, it means that you’re in range of victory.”
- “Becoming mayor was about perseverance, tenacity, and positioning. Winston Churchill said that “nothing in the world can take the place of perseverance.” After this evening I reflected that there was no reason for any of this to have happened in my life. I never thought it would happen; I had no plan for it to happen; but by moving forward through the years with my own commitment to serve in place, this is where I had arrived.”
- “Thinking back on this race, I was well positioned by leadership, sponsorship, and support—and the timing was right for what I had to offer. I moved from my solid 12 percent to 83 percent because voters wanted change, they wanted reform, they wanted someone who actually knew the issues and knew the city. The one advantage that I had over the other four great candidates is that I had served in city government. My City Council experience distinguished me from the others. My most notable achievements as a councilman—campaign finance reform, the anticorruption measures, and the smoking ban—were momentous in their time. They were all big battles, all controversial, and all ultimately implemented successfully—and afterwards, the world was still spinning on its axis.”
- Legislative record on the Council gave Nutter credibility in the mayoral race.
- “One of the very greatest moments in being in elected to office, whether mayor, governor, or certainly president, is that inaugural speech. ”
- Typo
- “All mayors are special and all cities are great—but I do truly believe that there is something just a little extra special to be mayor of Philadelphia where, more than two hundred years ago, people really put their lives and fortunes at risk because they wanted something different, a different form of governance. People took serious risks to forge our political system and our country here. With our history and prominence, people actually pay attention to what happens here. We are not just a wonderful train station stop between those two other great cities of Washington, DC, and New York. Philadelphia is the true birthplace of freedom, liberty, and democracy.”
- “We don’t necessarily create jobs; we create opportunity. We create an environment that will allow entrepreneurs and business leaders to put people to work.”
- TC-ism
- “For a mayor, budgets are more than words and numbers on a sheet of paper. Budgets tell a story, and should be a reflection of a mayor’s values and what he or she is committed to and trying to get done.”
- Budgets as a reflection of values.
- “Prioritizing resources and your time are critical components of governing.”
- “The team has to endorse your own vision, and you, as mayor, must ensure that you back them up with support and public acknowledgment.”
- Importance of praise and acknowledgement for your teammates.
- “You have to face the music as mayor: you can’t hide, and if you expect to lead then you have to listen to the people.”
- “That first year we also had negotiated one-year contracts with all of our unions, which was completely against convention. We didn’t know a recession was coming. We just wanted one-year contracts because we were brand new and didn’t know all of the things that we might want to do. That subsequently turned out to be a really great decision for many different reasons. If we had made the traditional three- or four-year contract agreements with our union workforce, there is no way in the world that we would have been able to pay for those contracts, given our financial situation. That would have led to massive layoffs of our workforce, which I didn’t want to do in the first place. Having those one-year contracts in place put us in a situation of being able to negotiate just a year later, but now with the information that we were in a full-blown, worldwide economic recession.”
- One-year union contracts in first year as mayor
- “To navigate the recession, my team and I drew on some of the lessons learned from the early 1990s, when Philadelphia faced some similar, although different, financial challenges. We borrowed some strategies from that crisis that helped us manage the one in 2008.”
- To navigate this recession, they took stock of history and looked at the city’s efforts in previous recessions/economic downturns.
- “On my hundredth day in office as mayor, I was sued by the NRA, which for me was one of the proudest moments of my entire political career.”
- “But if you’re not willing to make that level of commitment and to personally sacrifice your own ego and any narcissism for the sake of deferred and often uncredited achievements and successes, then you should avoid public service and electoral politics. If you have a deep-seated need to be loved and admired every day, you shouldn’t be in politics. You should go work at a pet shop. My motto was to manage for the present and prepare for the future.”
- Politics can be thankless, and many of your efforts won’t bear fruit until after you’re gone.
- “I don’t think any other political office combines the attention to microlevel details—garbage dumpsters and potholes—with the macrolevel picture of, say, a global economic crisis, quite like the office of mayor.”
- “It’s arguably the case that mayors in large American cities get judged by their snow removal prowess as much as any other issue.”
- @Bowser!
- “The soda tax did not move forward in my administration. Consequently, to save the schools financially, we raised property taxes instead.”
- “As mayor, you can’t expect to fulfill every ambition in your first hundred days, or even your first administration. With some issues, you’ll be seeding a project for success in a subsequent administration, and if we are all more concerned with the work than with the credit (as we should be), then things often work out fine.”
- Sometimes ideas bear fruit after you’ve moved on.
- “They—and other successful mayors—are all generous with their time, talent, ideas, and resources. They are ambitious for success but also empathetic.”
- Good mayors share.
- “When I was coming into the mayor’s position, I learned by trial and error, and by the mistakes made and successes achieved.”
- “One of the most unheralded and vital positions in city government, and for a mayor, is the director of the Office of Emergency Management. It’s one of those positions where as mayor you might not be exactly sure of what they’re doing or how, but you’re extremely glad that they’re doing it. The “3 A.M. emergency phone call” to a mayor, governor, or president is a cliché of American politics, but people never ask, who is calling that leader at 3 A.M., and who is on the other end of the line? That person was already up and prepared to make the call. In the case of weather emergencies, the director of emergency management is the person on the other line.”
- Importance of Emergency Management professionals
- “At this press conference as with most others that concerned weather emergencies, an array of officials and team members flanked me. This serves to show that we knew what was going on, we had personnel and a plan, and these are the things you need to do to protect yourself.”
- Press conference imagery to convey messages to the public.
- “Philadelphia is often less affected by storms than its surrounding areas, owing to its lower geological placement, but the entire region looks to the mayor of any large city for information, and we share the same television markets. In these situations a mayor can also become a regional leader and spokesperson.”
- “When Occupy first came to town, [Police Commissioner Ramsey] put out an order that at every roll call, every day, in every police station, the First Amendment would be read to the officers assembled.”
- “The Occupy negotiations exemplify the importance, once again, of communication, which is perhaps the most constant and recurring theme of my experience as mayor, and the lessons learned about how to do the job effectively. As mayor, you work for the public, and you need to meet the public where they are. That is the job.”
- “At this writing in 2017, some congressional representatives have avoided holding town hall meetings in fear of having to confront their constituents angry over healthcare or other controversies, but in my opinion that is an abrogation of a public servant’s most basic responsibility.”
- “I advise elected officials all the time that people do not pay nearly as much attention to us as any of us would like to think, because they have real lives. They have real things going on. And they actually spend very little time focused on or thinking about the things that we’re talking about. And so it takes constant communication and a consistency of message to really catch the public’s attention.”
- People don’t care about the things you think they care about, or at least they aren’t thinking about them all the time. This is why consistent and repeated communication is so important. Send the message home!
- “a fair and transparent tax system is another of the unglamorous foundations for the glamorous transformation of a city’s skyline with new buildings, cool start-ups, and enterprise.”
- “My first task was to separate the two functions: to have a separate office of assessment and a separate appeals process for tax bills. Then I wanted to change the appointments system. We succeeded at the first task, but not the second.”
- Re: Board of Revision of Taxes
- “During these years, my grandmother’s words and wisdom that you can be house rich and cash poor rang in my head. In other words, the projected market value of your home has nothing to do with your ability to pay your taxes. And so we created a new program. It is really true that the government could not operate without acronyms, so the program was called LOOP, for, Long-term Owner-Occupied Program, and it was designed to help Philadelphians stay in their homes and not get pushed out by higher property taxes resulting from the revaluation.”
- As a consequence of the property assessment tax reforms
- “Being mayor, especially if you have term limits, is like running a relay race. Run your best and fastest for your part, and then hand off the baton, get off the track, and let the next runner do their thing.”
- “PGW employees would have had a three-year guaranteed no-lay-off clause, which the employees of PGW did not have at that time. And the private company was going to invest heavily in pipe and main replacement, which would have created more jobs. Furthermore, the company already had union employees, so they were comfortable working within a union environment and with other protections in place. The PGW sale was a fantastic deal, plain and simple. It had something for everyone.”
- Reminds me of US Steel-Nippon deal.
- “Being mayor has to be about getting results, rather than getting credit.”
- “Mayoring should always be less about credit and more about results, because you can’t do everything, even in an eight-year tenure. Do your part, while you’re there.”
- “First, if you don’t have certain factual information, don’t try to guess. Second, if you don’t know what you’re talking about, stop talking. Third, let the professionals explain the things that you’re unfamiliar with or don’t have all the details on. And last, stay calm and focused.”
- Lessons from the Amtrak derailment.
- “As mayor, you have to have a plan. Mayoring is really about setting goals, having an agenda, making plans, communicating constantly, governing transparently, and providing leadership.”
- “I tried not to make the same mistake twice. But no one gets it right all the time. I still believe in honesty in communication and laying out what you’re trying to do. Acknowledge where you may have made a misstep. And then keep it moving. No one’s ever been able to figure out how to fix yesterday. But you can do something about tomorrow.”
- “I’ve been predicting that after the 2016 election, we will see the rise of the United Cities of America. There will be a number of conflicts with the federal level that test the authority of cities to set their own policies.”
- “When I look at what people have done after they’ve had this enormous responsibility, authority, and power, I give the following advice: Don’t fall in love with the job, fall in love with the work. Fall in love with public service and the calling to service.”
- “As mayor, you have the authority to perform weddings.”
- “That’s what I miss the most—that daily engagement of knowing that you have one more opportunity, one more day to try to make a difference in people’s lives by the work you do.”
- “Public service is a trust, a gift, and it is an honor to serve, whether you are elected or selected. And, if you ask me, being mayor is the best job in America.”

[Sameem Ahmadzai · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't actually intend on writing a review for this book, but I think there are a few things worth mentioning.

First, I had some trouble assigning this book the rating that I did. I'm not sure that it necessarily deserves 3-stars; instead, I'd say that it deserves somewhere between 2.5 and 3-stars. I don't think I necessarily enjoyed it enough to give it a three, but I was inclined to assign it that much rather than downplaying it and giving it a two because there were a few small things about the book that I did appreciate. With that being said, I don't really think that this point matters all that much. I do care about being more mindful with my reviews, but when it comes down to such small details, I think they're ultimately best articulated in a review like this one rather than trying to force it into a quantified format.

Second, to address what I alluded to above, what comes off as one of the more memorable elements of this book are the lessons that Nutter was trying to convey. I actually got this book for an urban research fellowship at my college during which we read the text and had a conversation with the former mayor about his time in office. I think that conversation, especially when it's situated in and after the context of his time as mayor, came off as fruitful. That isn't to say that I came out of the book or conversation with a reshaped politics, because I didn't; I appreciated hearing his words and conviction on the topics he did speak to, but I wouldn't say that I came out of the reading with a sense of being politically swayed or affected. With that being said, though, if there's anything that kind of shone through in the book, it was the kind of practical sensibility that Nutter seems to carry in his character. I do question what kind of conceptual or solution-oriented limitations that kind of a political mindset has, but what is worth highlighting about it is that it produces a mindfulness to guidance. What I mean here is that Nutter recurringly made efforts to describe important lessons that not only he learned but that he believes are worth taking with you. And it's not like every lesson he mentioned in the book was revolutionary or entirely out of an average person's political imaginary, but I think the fact that he so frequently reflected on and explicitly stated what he had learned from his experiences demonstrates a certain kind of intentionality and tact that is worth admiring. I'm not sure that I can say it for every single part of the book, but there are several points where his reflections came across as sincere and meditative, and notwithstanding where they were limited, I think that's a notable strength of the text.

It's also worth adding that I only began to live in Philadelphia in late 2021 for college, and I didn't really develop my (still limited) understanding of its political landscape until very recently, so, in many ways, I was reading this book with a very constrained knowledge set. In one way, I think that this book offered a few notable highlights of Philadelphia's governmental history. I was trying to co-opt everything written with quick online searches of my own to clarify the scope of what I was reading, but I think it was helpful on that front. I do wonder, at the same time, where his recounting of his time in office and of Philadelphia's history falters. By that I mean, what did he omit? The answer to the former question certainly begins with, "in short, plenty of things," but I think I'm curious about what kinds of political conversations and dispositions he didn't really pay much mind to. For example, it feels like the conversation on police that he approached throughout the book deserved much more space than he gave it. Obviously, he spent several parts of the book talking about his work around policing, but what I'm really looking for are deeper reflections on the relationship between policing and mass incarceration, especially in a city like Philadelphia. It felt like a missed opportunity, as though he kind of brushed it off without delving into what is demonstrably a massive subject. Maybe a response to this concern is that it would simply amount to another book of its own, but I don't really agree; I think that Nutter could've spent more time meditating on this subject, explaining his reflections on it in a way that didn't come across as brief as they did.

To quickly summarize things, what I appreciated about this book was the lessons that Nutter reflected on and passed over to the reader. Some of them come across as intuitive, sure, but the fact that such intuitive lessons resonate so heavily for a person with so much governmental experience only seems to further reflect how important it is to practice those lessons. I'll always appreciate reading memoirs, biographies, and similar books, because—and this isn't to say that other genres and formats do not embody this; they just embody it differently—they help to imperfectly yet appreciably reflect the lessons that we can gather from a person's lived experience. Knowing that what you're reading is the active recollection and meditations of a person who has lived an entire life and has taken the time to recount that always comes across as worth appreciating. So, even if there are plenty of points of contention and critique for the book, it was nonetheless interesting to read about Michael Nutter's years before, during, and after his mayorship.

[Frank Stein · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a thin book with little thought put into it, but you come away from it impressed with Michael Nutter, both as a honest, straightforward man and a good mayor, even if he is less likely than many politicians to trumpet himself.

Nutter's family was the third black family to come to his West Philadelphia neighborhood, which soon suffered from substantial white flight. But unlike some neighborhoods, Nutter's survived and thrived and kept some amount of racial mixing. It was tight-knit, with neighbors comfortable telling off a kid and reporting to his parents about merely walking in the street. Nutter went to the semi-famous St. Joseph's Prepatory School, then to UPenn and Wharton, and then spent some time moonlighting at a disco, Impulse, where he met a handful of politcos and decided to spend his life in politics, which he did, partially by working through Philadelphia's abstruse 69 ward and ward committee system.

From 1993 to 2006 Nutter was a City Councilman and from 2008 to 2016 he was mayor. In the first he pushed ordinances like civil partnership benefits and a smoking ban. In the second he pushed for a soda tax (which only passed the year after he left), a reform of property tax assessments (splitting the asessment from the appeal board), creating a chief ethics and a chief sustainability position. He tried, but failed, to sell off the Philadelphia Gas Works. But as mayor was clearly events that dictated what happened. The Great Recession forced devestating cuts, which he did without layoffs, but which included a one cent sales tax increase and delay in pension funding, both of which he got from the state. He allowed the Occupy Movement to occupy Dilworth park until it became a mess and he had to clean it. He fought a big snowstorm, which he claims is a defining event for mayors, in 2010.

The book goes into too many names of aides and friends that never come up again, but it also is an interesting look at a mayor who liked his job and did it well. Those interested in modern city politics should read it.

[Barbara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting

I’ve never thought I would actually enjoy this book by I really did. I wish all mayors had this mindset. Great read

[Steve Hagerty · Rating 3 out of 5]

Feel good book on being Mayor. Very much related to Mayor Nutter’s time in office.