The whispers have gone public, ever since Democratic Socialist Chris Rabb’s stunning congressional upset in May: Is Mayor Parker in trouble? After all, the mayor has endured a string of political defeats. Not only did Rabb beat her candidate, the establishment’s State Senator Sharif Street; her own ward went for the progressive firebrand. At least one private campaign poll has shown the mayor’s job approval to have dipped below 50 percent in that 3rd Congressional District — a large swath of the city. Then, of course, there is City Council’s rejection of her four mystifying tax hike proposals — including a regressive rideshare levy and a hotel tax — during this $7.1 billion budget season.

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Is the mayor in trouble? It’s tempting to suggest that the mere question is related to her status as the city’s first Black and female mayor. That is, it’s hard to remember such circling of sharks three years into her depressed predecessor’s mayoralty. But circling they are: Just witness District Attorney Larry Krasner’s performative trolling of the mayor as he ostensibly sought more budgetary largesse from her. (Just days before, a panel of federal judges took disciplinary action against one of his top former prosecutors and excoriated Krasner’s office for having “violated its duty of candor“ to the court.)

What Parker is up against is less a fair-minded assessment of her record than the rise of a performative progressivism more concerned with symbols than outcomes. Democratic Socialists like Rabb, and mayors including New York’s Zohran Mamdani, Chicago’s Brandon Johnson and Seattle’s Katie Wilson may all prove to be governance-challenged. But as a political movement, the Democratic Socialists of America and Working Families Party is having a moment.

The mayor is as good a City Hall front person as we’ve had since Ed Rendell over a quarter century ago.

Perhaps that’s why, in arguing for her (regressive) rideshare tax proposal, Parker talked about taking on “billionaire big tech companies.” She was elected to be a practical quality-of-life mayor but, suddenly, she adopted the buzzwords of the far left. No surprise the argument fell flat, since it ran counter to the pragmatic Parker Philadelphians elected in 2023.

So let’s start with Parker’s record. Whether she’s dancing with Team Mexico fans at Fan Fest or breaking into rap to honor Lady B at the Philadelphia Music Alliance Walk of Fame Gala, the mayor is as good a City Hall front person as we’ve had since Ed Rendell over a quarter century ago. She exudes Philly from her pores; she’s publicly joyous; and her emphasis on unity — “One Philly,” complete with the demand to raise your hand and put “your one in the air” — strikes just the right rhetorical tone in these fractured times.

Substantively, as I’ve written, she has orchestrated a public safety turnaround the likes of which we’ve not seen in nearly 70 years — yet gets scant credit for having done so. It’s not just that crime has receded everywhere else; here, the drop has been more precipitous and directly flows from the interventional work of Parker’s hire, Commissioner Kevin Bethel, the cooperation of civic stakeholders, and her own framing of the strategy, which she has coined “PIE”: Prevention, Intervention, and Enforcement, a fresh spin on focused deterrence policing.

You can’t say Parker doesn’t take big swings. Wherever you ended up on the Sixers arena, her support demonstrated the political will to fight for a big economic development deal. Ditto her $2 billion HOME Initiative; like Rebuild before it, it has the potential for boondoggle — but lacking in ambition it’s not.

While it’s not sexy, Parker has made strides in an area where the city has long lagged: In six years, the city’s pension obligations are projected to finally be fully funded, freeing up nearly $500 million in the city’s operating budget to invest in people. Finally, Parker has smartly handled the mania that is Donald Trump by refusing to take his bait. The same can’t be said of Council, whose likely unconstitutional “ICE Out” legislation is now the subject of an administration lawsuit while Republican U.S. Representative Jim Jordan’s Judiciary Committee is readying to subpoena City records.

Parker doing no favors to Parker

Problem is, Parker’s record just might be too practical for today’s platitudinous progressives. And Parker has not helped herself, particularly when it comes to two key areas of governance: implementation, and the inside game of politics.

First, the former. It was telling, early on, when Parker’s sweep of the Kensington encampment found the police arriving hours before the social workers. As a result, all they did was essentially push many of those in the tents into other neighborhoods, rather than help them. As The Philadelphia Citizen’s late founding chairman and civic force Jeremy Nowak used to say, “Implementation is policy.”

Remember, Parker is a lifelong legislator; what we’ve witnessed for two years now are the growing pains of on-the-job CEO training. Civic leaders, politicos, and even members of her own administration all have the same complaint: The Parker administration moves at the speed of bureaucracy. Micro-management, either from Parker herself or Chief of Staff Tiffany Thurman (who outlasted an original, and impractical, three-headed leadership team), is the order of the day. I’ve heard it from department heads in the government and from civic leaders without: You can’t get a yes or no, because everything must run up a very complicated and lethargic chain of command. And forget about access to the mayor; one boldface name civic leader tells me they’ve been here through five mayors. This is the first one they can’t just get on the phone.

Former Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed had a standing rule: If a councilmember wanted to see him — even if Reed was huddling with President Obama — said councilmember took priority.

Which gets us to Parker’s political skillset. She spent a boatload of political capital in year one on the proposed Market East basketball arena. Yes, the Sixers bailed on her — which is why she’s privately complained about “trusting the billionaires.” But she lobbied Councilmembers into taking a perilous vote for, it turned out, no reason. Now, the 12 members who backed the politically dicey plan have targets on their backs come next year. Who do you think they blame?

When Kasim Reed was building Atlanta into an economic behemoth as its mayor from 2010 to 2018, he never lost a vote in Council. Like Parker, he’d been a legislator, but he had wise political counsel in his ear, including legends like former U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young; former San Francisco Mayor and California Speaker Willie Brown, and Home Depot founder Arthur Blank, the leader of his city’s business community. Reed had a standing rule: If a councilmember wanted to see him — even if Reed was huddling with President Obama — said councilmember took priority. In his phone, he kept data on councilmembers: not only spouses and kids’ names and birthdates, but also their relatives and friends who brought home city paychecks. All so he could inquire: “Hey, how’s your buddy Jeffrey doing over at Parks and Rec?”

Such interactions are expressions of care, yes, but they’re also subtle reminders of power and maybe even implied threats. That’s the tedious work of politics away from the klieg lights. Here, Parker has mostly chosen to defer to Council President Kenyatta Johnson when it comes to whipping votes, a perfectly valid choice — if it works.

But, at least this budget season, it didn’t. The rash wishlist of taxes sought by Parker stemmed from retrograde political thinking. A decade ago, Mayor Nutter’s final budget was $3.9 billion. Parker seeking to further her predecessor’s tax and spend proclivities and nearly doubling Nutter’s 2016 budget speaks to a confounding old school political addiction. After all, what return on investment have we seen from all that spending?

Think of our $7.1 billion budget as consisting of three buckets. About $3 billion is mandated on items like employee healthcare, pension contributions, and debt service on bonds. Another $3 billion is what we’ll call “politically protected” spending: Police, fire, libraries, emergency services. You cut them — as Nutter learned in his first term when he tried to right-size the library system — at your political peril. That leaves maybe $1.1 billion at a mayor’s true disposal.

Cherelle Parker can still be among those representing a third way — neither left nor right, but for you.

That’s why we’re always privy to fights about this or that $50 million or $100 million need. Compared to cities like Nashville and Charlotte, neither of which is burdened by such required spending, Philadelphia is enjoined from investing in growth as a matter of accounting.

Parker as reformer?

But does it have to be so? Parker’s finance director, Rob Dubow, has been in his position under three mayors, starting with Nutter nearly 20 years ago. (Despite the fact that, a decade ago, it came to light that, under Dubow, the City had misplaced about $30 million and had long failed to reconcile seven of its bank accounts — a faux pas that would never be tolerated in the private sector.) Dubow has amassed internal clout within the Parker administration. But he is a numbers guy, not a policy maven.

The challenge for Mayor Parker, as a wave of socialism looms, is to respond to the performers as a reformer would. Remember reform? It’s what’s working for other mayors in the face of Working Families Party grievances, giveaways and shibboleths. It’s what Mayor Dan Lurie is doing in San Francisco, when he proclaims “the era of excuses is over” while introducing sweeping city charter reform; what Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb is doing with his membership in the middle-of-the-road reform group Third Way and his remaking of the urban grid into a 15-minute city; what Houston Mayor John Whitmire is doing with a series of systemic structural budget reforms he announced with members of his City Council by his side; what Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin — a self-described “pro-growth progressive” — is doing with his Birmingham Promise, which funds collegiate scholarships, and his Black Male Initiative workforce development program.

Here, rather than play the tax-and-spend game (where has that gotten you, Dems?), Parker’s reform could begin by zero-budgeting that middle bucket of our budget, the one where all the political claims reside. You remember zero-based budgeting, right? Mayor Kenney promised to do it, and then forgot. You start each department’s budget at zero and align every expense with your mission. When it’s been used elsewhere — as then-County Commissioner Josh Shapiro did in Montco — it has unearthed tens or even hundreds of millions. You’d be saying to taxpayers: Government is in your pocket enough already. I’m going to find money myself to invest back into you.

Impossible? It kinda just happened. I’m told that Councilmember Katherine Gilmore Richardson didn’t buy Dubow’s conventional wisdom and, after a tense meeting with the mayor in which Parker must have realized she didn’t have the votes for her slate of taxes, the mayor, Johnson and Dubow magically came up with $48 million for schools. It took a little over two hours to find the funds, Dubow boasted in a press conference. Well, if you spent, I don’t know, a week combing through the ledger, how much more might you find?

Or let’s take it a step further. A reform mayor might borrow from the Copenhagen model, as Denver did with its airport, and leverage her city’s assets to make public investments. As urbanist Bruce Katz has championed, Copenhagen created a public Development Corporation and transferred vast amounts of city-owned land into it. The corporation borrowed against future land values and financed major infrastructure projects, including building its Metro system. A mayor who is willing to think outside the box would argue that, if your feet are on city property, you’re standing on part of an untapped investment portfolio.

In other words, in the face of the oncoming socialist movement, a reformer might channel Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell, who argues that being pro-growth is an anti-poverty plan. Instead of tacking left, Cherelle Parker can be a bulwark against a progressivism that gives Trumpism ammunition to caricature blue municipalities and that drives capital to pro-growth Sun Belt cities.

She will have to practice politics in the best sense of the term: reaching out, widening her kitchen cabinet, inviting strange bedfellows to the problem-solving table, forging coalitions.

“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket,” wrote Eric Hoffer, author of the seminal 1951 book, The True Believer. History has proven him right: Movements fade. (As Mayor Brandon Johnson, at 34 percent in the polls, is learning in Chicago.)

Make no mistake about the racket Parker and her city are up against. In New York, Mamdani has already fueled a political civil war between progressives and socialists — a brewing fight to the death to see who could be most responsible for unwittingly keeping Trumpism alive. In Seattle, Wilson’s response to Starbucks moving 2,000 jobs to Nashville — “Like, bye” — has other businesses fleeing and even Democratic council members rethinking the mayor’s radical platform. In Washington, D.C., a new Socialist mayor is about to take office. Blue city electoral wins notwithstanding, the DSA platform is dead on arrival for a national party that one would think might be tired of losing. DSA policy positions include a four-day, 32-hour work week with no loss in pay; universal basic income plus a federal jobs guarantee; free government childcare, free pre-K and free college; federal rent control, and eliminating deportations. Not every candidate supports all these planks, but every DSA-endorsed candidate signs on to some mix of them. Problem is, the DSA platform just is not where the majority of the country is, and cities that get too far ahead of the national Overton window are cities that lose their clout — especially if they exist in purple or red states.

Cherelle Parker can still be among those representing a third way — neither left nor right, but for you. Imagine: A city that solves its own problems instead of always asking its taxpayers to foot the bill. A city that invests and delivers quality of life outcomes — for you. That picks up your trash, that creates green and clean spaces, that entices employers to offer opportunity.

The mayor of that city will have to say no to elite progressive ideas fueled by little more than class grievance, yes, but she’ll also have to push her own government to think more creatively in order to invest more wisely. She will have to practice politics in the best sense of the term: reaching out, widening her kitchen cabinet, inviting strange bedfellows to the problem-solving table, forging coalitions. That will be a mayor who invites others to help her build a pathway to the middle class and beyond. Hannah Arendt once said that the great success of Stalinism among intellectuals everywhere was that it had replaced all questions of validity or testability or objectivity with the question of motive. Our Comrade has questioned our policy; why would he do such a thing? And why now? And who put him up to it?

A mayor who holds ideology up to inspection and errs on the side of pragmatism will be a mayor staying true to FDR’s long-ago advice, words of wisdom that every hubristic socialist parroting Emma Goldman ought to heed:

“It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”

LARRY PLATT ON PHILADELPHIA POLITICS