The High Rise of the First Metropolitan Candidate

A mural of Barack Obama in New York City. (Chris Mcgrath - Chris McGrath/Getty Images)

This approach fits with Chicago, which has become the epitome of the new metropolis, with its high-rise housing projects replaced by mixed-income town houses and its economy dominated by commodities trading, aerospace and higher education instead of stockyards and steel mills -- "a brainy city, not a brawny city," says Lang. Obama was elected in 1996 to represent a South Side district with many poor residents, but after losing his 2000 run for Congress, he decided to expand his base beyond the urban working class. He engineered the redrawing of his district to encompass the city's Gold Coast, putting him in touch with a Chicago elite that would power his U.S. Senate bid.

Casting city issues as "metro" ones rankles some advocates of the urban poor, who see it as a way to gloss over the despair that remains very much an inner-city phenomenon in many metro areas. The Rev. Jesse Jackson acerbically suggested that Obama was playing down urban poverty to appeal to whites. Obama's typical stump speech generally tucks issues such as urban education woes into his broader policy pitch.

But the politicians who deal most with urban troubles, the nation's mayors, say that the metropolitan framing is a shrewd way to convince better-off urban and suburban dwellers that the core affects the vitality of the whole. "When you think of urban, you think of poor, you think of drugs, you think of crime," said Jerry Abramson, the Democratic mayor of Louisville. "When you think of 'metro,' you realize we are linked together, and that the success of one will have great effect on the success of the other."

Embedded in the nation's founding, America's anti-urban bias culminated after World War II, when the automobile propelled city workers to their own suburban arcadia. As cities declined in the 1960s and '70s, Democratic and Republican presidents alike tried to stanch the bleeding with urban renewal projects and social programs that, even before President Ronald Reagan's cutbacks, fell short of their aims. But the trend turned in the 1990s, as the crime wave ebbed and a new generation, beckoned in part by television programs such as "Friends" and "Seinfeld," tired of the suburbs. The rise of a big-city pol like Obama, said Seattle mayor Greg Nickels (D), "represents something that's been happening below the radar screen for a long time."

Obama hasn't entirely abandoned older conceptions of urban uplift. His platform includes Democratic standbys such as restoring funding to the Community Development Block Grant program, which Republicans deride as a money pit; expanding the earned-income tax credit; investing in job training; creating an affordable-housing trust fund; paying for more cops on the street. He talks of creating 20 "promise neighborhoods" modeled on the Harlem Children's Zone, where an intensive application of services -- from prenatal care on up -- aims to lift an entire neighborhood.

Cincinnati Mayor Mark Mallory, a Democrat, says that he also has hopes for Obama's ability to help cities via the bully pulpit, with rhetoric urging parental responsibility, particularly among African Americans. "To the extent that you can motivate people to change their behaviors, you can change outcomes within cities," said Mallory. But dominating Obama's platform are ideas geared more toward the metropolis as a whole: a big investment in infrastructure, including mass transit and inter-city rail, that he now also bills as a jobs measure; a network of public-private business incubators; new green-technology industries; a White House office of urban policy that will goad governments within metro areas into working together.

Mayors like this package partly because, aside from infrastructure spending, it doesn't cost much in a time of low budgets. Cities need a president who understands that they "are no longer the basket case they are often described as from Washington," said Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak (D). "The skills we need in a president aren't the old skills of putting together a benevolent program for communities that will always be disempowered. We need someone who's done what Obama has done, to go into communities that have been hard hit and understand their assets, mobilize people to help them solve their problems."

But can the first metro president banish all of the negative associations of cities -- as un-American, perilous and snobbish -- that McCain and Palin have invoked? Lang, of Virginia Tech, is doubtful. He suspects that the limits of the urban ascendance would become clear after Obama entered the White House. Soon enough, he predicts, a President Obama may be shopping for a vacation home far from the South Side.

"I'm going to look for him to buy some hillside in Virginia," Lang said. "I wonder if he almost has to do that."

macgillisa@washpost.com

Alec MacGillis covers national politics for The Washington Post.