Newark is the most dangerous city in New Jersey, Tallahassee is the most dangerous city in Florida, and South Bend is the most dangerous city in Indiana. But instead of fixing their failed cities, the current mayor of South Bend, and the former mayors of Newark and Tallahassee want to run for president.
Mayor Peter Buttigieg has announced that he’s forming an exploratory committee for a 2020 run. Media reports have focused on the possibility that he might become America’s first gay millennial president, instead of on the fact that he’s headed a city since 2011 which has double the national and statewide violent crime rates. And a city where Hispanic poverty rates are 10% higher than the national average, African-American households have double the poverty rate, and Asian-American incomes are halved.
Peter Buttigieg
South Bend was recently rated one of the “worst cities” to live in. The unemployment rates are higher than average, the property values are lower, and even the water quality is below average.
Gushing media reports about the gay millennial mayor, a Harvard grad and a Rhodes scholar, overlook South Bend’s poverty rate of 24.7% and that 45% of households are living near the poverty level.
South Bend has a little over 100,000 residents, but there were over 100 criminal shootings in 2017 in the failed city which hosts murderous gangs such as the Latin Kings and Gangster Disciples.
In January 2019, just as Buttigieg was prepping his presidential run, three shootings in one week killed two teens and left a woman paralyzed from the waist down. In one summer week, the casualties included a 12 and a 13-year-old. In March, 6 people were hurt in one shooting spree.
“It is a season for boldness and it is time to focus on the future,” Mayor Buttigieg declared in his presidential debut video. “Are you ready to walk away from the politics of the past?”
Buttigieg’s past is a poverty-stricken murder capital so it’s understandable that he would want to walk away from its blighted streets, wrecked industry and general misery to focus on his political future.
And he’s not alone.
Andrew Gillum
Andrew Gillum, the former Tallahassee mayor, coming off a humiliating defeat in the Florida gubernatorial race and still struggling with an ethics complaint tangled in an FBI investigation, also wants to throw his tattered hat into the 2020 ring.
Tallahassee’s murder rate tops bigger cities in Florida. And Leon County’s murder rate rose 83% in 2017.
“Tallahassee had the highest number of murders in history last year and we top the state for the highest crime rate,” his former chief of staff warned in his own campaign.
The poverty rate in Tallahassee is at 28.4%. That’s even worse than South Bend. One single zip code in Tallahassee has the highest concentration of poverty in Florida. 1 in 5 adults in Leon County have trouble reading. And even Florida State University had more violent crimes on campus than any other state school.
That’s another reason why the Florida city was also ranked as one of the worst places to live in America.
There’s no conceivable reason why running South Bend or Tallahassee would qualify you for higher office, lower office or even any office at all. But Cory Booker exploited his tenure running the worst city in New Jersey to represent the entire state in the United States Senate. Booker has also joined the dozens of candidates vying for the opportunity to be the Democrat nominee for the White House.
Cory Booker
Booker first became a national figure as Newark’s mayor. The charismatic politician got famous by promising to turn the troubled city around using a Twitter account and viral stunts that got him national headlines, but did nothing for the city he was running into the ground. And then, as Buttigieg is trying to do, he got out of there as soon as he could, using his new celebrity as a springboard to higher office.
Like Tallahassee and South Bend, Newark is one of the country’s murder capitals. And it’s been listed as the most...
