Michael Ennis
What’s the Matter With Dallas?
Why the city’s timid political culture doesn’t live up to its brash image.
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But who was for Blackwood wasn’t nearly as interesting as who was against it. And that was just about everyone: the entire city council and all but 4 out of 36 council candidates; 6 of the past 7 mayors; 10 area chambers of commerce, along with the heavy-hitting Real Estate Council; the Crow and Hunt family interests (the most emblematic names among the Dallas plutocracy); and last but not least, the DCC, which began calling the shots for the “no” campaign after making a $200,000 pledge. The little people were equally opposed: Many of Miller’s North Dallas pothole populists, who had rallied with her against the welfare-for-billionaires arena deal, now agreed with the business community that Dallas didn’t need a “dictator.” Most vehement of all was an African American community long bitterly resentful that Miller had targeted a few of its most revered leaders during her muckraking days. The issue was principle as much as personality; most African Americans were adamantly opposed to any change that would threaten the power they had only relatively recently won after generations of struggle, culminating in a 1991 federally mandated redistricting that finally gave minorities their fair share of seats on the city council.
The idea that power-worshipping Dallas might actually be led by a powerful elected executive seemed to have whipped up a perfect storm of opposition. But behind the scenes, the DCC-led business community was hedging its “no.” Concerned about North Dallas voters who didn’t like the way the city was run but felt that Blackwood went too far, the DCC, months before the election, pressed the city council to pass a nonbinding resolution (i.e., the members voted with their fingers crossed) to put an alternative initiative to a November vote. This compromise solution assures an institutional train wreck; the mayor would hire the city manager (renamed the city’s chief operating officer), who could be fired by either the mayor or a simple majority vote of the city council—allowing the city’s hands-on operator to be kicked back and forth between the council and the mayor like a political soccer ball. But the idea was that North Dallas voters who were always grousing about cleaning up city hall could safely vote no in May (presuming they believed the council’s promise), then drop in on the November clearance sale and pick up the less-filling Strong Mayor Lite. What made this strategy to delay the yes vote even more egregiously boneheaded was that it didn’t work—the strong-mayor measure still passed in the North Dallas precincts—and its supporters didn’t seem aware that it hadn’t. Renewing pledges of a November vote on Strong Mayor Lite in the wake of the blowout, the “yes, but later” faction seemed clueless to the new political reality: Predominantly black southern-sector voters had taken ownership of this issue. Setting records for early voting, they transformed the north’s yes into a thunderous 62 percent overall rejection—a “no” that really did mean no to any version of a stronger mayor. While it’s remotely possible that the DCC can still pull a rabbit out of the hat and strike a meaningful deal with the south—or persuade the north to turn out—it seems that after 75 years of engineering city government to avoid risk, the Dallas business community has now risked most of its rapidly dwindling political capital on a measure that, if it’s lucky, will end up on the November ballot as an even more watered-down face-saving gesture.
What really did in Blackwood wasn’t the freaked-out, freak-of-nature coalition against it so much as a habit of mind Dallas can’t seem to break: a psychological dependency created by generations of single-party (the business party) rule. In so thoroughly privatizing government, Dallas’s oligarchy historically relied on an anti-government ideology that disdained public solutions in favor of discreetly negotiated, behind-the-scenes fiats. Good public policy could be made only behind closed doors; to allow a cacophony of dissenting public opinions was considered “bad for business,” if not simply subversive. As Royce Hanson, the former dean of the University of Texas at Dallas’ School of Social Sciences, notes in his definitive study Civic Culture and Urban Change: Governing Dallas, the city patriarchs fostered a political culture that relied on a passive population and the ruling elite’s monopoly of power. Over the decades the very notion of the public, at least in the political sense, disappeared in prim, privatized Dallas.
Yet none of the Blackwood supporters effectively made the case that a strong mayor would remedy the biggest problem with Dallas’s democracy: Nobody votes. What Hanson calls Dallas’s “phantom public” just might show up if real issues of the city’s long-term vision and viability were raised in the quadrennial mayoral elections. In Houston wild gyrations in public policy are possible with each election: One mayor opposes mass transit, the next is in favor of it, but somehow the two-steps-forward, one-step-back approach actually gets things done at a pace Dallas can only envy. From fighting crime to revitalizing downtown, Houston’s messy public forum is producing measurably better results than Dallas’s decorous, closely held private consensus. It’s not that Houston has a genius for leadership that Dallas doesn’t; it’s that its superior civic entrepreneurship is based on public participation. In Houston’s last mayoral election, more than 30 percent of the voters turned out. In Dallas the figure was 10 percent.
If there’s any exception to this state of political immaturity, it is, ironically, the city’s ascendant African American community. Treated for generations like unwanted children at best, Dallas’s blacks were forced to use—and value—political tools such as organized protests and voting-rights litigation. By virtue of being largely excluded from privatized Dallas, they became a gutsy, politically engaged public, the only real public the city currently has. But of course the shadow of the old paternalism hovers over the African American community as well; there’s a pervasive fear that Big Daddy is coming back, even if it’s only in the form of Big Mommy Miller’s stern but progressive reform politics.
The voting bloc that once sat in the back of the bus isn’t quite driving the bus now. But Dallas’s African Americans have proved they can keep the bus from going anywhere they don’t want to go, which could worsen gridlock in a city that already can’t keep up with its peers. Dallas won’t be saved from that predicament by some kinda-stronger-mayor formula sponsored by a business community seemingly unaware that it began ceding its power a generation ago. It will probably take a leader of a black-brown coalition like the one that recently elected Los Angeles’s first Hispanic mayor in more than a century (though Hispanics are Dallas’s largest population group, they have yet to vote in representative numbers). The ideal mayor would combine the multiethnic appeal of Ron Kirk, the establishment-sponsored corporate attorney who became the city’s first black mayor, in 1995, with the populist, establishment-bucking independence of his successor, Miller—without the former’s embarrassing conflicts of interest and the latter’s hectoring political style. Dallas’ savior could probably write his or her national political ticket. But of course anyone with the political talent to rescue Dallas would have little incentive to run for a city job with no real power.
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