Feature: The Problems of the Post-Racial Politician Operating in an Economic Downturn and Facing an Electorate Still Largely Segregated Along Lines of Class and Skin Color

Nutter isn’t in denial. He knows full well that stop-and-frisk, the budget cuts and the tax proposals aren’t helping him with African-Americans. But you get the sense from talking to him that there isn’t very much he’d do differently. He seems to think most of his problems — with blacks, Latinos and everyone else — come down to the crappy economy.

“In many of our communities, black folks had a cold,” Nutter says. “When the recession hit, many got pneumonia because things got that much worse. So our community, my community, has been hit very, very hard by this recession.”

It’s easy to dismiss this as so much excuse-making, as Nutter’s critics do. And ironically, to the extent he’s lost support in the white community, it’s not because his proposed cuts have been too harsh, but because they haven’t been harsh enough — he hasn’t used the economic downturn as an opportunity to win concessions from municipal unions and cut the size of city government even more. This criticism points to the clear political conundrum Nutter has faced and shows how fragile the very idea of post-racial politics is: Do what one part of your base thinks is right, and you’ll only alienate the other part.

LAST YEAR, when John Street was hinting that Michael Nutter wasn’t black enough, he was giving voice to an idea so old that it dates back at least to W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. But a lot of people I spoke to had no patience for the topic at all, particularly in the context of Nutter.

“What, is he supposed to mau-mau and act like he’s scaring white people?” asks attorney Carl Singley, former dean of Temple Law School. “What the hell does it mean? What does he need to do to satisfy the black quotient? Have his pants hanging down?”

Yet this is not the first time Nutter has had to fend off questions about his blackness. Usually the attacks are more subtle: a reference to the nasally tone of his voice, or to his home in Wynnefield a few blocks away from Lower Merion. He heard it as a Councilman, when he was talking ethics and smoking bans instead of gun control. He heard it when he ran for mayor against U.S. Rep. Chaka Fattah and State Rep. Dwight Evans. And he heard it again when he endorsed Clinton over Obama.

The Mayor’s friends are more willing than his enemies to talk about this uncomfortable subject on the record, if only to try and shoot it down. Oliver, for instance, has clearly spent a lot of time trying to figure out why a lot of African-Americans in the city don’t see the Mayor the way he does.

“For some black folks, just the fact that you didn’t have to dodge bullets means you were privileged,” Oliver says. “And you know, he is not the guy who grew up having to sell drugs to feed his family. He’s not the guy who had a reputation for being thuggish or rough around the edges or having a hard-knock life.”