Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton Now In The Spotlight On A National Stage |

The Mayor of Phoenix Prepares to Take On Trump

Ronald Brownstein on December 1, 2016

Source: The Atlantic

Your MesaZona blogger made it a point last year to meet Greg Stanton catching him alone during a stand-up breakfast buffet before his engaging speech at the LISC Phoenix Annual Awards Breakfast held at the Phoenix Art Museum. In a brief close-encounter personal sphere there's a strong magnetic resonance that radiated later to the assembled crowd while he spoke standing tall at the podium.

Maybe he's not a born-performer, but he certainly is energized by his public role onstage advocating for what he feels and cares about whole-heartedly with a drive and ambition grounded in a few years of drama in public office in Phoenix where he's exercised his personal and political talents across state-wide, national and trans-national boundaries.

In this article from yesterday, Greg Stanton gets more attention he well deserves, although the headline used is cast as "taking on Trump", that's just a click-bait tactic for two players with ambitions - we will see how that plays out. . .

Atlantic Monthly Online reporter Ron Brownstein does provide some context and background mentioning some of the ploys used by many conservative Republicans in the Arizona State government, many of whom herald from here in Mesa [and go un-named] that have proved to be major embarrassments.

Phoenix encapsulates the precarious urban dynamic of 2016 . . . Big cities are economically ascendant, but politically isolated—and ready to fight to maintain economic growth and cultural diversity."

Politically, cities are reeling under a furious counter-revolt from mostly white voters outside of urban areas who feel eclipsed by the racially diverse, economically globalized, and largely post-industrial future America’s largest metros are forging.

These dynamics are unfolding starkly in Arizona....opportunities are blossoming: the Phoenix metro area now accounts for fully 70 percent of Arizona’s total economic output, according to calculations by Mark Muro of the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program from Moody’s Analytics data. Tucson, Arizona’s second largest city, adds about another 15 percent.
Yet while driving the state’s economy, these racially diverse urban centers have faced steady hostility from an Arizona state legislature dominated by Republicans representing preponderantly white and often older suburban and rural areas. (Whites comprise 77 percent of Arizona residents older than 55 but only 43 percent of those younger than 35, the widest “racial generation gap” in any state.)