A conservative surge in the Greensboro municipal election?

John Hammer is a gifted polemicist. Depending on whether you agree with his point of view or not, he's an engaging writer. Readers invariably find themselves mouthing in response to his essays, alternately, "amen" or "excuse me?" At first blush, Hammer's ordering of the facts sings with cognitive harmony. On second glance, his writing betrays glaring omissions and inconsistencies of logic.

Hammer writes in this week's Rhinoceros Times that “conservatives in Greensboro have a once-in-a-decade opportunity to bring change to city government,” and cites the 1995 election in which Carolyn Allen defeated Tom Phillips in the mayoral race as the last time such an opportunity existed.

Playing the “party” card in Greensboro, where municipal elections are nonpartisan, would seem to be a high-stakes gamble.

“The truth is that since [1995] the mayor has been a liberal Democrat and the council has been dominated by liberal Democrats," Hammer writes. "Take a look at the city council that was elected in 2005, the one that was in office when former police Chief David Wray was locked out of his office and the one that caused all the police and city manager problems that led to all the lawsuits that plague the city today. On that entire nine-member city council there was one Republican – Phillips.”

As Tom Phillips once said to me, Hammer "doesn't let the facts get in the way of what he wants to say."

The problematic omission in Hammer's polemic is that Phillips has been an ardent supporter of Mitchell Johnson and his handling of David Wray’s departure from the police department. And one of the three Republicans elected to council in 2007, Robbie Perkins, has also staunchly defended Johnson. (The other two Republicans, Mary Rakestraw and Trudy Wade joined forces with Democrat Mike Barber to remove Johnson.)

While never mentioning that Bill Knight and Danny Thompson, among this year’s crop of candidates, are Republicans, Hammer infers the connection by saying in the headline of his editorial that “Knight, Thompson could change city” while bemoaning that the Greensboro City Council has been dominated since 1995 by “liberal Democrats.”

Knight has repeatedly called on the city to reimburse Wray’s legal expenses and apologize to the former chief; he has said that he opposes a financial settlement with the black officers who allege that they were subject to racial discrimination under Wray’s administration. Thompson has taken no public stand on the Wray affair; what he has said to Hammer or voters at Republican Party is not known to me.

Hammer says that in this election conservatives have an opportunity to elect a majority on council, presuming the victories of Zack Matheny, Mary Rakestraw and Trudy Wade respectively in districts 3, 4 and 5 – all majority-white districts.

Voter turnout in Greensboro municipal elections is typically around 10 percent, Hammer writes, proposing that “if it was 20 percent, and that was because more conservative voters showed up to vote for conservative candidates… that would change the future of Greensboro. It is almost assured that Greensboro would no longer have the highest tax rate of any comparable city in North Carolina.”

Hammer goes on to say that “the liberals, led by the Simkins PAC, organize their voters and get voters to the polls. The conservatives do nothing and the liberals win city election after city election.”

The racial dimension of this argument is obvious in that the Simkins PAC is designed to express the candidate preferences of a consortium of black elected officials to the black electorate, which primarily resides in east Greensboro. Hammer presents the Simkins PAC as a distortion to the political process and “conservative voters” as a necessary corrective. Yet if there’s a distortion it would appear to be that east Greensboro voters in predominantly black and working-class districts 1 and 2 consistently turn out to vote in lower numbers than their counterparts in predominantly white and affluent districts 3 and 4.

If there’s a skew in Greensboro politics, it would seem to be towards conservative candidates given the high rates of political participation in north-by-northwest neighborhoods such as Irving Park and Starmount.

Hammer celebrates the Tea Party movement’s ability to mobilize a grassroots conservative movement to protest various Obama administration initiatives in Washington, then calls on the movement’s organizers to harness the movement’s power at the polls.

“There is an election in less than two weeks that has a far greater effect on the lives of the citizens of Greensboro than anything that will happen in Washington, DC, and that is the city council election on Nov. 3," Hammer writes. "Somehow, the Tea Party organizers are able to raise large crowds of people. It would make a huge difference in Greensboro if those same grassroots techniques were used to get people to the polls instead of to a rally.”

There’s no doubt that local government has immeasurably more impact on ordinary citizens’ lives than the decisions of politicians in Washington, so the same mobilization principle could just as easily be applied to another constituency that has so far remained dormant in this municipal election: the 80,000-plus, or more than two out of every three, Greensboro voters who cast their ballots for Barack Obama last year.