St. Louis and Missouri are in danger of finding out the hard way what happens when a weak, compromised leadership is our only defense against a determined onslaught from the right.
On his Arch City Chronicle site, Dave Drebes does a good job of setting forth the problem, without addressing the political cowardice that has let the problem worsen to a crisis point. Drebes points out that Rex Sinquefield has pumped $1.75 million into a campaign to abolish the earnings taxes in Missouri’s cities since January 1, while United for Missouri’s Priorities has raised more than $370,000 from unions within the same time span to combat the effort. Meanwhile, the ShowMe Courts’ effort raised about $1.5 million this year for a ballot petition designed to abolish the Missouri Non-Partisan Court Plan, while the Missourians for Fair and Impartial Courts Action Fund has received more than $210,000 from attorney firms in the same time frame to defend the plan.
Both petition efforts made the deadline, and their signatures are on their way to local election officials for verification.
Drebes makes the incontestable point that defending against these conservative ballot petition efforts has drained precious resources from two of the Democratic Party’s core fundraising bases, unions and trial lawyers. The unions want to preserve the cities’ earnings taxes, because so many government jobs remained unionized; and the trial lawyers want to preserve the court plan because it gives them a say in judicial selection and has provided for a fair, centrist bench. And while much more money has been poured into the right-wing petition efforts, there is much, much more money where that came from, as the Republicans remain the party most closely tied to the rich.
Drebes’ own client base for his Missouri Scout political news service is bi-partisan, and by temperament he is not a fighter, so he is not likely to follow through and draw the more contentious but obvious conclusions suggested by the data. He does allude to “a confluence of interests and coincidences of campaigns” that has weakened the Democrats, without naming specifically the interests that are coming together to spell danger for this city and state.
Urban areas are traditionally core Democratic strongholds. But the Democratic leadership in St. Louis city is weak and compromised nearly to the point of uselessness in defending against these grave threats. Mayor Francis G. Slay counts Sinquefield as his single largest campaign funding source. Slay’s chief of staff Jeff Rainford submitted a blistering fiscal note to the earnings tax ballot petition, all but screaming that it is dangerous for the city. But unlike his counterpart in Kansas City, Slay did not vigorously contest this effort waged by his campaign contributor. Indeed, in a bizarre note on his campaign site, Slay said he found it “sort of exciting” to slash $45 million in staff and services from his city budget. This was at least a wink to his right-wing, small-government benefactors in the Republican Party. At worst, it was the mayor licking his lips in relish as he foresees a collapsing budget that streamlines city government to centralize power in his office.
What of the City Democrats? They are more of the same, only even weaker. The City Democrats are chaired by Brian Wahby. His wife, Robbyn Wahby, is a veteran of the Slay/Sinquefield school choice wars who recently was promoted to deputy mayor. Slay is compromised by his political debt and financial connections to Sinquefield, and Wahby is compromised by his political debt and financial connections to Slay. The incestuous cronyism of politics in this city – and the disturbing weakness of any African-American political opposition – have rendered St. Louis all but useless to help Missouri Democrats fend off this onslaught from the right.
We have raised this alarm before, but no one rose to the defense. Will the sleepers awake now before it is too late?
