Buffalo news: Prayer for the dying

Buffalo says 'no' to socialism. Dave Seminara. City Journal. November 3, 2021

Here is the opening paragraph:

When India Walton defeated Buffalo’s four-term incumbent mayor, Byron Brown, in the Democratic primary in June, she called her mom and said, “Mommy, I’m the mayor of Buffalo! Well, not until January, but yeah!” The 39-year-old had every reason to believe she was a shoo-in to become the first socialist mayor of a major U.S. city since 1960. Buffalo is a Democratic stronghold, and Republicans didn’t even bother to field a candidate in the mayor’s race. But on a bloodbath of a night for the Democratic Party in races throughout the country, Brown appears to have risen, Lazarus-like, to beat Walton badly with a surprisingly effective write-in campaign.

And the closing two paragraphs:

Walton wasn’t ready to run a city of Buffalo’s size, and her ideas are dangerous and counterproductive. But, as I wrote earlier this year, her personal story is sympathetic. She grew up the child of a poor single mother, got pregnant at 14, had the child, got pregnant again at 19 with twins who were born premature, spent six months in the hospital, and eventually become a nurse. Even during the campaign, she continued to make deliveries for DoorDash to make ends meet. “I’ve got to feed my children,” she explained.

Buffalo is a historically blue-collar town that’s become more white-collar in recent years. The city has improved under Brown’s watch, though it’s debatable how much credit he deserves for that. Buffalo is still the third-poorest city in the country, and the metro area’s population growth is almost all concentrated in the suburbs. Ideally, Buffalo could use fresh leadership after four terms of Byron Brown, but the silver lining is that pragmatic Buffalonians said no to socialism last night. Let this be another warning to Democrats everywhere that socialism is a loser at the ballot box.

Here is my response to a colleague on the topic of Buffalo's past and prospects:

In addressing the two candidates, one can’t help but recall the remarks attributed to Henry Kissinger about the Iran-Iraq war: “Too bad they both can’t lose.”

You’ve heard my take on Buffalo before. Having spent the first twenty years of my life in Lackawanna/South Buffalo and then the country, with two sisters still living there and a student of the “City on the Lake: The Challenge of Change in Buffalo, New York” series of books on Buffalo (see also, City on the Edge,” I have a strong, sentimental feeling towards Buffalo and have been a sad observer of its demise.

Since WW II, when the U.S. population has doubled, the population of Buffalo has halved. In the 1950’s, half the kids attended parochial schools, while Catholics ran the public school board and seriously underfunded the city schools. In the meantime, a union stranglehold on western New York, the county and the city, turned productivity negative and drove industry out of town. The Lackawanna steel plant, once employing 35,000 men, is now an eyesore and the green energy promise is a sick joke, with broken and unusable wind turbines now littering the place where steelmaking furnaces once flamed. And even the previous efforts to make steel making more productive and cleaner ended with the BOF furnaces being dismantled for use elsewhere. Then they drove the University of Buffalo out to Amherst and lost the city stadium proposal in a flood of bribery, corruption and convictions.

Any success of late for Buffalo is not unlike post-war Japan (only without the work ethic and determination to "build back better" on its own), building from a very, very low base, where going lower is almost impossible and even a small absolute increase translates into a high growth rate. Converting abandoned department stores into apartments creates housing but not jobs. Buffalo’s only glimmer or chimera of hope is a new governor from the area who may start by supporting a new $1.5 billion stadium in her hometown of Orchard Park, yet that might be too much, too late and in the wrong place to help Buffalo. Brown is going to feel vindicated and more confident as ever, and now with an agenda to "help the little guy," in a city where eigthy percent of the population qualifies as little guys.

Tim Russert, the hometown hero, is the poster boy for Buffalo’s most recent decline, a product of the conservative, blue collar Catholic ethic that evolved into a liberal, white collar, big government, ethos. If he were alive today, it would be interesting to hear his spin. Buffalo got exactly what they deserved, with a corrupt Democrat machine and suburbs eager to accommodate white flight as city crime ballooned – ‘spiked’ -- and the once well-run, low-cost schools turned into poorly run, very expensive nightmares, spending about $25,000 a year for each student in the Buffalo K-12 system and grotesquely embarrassing attendance and graduation rates, while the teachers’ union controls the city’s elections. And almost all the Catholic schools are closed now, just as most of the “racist” Catholics with families also left town, along with their kids who headed for North Carolina or Florida.

The other irony is how quickly this flash-in-the-pan “rising star” was elevated by the Times and the progressive left, only to crash and burn in record time, revealing the Times’ disingenuous and emotionally unintelligent bias and ineptitude when it comes to writing about politics and the progressive Left’s desperation for a victory, however small, in the third poorest city in the country. Even a cursory look at Walton should have sent the Dem party screaming from the room; instead they embraced the ‘sympathetic’ interpretation of her past, played the race card (against another Black), doubled down, and came out smelling pretty awful. And don’t expect AOC to send Brown a Christmas card this year…