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Chapter  The Politics of Recovery It is cumbersome to ask for help, especially [of] those who live in the suburbs . Together with Camden residents, we need to make the city the economic powerhouse it deserves to be. Remember your parents and/or grandparents and/or family members who worked for RCA and Campbell Soup or Camden’s shipyard. They made it and owed it to Camden City. It is not too late. We can save Camden. Yes, we want the middle-income people [to come] back to Camden. —Angel Fuentes, President, Camden City Council,  On a hot day in July , Bill Clinton and Al Gore’s eight-bus caravan arrived in Camden to mark the first stop in the candidates’ whirlwind tour marking their nominations for national office. As the local paper noted, the candidates could have used the occasion that day to speak about a number of issues: drugs, poverty, crime, and rebuilding American cities. Instead, Bill Clinton chose to highlight a state grant aimed at helping retain some of the four thousand workers laid off from the General Electric aerospace plant during the Bush presidency. Such ‘‘government in partnership with private industry’’ would prepare skilled workers for other occupations, Clinton said. It was an example of the ‘‘third way’’ approach between traditional liberal and conservative policies that ultimately marked his time in office.1 Clinton’s emphasis was in fact not entirely new. The previous Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, had also promoted public-private partnerships , especially an urban development action grant program aimed at leveraging private funds through public investments. Clinton’s major urban policy initiative, the creation of a limited number of empowerment zones around the country, was both a modification of a Republican idea and his own attempt to use tax incentives to attract private investment. Toward the end of his tenure, he extended his vision by traveling with a group of businessmen to a number of distressed post-industrial cities, including East St.  Chapter  Louis, Hartford, and Newark, to stress the new market opportunities such underserved communities offered for investors. The private sector, he said, was poised to do the work at which the public sector had failed. As Clinton asserted in East St. Louis, ‘‘Government’s not going to do it.’’2 When Al Gore returned to Camden as a presidential candidate eight years later, he neither addressed the city’s obvious problems as the third poorest in the nation, nor did he set foot beyond the new entertainment center, where the Democratic National Committee had brought Cher and a number of other luminaries to help boost party coffers on Gore’s behalf. Despite an early commitment to issues of sustainable development in his campaign, he touched on none of those issues in his few hours in Camden.3 He was no more engaged that night with the issues roiling the city than the Republicans had been only months before when they had gathered on the waterfront in huge numbers to kick off their national nominating convention in Philadelphia. Such was the level of indifference at the national level to the ongoing decline in the nation’s post-industrial areas at the millennium. That situation , however, did not eliminate policy formation for such areas, especially at the state level, where rising deficits requiring ever larger state subsidies were raising serious concerns. Both Republicans and Democrats in New Jersey’s statehouse struggled with urban deficits for most of a generation. Superficially, the two parties differed, with Republicans stressing fiscal discipline primarily through management reform and Democrats calling for new public expenditures as the means of stimulating new private investment . By the mid-s, as Camden’s situation in particular reached desperation , state officials acted. After a long and contentious process, the legislature finally approved a bipartisan $ million recovery package for Camden that appeared finally to address the city’s problems in a comprehensive manner. Approved in July , the effort was hailed in the press as a triumph and the best possible hope for the city and the region. Such were the times, however, that recovery was cast within the same constraints that characterized national discourse. The new legislation, although it addressed the effects of concentrated poverty, was crafted primarily to reduce the city’s deficit. Although the means to this end were contested by opposing political parties, each seeking its own advantage, the chief goals were generally agreed on. To assure Camden’s renewal, recovery proponents, like...

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