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      The Great Chicago Gas Giveaway and the Return of Stunt Philanthropy

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      Grand shows of largess may be back in style. Recently, driving on the North Side of Chicago, I found myself stuck behind a line of cars long enough that I could not, at first, tell what was causing it. It was only minutes later, after I was able to switch lanes and pull ahead, that I saw the cars were waiting at a gas station. Had something in the news set off a flurry of panic buying? I turned on the radio and soon learned that the people I saw were not, in fact, buying fuel. They were hoping to get some free.This was a giveaway orchestrated by Willie Wilson, a Chicago businessman known locally as a rags-to-riches success story and a serial long-shot political candidate, having run to be mayor of the city (in 2015), president of the United States (2016), mayor of Chicago again (2019) and U.S. senator (2020). On March 17, the day I passed that gas line, he gave away $200,000 worth of fuel at 10 stations around the city, capped at $50 per car. A week later he did it again, this time buying about a million dollars’ worth of gas at 48 stations.Wouldn’t it have been just as effective — as charity, not political theater — to hand out prepaid gas cards?On the morning of the second giveaway, I tuned in to a livestreamed news conference Wilson held at a station in Cicero, a suburb that borders Chicago’s West Side. The more I thought about the giveaways, the more absurd they came to seem. Even setting aside my wish that Wilson had used some of his money to support public transit (a much more robust and environmentally healthy response to oil-price instability), the logistics seemed offensively nonsensical. If the point was to give 24,000 drivers $50 of gas each, wouldn’t it have been just as effective — as charity, not political theater — to hand out prepaid gas cards? Drivers lined up hours early, and in some cases overnight, creating carbon-spewing, commute-snarling traffic jams. Police officers were deployed to manage the lines, meaning that what appeared to be an individual act of philanthropy was in fact partly subsidized by taxpayers. When a CBS Chicago journalist asked Wilson if he would help cover those manpower costs, he argued that the taxes he paid over the years were more than enough. Asked about gas cards, he said: “Don’t nobody tell me how to spend my money. You do gas cards, people come up with counterfeit gas cards, and it doesn’t work right.”Wilson was expected to announce another run for mayor shortly, and if this looked a little like a vote-buying stunt, plenty of others lined up to reap its benefits. As the news conference began, Wilson stood off to one side, watching cheerfully as person after person stepped forward to celebrate his efforts. Richard Boykin, Wilson’s candidate of choice for Cook County board president, served as a kind of M.C. There was a prayer led by Cicero’s police and fire department chaplain. The town president spoke, expressing his admiration for Wilson’s generosity, his disgust at gas prices and some quick thoughts on energy policy (“All they got to do is open up the pipeline. Why don’t they open up the pipeline?”). Representative Danny K. Davis talked about Wilson’s long history of philanthropy. Cicero’s police chief spoke. Someone from the town’s board of trustees spoke, then a local reverend, then a gas-station owner, then the town president’s wife, then another gas-station owner, then a representative from the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH coalition.Finally it was Wilson’s turn. The government wasn’t moving fast enough, he said. “If gasoline prices go up again,” he said, “then we’re going to be compelled to do this again.” As for the people who needed the fuel, he said: “I’m enjoying it more than they’re enjoying it. Because the Lord has blessed me to be able to do it.”It wasn’t long ago that gestures like Wilson’s felt like products of a bygone era of American life, when it was common for the wealthy to sprinkle money down on the masses in ways that, in addition to doing real good, might distract from their rapacious business practices and make them look like champions of the common man. The political “machines” that ran many cities and states had their own versions of this game, dispensing money and jobs to buy votes and curry public favor. But at some point these approaches came into disrepute, at least in their most overt manifestations. Respectable charities put some degree of separation, however cosmetic, between wealthy donors and good work. Respectable politicians are expected to back helpful policies, campaign by explaining their benefits and, sure, show up at ribbon-cutting ceremonies to claim credit for every dollar funneled toward constituents. But anything that looks too much like a handout from the powerful risks seeming like the stuff of robber barons and back-alley politics.Maybe that’s changing. As of 2018, a stray tweet at Elon Musk about the water supply in Flint, Mich., could draw a response pledging to “fund fixing the water in any house in Flint that has water contamination above FDA levels.” The billionaire Robert Smith finished a 2019 Morehouse College commencement speech by saying he would cover student debt for the entire graduating class. (A year later, he would pay millions to the federal authorities to settle a tax-evasion case.) Similar exercises extend into politics. During Wilson’s 2019 mayoral campaign, he gave out money at a South Side church and City Hall, saying he wanted to help people with their property-tax bills. (He argued that because this money went through his nonprofit, and not his mayoral campaign, it was not subject to campaign-finance laws; the Chicago Board of Elections agreed.) That same year, Andrew Yang, who was running for the Democratic presidential nomination, promised to give 10 families $1,000 a month each as a proof-of-concept for a universal basic income. After leaving the race, he started a nonprofit that gave 1,000 Bronx residents $1,000 each; less than a year later, he was running for mayor of New York. You can even make a show of distributing public money, as politicians have long done with things like tax rebates and stimulus checks; in 2020, days before the first individual pandemic-relief checks went out, White House officials scrambled to make sure Donald Trump’s name was printed on them.Wilson’s willingness to drop big cash on gas giveaways says little about how he would actually govern, or address such costs overall. It is intended to broadcast that he cares, and that he acts. This explains, in part, why so many public officials participated in his news conference. (When, in the popular consciousness, government means out-of-touch inefficiency, even insiders want to brand themselves as outsiders.) But like so many shows of generosity, there is a gamble here. Some may see you as a populist savior, but others may be convinced that you’re a huckster, more interested in self-aggrandizement than in actually changing anything. Which reaction prevails will depend: How much frustration and desperation are out there?As political battles over pandemic relief, inflation and gas prices continue, I wager that we’ll see even more exercises like Wilson’s. In the week after Wilson’s news conference, Chicago’s current mayor, Lori Lightfoot, held one of her own, announcing an actual city program that will distribute $7.5 million in prepaid gas cards and $5 million in prepaid public-transit rides. The program has received nothing close to the media coverage of Wilson’s gas giveaway. (Wilson, for his part, had the self-confidence to dismiss Lightfoot’s program as a “political stunt.”) One response, for anyone displeased by this disparity, would be to blame sensationalistic media and despair. The other would be to start cooking up good stunts of your own.Source photographs: Screen grabs from YouTubePeter C. Baker is a freelance writer in Evanston, Ill., and the author of the novel “Planes,” to be published by Knopf in May. More

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      Surfside Mayor Loses Election

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      Charles Burkett was the mayor of Surfside when the 13-story Champlain Towers South complex fell in June, killing 98 people. He lost his re-election bid by 33 votes on Tuesday.The mayor who led the seaside town of Surfside, Fla., through the traumatic aftermath of the collapse of a condominium tower in which 98 people were killed last year was voted out of office on Tuesday night.The mayor, Charles Burkett, who was elected in 2020, placed third in the three-way race and lost by 33 votes to the winner, Shlomo Danzinger, according to an unofficial tally.Mr. Burkett was thrust into the national spotlight after the Champlain Towers South, a 13-story residential condo building just north of Miami Beach, collapsed in the early hours of June 24. He was a fixture at press briefings as firefighters, search dogs and emergency crews spent weeks scouring the rubble for survivors. Eventually, the rescue effort shifted to a recovery operation, when rescuers acknowledged that no more survivors would be found.The tragedy was officially deemed one of the deadliest accidental structural building failures in American history and was expected to lead to years of investigations. The first signs of failure were found at the building’s base and in an underground garage, but federal authorities have not determined what caused the collapse.The Champlain Towers South condominium complex in Surfside partially collapsed in 2021, killing 98 people.Erin Schaff/The New York Times“It’s been a pretty tough two years,” Mr. Burkett said in an interview on Wednesday. “The day I was elected, the country shut down because of Covid, and then the next year we had the building collapse. It was all hands on deck.”He said he believed that rancor at recent town meetings had led voters in the town of about 6,000 people to seek new leadership.In July 2020, a town commissioner, Eliana R. Salzhauer, gave Mr. Burkett the middle finger after he muted her during a virtual meeting about a proposed anti-discrimination resolution. The disagreement was over Mr. Burkett’s proposal to add Christians to an ordinance denouncing hatred against Asians and Jews.“I liken it to a cage fight,” Mr. Burkett said, referring to the meetings. “We’re all put into this cage for five hours and then asked to conduct a productive meeting.”Ms. Salzhauer, who was up for re-election, also lost her seat. She did not respond to messages on Wednesday.On his campaign website, Mr. Danzinger, a father of five children, describes himself as a community activist and leader who has helped “tech startups and tech giants” for more than 25 years. He pushed for “restoring civility and dignity” to the commission and railed against the “obscene gestures and comments made during public meetings” that he said had “put our town in the press’s crosshairs.” Shlomo Danzinger was scheduled to be sworn in as mayor of Surfside on Wednesday night.Pedro Portal/Miami Herald, via Associated Press“Needless to say, our town deserves leaders who put aside their egos for the benefit of the community,” Mr. Danzinger said on his website. He also pushed for a “gold standard” for building requirements that would ensure the safety of new developments and neighboring buildings while demanding accountability from developers.Mr. Danzinger received 499 votes. Tina Paul, the town’s vice mayor, placed second with 476 votes. Mr. Burkett received 466 votes, according to unofficial results.Mr. Danzinger did not respond to messages for comment on Wednesday. He is scheduled to be sworn into office on Wednesday night, according to the town clerk’s office.During the campaign, Mr. Danzinger presented himself as a family man who lives in the heart of town while saying that Mr. Burkett “lives alone in a mansion on the pristine little enclave of Biscaya Island.”Mr. Burkett, who owns Burkett Properties Inc., a real estate company, said he lives with his son, who is 18.A supporter of the state’s governor, Ron DeSantis, a Republican, Mr. Burkett said he would turn his attention to helping him get re-elected this November. Mr. Burkett, who is not affiliated with a political party, said he also admired Senators Rick Scott and Marco Rubio of Florida, who are both Republicans. He said he would consider running for governor or the Senate if any of the three current office holders choose not to run again.While he was surprised by the results, Mr. Burkett said he was glad Mr. Danzinger won. Mr. Burkett described his opponent as someone who has “a very similar worldview compared to me.”“It’s a good day because the town of Surfside is going to be fine,” Mr. Burkett said. “We’ve got good people in place. They’re reasonable. They’re thoughtful.” More

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      Just How Liberal Is California? The Answer Matters to Democrats Everywhere.

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      LOS ANGELES — California is awash in money, with so many billions in surplus revenue that the state cannot enact programs fast enough. Democrats hold veto-proof majorities in the Legislature, and Gov. Gavin Newsom has a $25 million campaign war chest to fend off any token opposition in his re-election bid.Yet all is far from tranquil in this sea of blue. Deep fissures divide Democrats, whose control of state government effectively gives them unilateral power to enact programs. As elections approach, intraparty demands, denunciations and purity tests have exposed rifts between progressives and moderates that seem destined to become more vitriolic — and more consequential. We are about to find out just how liberal California is.The answer will shape policy as the most populous state wrestles with conflicts over seemingly intractable problems: too many homeless, too many drug overdoses, too many cars, too many guns, too much poverty. Although some dynamics are peculiar to California, the outcome will also have implications for the parallel debate swirling among national Democrats. Because if progressives here cannot translate their ideology into popular support that wins elections, it will not bode well for their efforts on a national scale.California has long been more centrist than its popular image. The “Mod Squad,” a caucus of moderate Democratic state lawmakers, has had outsize influence for more than a decade. As the Republican Party became increasingly marginal, business interests that had traditionally backed Republican candidates realized they could have more influence by supporting conservative Democrats. That paradigm accelerated with the shift to a system in which the top two finishers in a primary advance to the general election, regardless of party affiliation. Designed to promote more centrist candidates from both parties, it often results in face-offs between two Democrats.A contest emblematic of the California divide is unfolding in Los Angeles. From a crowded field of mayoral candidates, the two most likely to advance offer a stark contrast: Representative Karen Bass, a stalwart liberal embraced for both her politics and her background in community organizing, and the billionaire developer Rick Caruso, who has sounded the familiar refrain that it’s time for a businessman to clean up the failures of the political class. In a bow to the overwhelmingly Democratic electorate, Mr. Caruso, best known for his high-end shopping malls, recently changed his registration from no party preference to Democrat — even though the race is nonpartisan. For her part, Ms. Bass has called for freeing up more police officers for patrol (and hiring replacements for administrative duties) and equivocated on abolishing cash bail, positions that alarmed some of her natural allies.It is hard to know just how much the pandemic, on top of the Trump years, has scrambled the political calculus. We have traffic jams at the ports that rival those on the roads, restaurant tables where cars once parked, hotels that catered to tourists now sheltering the homeless. Anger over closed schools and mask mandates has triggered a record number of recalls (most notably the landslide that recalled three San Francisco school board members, on which progressives and moderates agreed). In the far northern county of Shasta, a group including members of a local militia won control of the board of supervisors by recalling a Republican ex-police chief who had not been sufficiently anti-mask or pro-gun. A prominent anti-Trump Republican consultant called the vote a “canary in a coal mine” for the direction of his state party.If mask and vaccine mandates have become the litmus test for the far right, the left has chosen as its defining issue a far more complex — but seemingly unattainable — goal: single-payer health care. When a bill (with an estimated price of more than $300 billion a year) made it to the Assembly floor, progressives threatened to deny party support to any Democrat who voted no. Far short of the necessary yes votes, the sponsor, Ash Kalra of San Jose, a progressive Democrat, pulled the bill rather than force a vote that could be used against his colleagues. He was pilloried as a traitor by activists.The Working Families Party, which has pushed for progressive priorities in the New York State Legislature, recently established a branch in California in hopes of having similar influence and endorsing and supporting progressive Democrats. The group’s state director, Jane Kim, a former San Francisco supervisor who lost the 2018 mayoral race to the moderate London Breed and then helped Bernie Sanders win the California primary, argues that the state’s electorate is more liberal than its elected officials, who are beholden to the influence of large corporate donors. Still, in the 2020 general election — with a record-setting turnout — voters defeated almost all ballot initiatives that were priorities of the progressives, opting not to restore affirmative action, nor impose higher taxes on commercial and industrial properties, nor abolish cash bail, nor expand rent control.In the arena of criminal justice, where voters and lawmakers have consistently made progressive changes in recent years, the growing concern about crime (some justified by data and some not) will soon test the commitment to move away from draconian sentences and mass incarceration. The conservative Sacramento district attorney, Anne Marie Schubert, is running for state attorney general on the slogan “Stop the Chaos,” tying her opponent, the incumbent Rob Bonta, to what she calls “rogue prosecutors” like the progressive district attorneys in Los Angeles and San Francisco, who are targets of recall campaigns.In June, San Franciscans will decide whether to recall District Attorney Chesa Boudin, a referendum on his performance as well as a vote that moderates have framed as a cornerstone of the fight to “take back” their city from progressives. In a city decidedly less liberal than its reputation, Mayor Breed has referred to members of the board of supervisors as “a very, very extremely left group of people.”With near-record office turnover — a result of reapportionment, term limits, frustration and fatigue — the winners of the coming elections will collectively reshape the political landscape for many years. A quarter of the 120 state legislative districts will have new representatives next year, and among those departing are some of the most influential lawmakers.It would be nice to think that change will usher in a new generation of leaders, one that builds on the excitement and enthusiasm generated, especially among young people, by the 2020 Sanders campaign. It is hard not to root for young activists. They will live or die with the consequences of decisions being made today on air, water, housing, schools.In a recent poll, young adults who were asked the most pressing issue for the governor and Legislature to work on this year were twice as likely as those over 35 to cite jobs and the economy, and were far less concerned about crime. They were also more optimistic, with more than half saying California was headed in the right direction.The pandemic might yet prove to be the disruption needed to trigger big political shifts, comparable with those triggered in the arena of jobs and work. So far, it seems to have driven people further into their corners. The next generation will have to find a way to fill in that hollowed-out middle, just as they will have to bridge the ever-growing chasms in wealth, which in turn drive so much of the political divide.Miriam Pawel (@miriampawel) is the author of “The Browns of California: The Family Dynasty That Transformed a State and Shaped a Nation.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      At 101, and After 36 Years as Mayor, ‘Hurricane Hazel’ Is Still a Force in Canada

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      After playing pro hockey in the 1940s, Hazel McCallion entered politics at a time when few women held high office, leading a major Canadian city through epic growth. Her endorsements still matter.MISSISSAUGA, Ontario — On Valentine’s Day, she first took a call from Justin Trudeau. Next, she joined Ontario’s premier at the unveiling of a new commuter train line to be named in her honor.By 4:30 p.m. that day — her 101st birthday — Hazel McCallion had arrived at a shopping mall, where she took a seat in a rocking chair behind a velvet rope at an exhibition about her life and began accepting bouquets and tributes from dozens of fans.Slightly taller than five feet, Ms. McCallion commanded attention from towering well wishers, just as she has commanded respect in Canadian politics for decades.She has been a force in Canadian politics for longer than just about anyone alive, even though she began her career in middle age.She mounted her first campaign for elected office in 1966, five years before Mr. Trudeau, the prime minister, was born.When in 1978 she was first elected mayor of Mississauga, a Toronto suburb, her City Hall office looked out on cows.By the time she left office, 36 years later at the age of 93, the fields had been replaced with condo towers, a college campus, a transit hub and shopping centers in what is now Canada’s seventh largest city, granting her a moniker she isn’t so fond of, “the queen of sprawl.”An exhibition about Ms. McCallion’s life at the Erin Mills Town Center in Mississauga, Ontario.Tara Walton for The New York TimesShe prefers the nickname “Hurricane Hazel,” an ode to her brash style — though a devastating storm with the same name, which killed about 80 people around Toronto in 1954, was still fresh in local memory when she earned it.Just months into her first term, she gained a national profile for managing a mass evacuation of close to 220,000 residents after a train derailment in 1979.The dramatic event was ordained the “Mississauga Miracle” because of the success of the emergency response after two-dozen rail cars transporting hazardous chemicals erupted in flames at an intersection in the city.No one died, and one of the few people injured was Ms. McCallion, who sprained her ankle rushing around to work on the evacuation. She had to be carried into some meetings by emergency responders.“A job was to be done,” Ms. McCallion said, “and I did it.”As mayor, she was known for an uncompromising leadership style, a take-no-prisoners bluntness and a political independence that meant she never ran under the banner of any party.“It’s not like she’s had consistent positions all these years,” said Tom Urbaniak, a professor of political science at Cape Breton University in Nova Scotia and the author of a book about Mississauga’s sprawl during Ms. McCallion’s time in office. “She was very, very pragmatic and that was part of her political recipe.”A photo of Ms. McCallion on display at an exhibit entitled “Hazel: 100 Years of Memories.”Her hockey skills were also renowned — she played professionally — and in the political arena, they translated into a willingness to deliver bruising checks on opponents.“Everybody sort of genuflected to Hazel because she was this little dynamo,” said David Peterson, a former Liberal premier of Ontario between 1985 and 1990. “She’s a team player, if she’s running the team. But I can’t imagine having Hazel in a cabinet,” he added. “She’s not a comfortable follower.”She was 57 when she became Mississauga’s mayor, at a time when there were few women holding significant political office in Canada.But sitting for an interview in the living room of her home in Mississauga a few days after her 101st birthday celebrations, Ms. McCallion was characteristically curt in dismissing discussion of any of the sexism she may have encountered.“I’ve had very strong male support because I’m independent,” she said. “And they know that I am not a wallflower.”In her successful first campaign for Mississauga mayor, her opponent, the incumbent, regularly repeated patronizing references to her gender, which helped rally support for her. She defeated him and never lost an election after that, coasting to victory in most subsequent elections by outsize margins.Mississauga’s city hall, the former workplace of Ms. McCallion.Tara Walton for The New York TimesHer home in Mississauga is decorated with the mementos and celebrity photos one might expect from such a long political career. Less typically, hockey jerseys with numbers commemorating her 99th, 100th and 101st birthdays are hung over the spiral banister across from her dining room.Among all the objects, she said the one she holds most dear is a clock from her hometown, Port Daniel, on the Gaspé Peninsula in Quebec. The youngest of five children, Ms. McCallion was born in a farmhouse and grew up during the Great Depression.“When you have to leave home at 14 and you’re a Depression kid, you have to become completely independent,” she said. “You don’t call home for money.”She spent her high school years studying in Montreal and Quebec City, and credits her mother, a nurse, for instilling in her the confidence to take on the world. She later finished secretarial school, got a job managing an engineering firm’s office in Montreal — and started playing professional hockey for five dollars a game.She played from 1940 to 1942 in a women’s league with three teams and was known for her speed on the ice. She had to get two bottom teeth replaced following a stick to the mouth in a particularly rough game. In her 2014 memoir, “Hurricane Hazel: A Life With Purpose,” she wrote, “Considering the dental cost, I guess I broke even on my professional hockey career.”The engineering firm relocated her to Toronto, which had no women’s league, so she stopped playing hockey for pay, but continued to skate, fast, until about three years ago. She left the firm after more than two decades to help her husband manage his printing business, and she became more involved in the business community of Streetsville, Ontario, at the time an independent suburb of Toronto.Ms. McCallion and her late husband Sam.Tara Walton for The New York TimesA signed photo from Celine Dion hangs in Ms. McCallion’s kitchen.Tara Walton for The New York TimesShe said she was frustrated by the boys’ club running the town and was appointed to its planning board, eventually chairing it. She served as mayor of Streetsville from 1970 to 1973, before it was amalgamated with Mississauga.Her husband, Sam McCallion, died in 1997. The couple had three children. “I had a wonderful husband,” Ms. McCallion said. “He stood back. He looked after his business, and he let me look after the politics, so we worked extremely well together.”As Mississauga grew rapidly during her time as mayor, her tenure was not without its detractors. She became known for stamping out expressions of dissent at City Hall, with the political horse trading occurring in private, which made for blandly accordant council meetings, said Mr. Urbaniak, the political scientist.“Some of the serious conversation and debate unfortunately happened behind closed doors in order to try to present this unified front,” Mr. Urbaniak said. “It seemed a little eerie.”Perhaps a product of so many decades spent in politics, Ms. McCallion tends to talk in aphorisms and mantras: No decision is worse than a bad one, make everyday count, negativity is bad for your health, have a purpose. And her favorite: “Do your homework.”“I’ve had very strong male support because I’m independent,” Ms. McCallion said. “And they know that I am not a wallflower.”Tara Walton for The New York TimesOne of the rare times she seemed to have not done her homework led to conflict-of-interest allegations and a subsequent court case that was dismissed by a judge in 2013.Ms. McCallion claimed to not have known the extent of her son’s ownership stake in a real estate company that proposed to develop land near City Hall into an upscale hotel, convention center and condominiums. The project was scrapped, with the land used instead for the Hazel McCallion campus at Sheridan College.“Unfortunately, my son, he had heard me talk so often that we needed a convention center in the city core,” she said. “He attempted to do it and tried to convince others to support him.”In her memoir, Ms. McCallion insists that she always put the interests of residents first and denounces the multimillion dollar cost to taxpayers for a judicial inquiry “so that my political opponents could try to extract their pound of flesh from me.”Since retiring as mayor in 2014, she has kept an exhausting schedule — rising at 5:30 a.m., supporting campaigns for local causes and making frequent stops at the exhibition, or as she calls it, “my museum,” to meet with community groups.People continue to seek out her presence and her political blessing, including Bonnie Crombie, whom she endorsed — some say anointed — to take her place as mayor.Ms. McCallion spends a good amount of time at the exhibit, one leg crossed over the other in her rocking chair, receiving visitors who thank her, she said, “for creating a great city.”“If you build a sound foundation,” she said, “then nobody can ruin it.” More

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      Louisville Mayoral Candidate Says Gunman Shot at Him in Campaign Office

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      The candidate, Craig Greenberg, was unharmed, but the attack left a bullet hole in his sweater. A man was charged with attempted murder, the police said.A mayoral candidate in Louisville, Ky., said he was the target of a shooting inside his campaign office on Monday that left him unharmed but shaken — and with a bullet hole in the back of his sweater.The candidate, Craig Greenberg, said he and four members of his campaign team were in a morning meeting near downtown when a man walked in.“When we greeted him, he pulled out a gun, aimed directly at me and began shooting,” Mr. Greenberg said at a news conference.The gunman was standing in the doorway as he fired his weapon multiple times, Mr. Greenberg said, and a member of his campaign staff slammed the door shut before helping to build a barricade out of tables and desks.Police officers who responded to the scene detained Quintez Brown, 21, outside the building. Mr. Brown was later charged with attempted murder and four counts of wanton endangerment, a Police Department spokeswoman said.According to Louisville news media outlets, Mr. Brown is a Black Lives Matter activist who was involved in protests after city police officers killed Breonna Taylor during a botched drug raid in her apartment in March 2020. He has written columns for The Courier-Journal about race and social justice.Mr. Brown announced in December that he would run for a Metro Council seat but county records show that he did not file to do so before last month’s deadline. It was unclear whether he had a lawyer.Mr. Greenberg declined to say whether he recognized the attacker, citing the police investigation, and it was not clear why he was targeted.Chief Erika Shields of the Louisville Metro Police Department said at a news conference that possible reasons for the attack include Mr. Greenberg’s mayoral candidacy or his Jewish identity, but that it was also conceivable that the police were “dealing with someone who has mental issues or is venomous.”“Until we can determine what the motivating factors were, we are going to keep an open mind and proceed with an abundance of caution and concern for many of our community members,” Chief Shields said.Mr. Greenberg, a Democrat, is in a crowded race to replace Mayor Greg Fischer, a Democrat who cannot run again because he is limited to three terms. The party primary contests are in May, followed by a general election in November.There are eight Democratic candidates, including David L. Nicholson, the Circuit Court clerk for Jefferson County; the Rev. Timothy Findley Jr. of Kingdom Fellowship Christian Life Center; and Shameka Parrish-Wright, a local social justice activist. Bill Dieruf, the mayor of Jeffersontown, a Louisville suburb, is one of the four Republicans in the race.Mr. Greenberg is a businessman who has been the president of a boutique hotel chain and a member of the University of Louisville’s board of trustees. He has been endorsed by at least six members of the 26-person Metro Council, including its president.The top issue on Mr. Greenberg’s campaign website is public safety. An eight-page plan outlines his desire, among other things, to hire nearly 300 police officers and to dedicate more resources to solving violent crime and making sure illegal guns stay off the streets.“Too many Louisville families have experienced the trauma of gun violence,” Mr. Greenberg said after the shooting. “Too many in Louisville were not as blessed as my team and I were today to survive.“Clearly, much more work needs to be done to end this senseless gun violence and make Louisville a safer place for everyone.”Like many large cities, Louisville has seen an increase in violent crime during the coronavirus pandemic. The city set a record with 173 homicides in 2020, and then broke it with 188 homicides last year. There were 18 homicides this year through Feb. 6, according to the Police Department, slightly behind last year’s pace.The Police Department itself has been under scrutiny for years, most prominently after officers killed Ms. Taylor. The police chief at that time was fired after officers killed a restaurant owner during protests over Ms. Taylor’s death.On Monday, Mr. Greenberg thanked the Police Department for its swift response to the shooting and its daily efforts to keep the city safe. He said he wanted to go home and hug his wife and two sons, pausing to compose himself.“It all happened so quick, but it’s a very surreal experience,” he said of the shooting. “There are far too many other people in Louisville who have experienced that same feeling.” More

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      Rick Caruso Jumps Into Los Angeles Mayor’s Race

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      The longtime civic leader fits the profile of successful power brokers in the city’s past. Will that kind of résumé succeed in the present?Rick J. Caruso, a billionaire real estate developer and longtime civic figure, jumped into the race for mayor of Los Angeles on Friday, shaking up a crowded field for the top job in the nation’s second-largest city after more than a decade of flirting with a run.Mr. Caruso, 63, whose candidacy had for the past year been a subject of intense speculation, filed a declaration that he would run with the city clerk hours before the deadline and is expected to make a formal announcement next week. “It’s a very meaningful day for me and my family,” he told a small group of reporters standing in the breezeway of a city building in an industrial section of downtown. “I love Los Angeles, I love the diversity of Los Angeles. I’m eager to be a part of this.”His brief statement was initially drowned out by a protester who shouted profanity-laced criticism, and that Angelenos “don’t want a billionaire mayor.”Mr. Caruso is known for signature outdoor shopping centers designed with Disney-esque nostalgia and attention to detail, as well as for his roles in steering a lengthy list of civic institutions.His fortune has been viewed as a powerful asset in a market where mounting a credible campaign can be enormously expensive, and his résumé, which includes serving as head of the city’s Police Commission and chairman of the board of trustees of the University of Southern California, evokes an older generation of Los Angeles power brokers.Those figures include Eli Broad, the businessman and philanthropist who died last year after putting his stamp on Los Angeles’s cultural and civic life, and Richard Riordan, an investment banker who was elected mayor in the tumultuous aftermath of the 1992 riots. Mr. Caruso’s experience and wealth give him the potential to serve as a more conservative alternative in a field that leans left.But Mr. Caruso’s candidacy for the officially nonpartisan post of mayor will face a political dynamic that has undergone substantial change over the past generation. Many people say the appetite for that style of leadership has waned in Los Angeles, a vast, racially diverse metropolis where the symptoms of gaping economic inequality — from the heavy toll of the pandemic on poorer Black and Latino residents to the city’s monumental housing crisis — have become consuming challenges.And political observers say that two factors are likely to significantly amplify voter turnout among underrepresented groups like renters, young adults, Latinos and Asians: the timing of the election, coinciding with the national midterms, and a revamped system that will mail ballots to every active, registered voter.“The electorate in 1993 is completely dissimilar to the electorate in 2022,” said Sonja Diaz, the director of the Latino Policy & Politics Initiative at the University of California, Los Angeles. “We’re talking about two different Los Angeleses.”Homelessness — along with the constellation of thorny issues it touches, including crime, public health, transit, the cost of living and the environment — is likely to be a dominant concern.The contest is already stacked with big-name contenders, all Democrats, seeking to succeed Mayor Eric Garcetti, who is awaiting Senate confirmation to become U.S. ambassador to India and cannot run again after serving the maximum two terms.Representative Karen Bass, the former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus who was on President Biden’s short list for vice president, has perhaps the broadest base of support in the city, where she started as a community organizer in the 1990s. She has backing both from progressive activists and from members of the political establishment.Kevin de León, a councilman and former State Senate leader, is another well-known progressive in the race; he has touted his background as a son of Guatemalan immigrants in a city that is 49 percent Latino.Joe Buscaino, a city councilman and a former police officer, has tried to position himself as a moderate, in the vein of New York’s new mayor, Eric Adams.Mr. Buscaino and Mr. Caruso could find themselves fighting for many of the same voters, in a race that is likely to require a runoff after a June 7 primary. But at least one of the announced candidates, the local business leader Jessica Lall, will not be on the ballot; as speculation mounted that Mr. Caruso was about to enter the race, she announced on Tuesday that she was dropping out.The general election will be held Nov. 8.A former Republican in a city that is now overwhelmingly Democratic, Mr. Caruso announced in late January that he would register as a Democrat, and no longer be listed in the rolls without a party preference.“I won’t be a typical Democrat, that’s for sure,” he wrote in the statement. “I will be a pro-centrist, pro-jobs, pro-public safety Democrat.”He has enlisted help from some of the state’s top Democratic political strategists, including the consultants who led Gov. Gavin Newsom’s successful campaign to keep his job last year in a contentious recall election.The grandson of Italian immigrants who grew up in Beverly Hills, Mr. Caruso has become known for properties — including the Grove in Los Angeles and the Americana at Brand in neighboring Glendale — that present a vision of Southern California that is clean, polished and tightly controlled. Streetcars trundle jauntily past fountains, sidewalk cafes and luxury stores where security guards stand sentry.In television interviews late last year, Mr. Caruso said a flash mob robbery at The Grove was the fault of efforts to “defund the cops,” drawing condemnation from activists who said developers have an incentive to protect their property rather than address the root causes of crime.Raphael Sonenshein, the executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at California State University, Los Angeles, said the mayoral election could turn less on policy ideas than on perceptions of leadership.“The voters aren’t necessarily looking for somebody who has the best solution,” he said. “They want somebody who can take whatever solution and make it work.” More

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      Fury Alone Won’t Destroy Trumpism. We Need a Plan B.

      by

      In his 2020 book “Politics Is for Power,” Eitan Hersh, a political scientist at Tufts, sketched a day in the life of many political obsessives in sharp, if cruel, terms.I refresh my Twitter feed to keep up on the latest political crisis, then toggle over to Facebook to read clickbait news stories, then over to YouTube to see a montage of juicy clips from the latest congressional hearing. I then complain to my family about all the things I don’t like that I have seen.To Hersh, that’s not politics. It’s what he calls “political hobbyism.” And it’s close to a national pastime. “A third of Americans say they spend two hours or more each day on politics,” he writes. “Of these people, four out of five say that not one minute of that time is spent on any kind of real political work. It’s all TV news and podcasts and radio shows and social media and cheering and booing and complaining to friends and family.”Real political work, for Hersh, is the intentional, strategic accumulation of power in service of a defined end. It is action in service of change, not information in service of outrage. This distinction is on my mind because, like so many others, I’ve spent the week revisiting the attempted coup of Jan. 6, marinating in my fury toward the Republicans who put fealty toward Donald Trump above loyalty toward country and the few but pivotal Senate Democrats who are proving, day after day, that they think the filibuster more important than the franchise. Let me tell you, the tweets and columns I drafted in my head were searing.But fury is useful only as fuel. We need a Plan B for democracy. Plan A was to pass H.R. 1 and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. Neither bill, as of now, has a path to President Biden’s desk. I’ve found that you provoke a peculiar anger if you state this, as if admitting the problem were the cause of the problem. I fear denial has left many Democrats stuck on a national strategy with little hope of near-term success. In order to protect democracy, Democrats have to win more elections. And to do that, they need to make sure the country’s local electoral machinery isn’t corrupted by the Trumpist right.“The people thinking strategically about how to win the 2022 election are the ones doing the most for democracy,” said Daniel Ziblatt, a political scientist at Harvard and one of the authors of “How Democracies Die.” “I’ve heard people saying bridges don’t save democracy — voting rights do. But for Democrats to be in a position to protect democracy, they need bigger majorities.”There are people working on a Plan B. This week, I half-jokingly asked Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, what it felt like to be on the front lines of protecting American democracy. He replied, dead serious, by telling me what it was like. He spends his days obsessing over mayoral races in 20,000-person towns, because those mayors appoint the city clerks who decide whether to pull the drop boxes for mail-in ballots and small changes to electoral administration could be the difference between winning Senator Ron Johnson’s seat in 2022 (and having a chance at democracy reform) and losing the race and the Senate. Wikler is organizing volunteers to staff phone banks to recruit people who believe in democracy to serve as municipal poll workers, because Steve Bannon has made it his mission to recruit people who don’t believe in democracy to serve as municipal poll workers.I’ll say this for the right: They pay attention to where the power lies in the American system, in ways the left sometimes doesn’t. Bannon calls this “the precinct strategy,” and it’s working. “Suddenly, people who had never before showed interest in party politics started calling the local G.O.P. headquarters or crowding into county conventions, eager to enlist as precinct officers,” ProPublica reports. “They showed up in states Trump won and in states he lost, in deep-red rural areas, in swing-voting suburbs and in populous cities.”The difference between those organizing at the local level to shape democracy and those raging ineffectually about democratic backsliding — myself included — remind me of the old line about war: Amateurs talk strategy; professionals talk logistics. Right now, Trumpists are talking logistics.“We do not have one federal election,” said Amanda Litman, a co-founder of Run for Something, which helps first-time candidates learn about the offices they can contest and helps them mount their campaigns. “We have 50 state elections and then thousands of county elections. And each of those ladder up to give us results. While Congress can write, in some ways, rules or boundaries for how elections are administered, state legislatures are making decisions about who can and can’t vote. Counties and towns are making decisions about how much money they’re spending, what technology they’re using, the rules around which candidates can participate.”An NPR analysis found 15 Republicans running for secretary of state in 2022 who doubt the legitimacy of Biden’s win. In Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, the incumbent Republican secretary of state who stood fast against Trump’s pressure, faces two primary challengers who hold that Trump was 2020’s rightful winner. Trump has endorsed one of them, Representative Jody Hice. He’s also endorsed candidates for secretary of state in Arizona and Michigan who backed him in 2020 and stand ready to do so in 2024. As NPR dryly noted, “The duties of a state secretary of state vary, but in most cases, they are the state’s top voting official and have a role in carrying out election laws.”Nor is it just secretaries of state. “Voter suppression is happening at every level of government here in Georgia,” Representative Nikema Williams, who chairs the Georgia Democratic Party, told me. “We have 159 counties, and so 159 different ways boards of elections are elected and elections are carried out. So we have 159 different leaders who control election administration in the state. We’ve seen those boards restrict access by changing the number of ballot boxes. Often, our Black members on these boards are being pushed out.”America’s confounding political structure creates two mismatches that bedevil democracy’ would-be defenders. The first mismatch is geographic. Your country turns on elections held in Georgia and Wisconsin, and if you live in California or New York, you’re left feeling powerless.But that’s somewhere between an illusion and a cop-out. A constant complaint among those working to win these offices is that progressives donate hundreds of millions to presidential campaigns and long-shot bids against top Republicans, even as local candidates across the country are starved for funds.“Democratic major donors like to fund the flashy things,” Litman told me. “Presidential races, Senate races, super PACs, TV ads. Amy McGrath can raise $90 million to run against Mitch McConnell in a doomed race, but the number of City Council and school board candidates in Kentucky who can raise what they need is …” She trailed off in frustration.The second mismatch is emotional. If you’re frightened that America is sliding into authoritarianism, you want to support candidates, run campaigns and donate to causes that directly focus on the crisis of democracy. But few local elections are run as referendums on Trump’s big lie. They’re about trash pickup and bond ordinances and traffic management and budgeting and disaster response.Lina Hidalgo ran for county judge in Harris County, Texas, after the 2016 election. Trump’s campaign had appalled her, and she wanted to do something. “I learned about this position that had flown under the radar for a very long time,” she told me. “It was the type of seat that only ever changed who held it when the incumbent died or was convicted of a crime. But it controls the budget for the county. Harris County is nearly the size of Colorado in population, larger than 28 states. It’s the budget for the hospital system, roads, bridges, libraries, the jail. And part of that includes funding the electoral system.”Hidalgo didn’t campaign as a firebrand progressive looking to defend Texas from Trump. She won it, she told me, by focusing on what mattered most to her neighbors: the constant flooding of the county, as violent storms kept overwhelming dilapidated infrastructure. “I said, ‘Do you want a community that floods year after year?’” She won, and after she won, she joined with her colleagues to spend $13 million more on election administration and to allow residents to vote at whichever polling place was convenient for them on Election Day, even if it wasn’t the location they’d been assigned.Protecting democracy by supporting county supervisors or small-town mayors — particularly ones who fit the politics of more conservative communities — can feel like being diagnosed with heart failure and being told the best thing to do is to double-check your tax returns and those of all your neighbors.“If you want to fight for the future of American democracy, you shouldn’t spend all day talking about the future of American democracy,” Wikler said. “These local races that determine the mechanics of American democracy are the ventilation shaft in the Republican death star. These races get zero national attention. They hardly get local attention. Turnout is often lower than 20 percent. That means people who actually engage have a superpower. You, as a single dedicated volunteer, might be able to call and knock on the doors of enough voters to win a local election.”Or you can simply win one yourself. That’s what Gabriella Cázares-Kelly did. Cázares-Kelly, a member of the Tohono O’odham Nation, agreed to staff a voter registration booth at the community college where she worked, in Pima County, Ariz. She was stunned to hear the stories of her students. “We keep blaming students for not participating, but it’s really complicated to get registered to vote if you don’t have a license, the nearest D.M.V. is an hour and a half away and you don’t own a car,” she told me.Cázares-Kelly learned that much of the authority over voter registration fell to an office neither she nor anyone around her knew much about: the County Recorder’s Office, which has authority over records ranging from deeds to voter registrations. It had powers she’d never considered. It could work with the postmaster’s office to put registration forms in tribal postal offices — or not. When it called a voter to verify a ballot and heard an answering machine message in Spanish, it could follow up in Spanish — or not.“I started contacting the records office and making suggestions and asking questions,” Cázares-Kelly said. “I did that for a long time, and the previous recorder was not very happy about it. I called so often, the staff began to know me. I didn’t have an interest in running till I heard the previous recorder was going to retire, and then my immediate thought was, ‘What if a white supremacist runs?’”So in 2020, Cázares-Kelly ran, and she won. Now she’s the county recorder for a jurisdiction with nearly a million people, and more than 600,000 registered voters, in a swing state. “One thing I was really struck by when I first started getting involved in politics is how much power there is in just showing up to things,” she said. “If you love libraries, libraries have board meetings. Go to the public meeting. See where they’re spending their money. We’re supposed to be participating. If you want to get involved, there’s always a way.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More