Wilmington

That is the question posed by John Sweeney in the NJ Opinion pages today. There's a fair amount of fluff in this piece, and does a thing I mostly hate from newspaper opinion pages -- ask a bunch of questions that its news division is not in the business of helping to answer for its readers. Some of those questions are misdirected -- schools are under the jurisdiction of school boards and the state, the city has little influence over how they operate or serve city kids, for instance. And lumping in all Democratically run cities with Wilmington's story is equally misguided. We can start with the NJ's own comparison of Providence, RI starts to show how inappropriate this is. A city that is mostly Democratic and is clearly back on a upswing -- a city that still has real issues, but a city that the NJ compared to Wilmington in terms of effectiveness in addressing violence. Democratic-run places like Baltimore and Philadelphia also present very different stories -- cities that still have more than their fair share of issues, but cities working at the kind of development and change that starts to address those problems. Interestingly, Baltimore has reasonable support from the MD GA, and Philadelphia does not from the PA GA (GOP controlled). But I don't think that the city's problem is just about Democrats -- I think it is mainly uninspired (and oft-times lazy) governing.