We invited Diana Lind, editor in chief for the Next American City, to weigh in about what role urban issues have in this year’s presidential race. The Next American City is a national quarterly magazine published here in Philadelphia.

By Diana Lind

Back in the spring, when Pennsylvania’s primary seemed poised to shift the balance in the battle for the Democratic nomination, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter called on the candidates to debate “urban issues,” implying that the problems facing cities are of national concern. Prodded to demonstrate how they would improve cities, the candidates updated their Web sites to include urban agendas that called for stronger federal involvement in cities, better education for urban populations and greener cities.

But Nutter never got his debate in March, and now, just about ten weeks from November, it looks unlikely that cities like Philadelphia will get much more media attention before the election.

This void in national conversation has left me scratching my head. If the Brookings Institution puts the total urban/suburban population at a whopping 80 percent of the American populace, why does the country still refuse to see itself as a metropolitan nation.

Perhaps our rural history, frontier mentality, and cowboy myths have too long romanticized sprawling landscapes. But aside from the chic lifestyles featured in recent sitcoms (Sex & The City, Friends, etc.), Americans still associate cities with divisive issues of class and race. Urbanites are seen as either wealthy, educated elitists or disenfranchised minorities — in other words, not “us.”

Some contend that candidates ignore urban areas because they consistently vote Democrat. In an essay on Politico.com , Joel Kotkin and Mark Schill say, “Today, America’s urban areas have evolved into a political monoculture that increasingly resembles the “solid South” that provided a base for Democrats from the late 19th century to the 1960s. Since 1972, the year of the Nixon landslide, the Democratic share has grown 20 percent or more in most of the largest urban counties.”

I would beg to differ. In the 2004 election, four of the ten largest cities — Houston, Phoenix, San Antonio, and Dallas — voted Republican, not by inconsiderable margins. This makes Kotkin and Schill’s claim that “this fall, Barack Obama, a resident of Chicago, can comfortably expect to triumph in virtually every major urban county, often by ratios of 2-to-1 or more,” seem entirely absurd and irresponsible.

Maybe the candidates don’t want to talk about cities because the conversation might be too embarrassing or depressing. After Hurricane Katrina, much of the country saw a part of New Orleans that rarely gets talked about in national media — the poor, the poorly educated, the jobless. Are cities ready for this kind of national exposure? What would America say if they heard about Philly’s unacceptable high school graduation rates? Or about its crime rates? Or its levels of poverty? Though we live these realities every day here in Philadelphia, we haven’t quite figured out a less depressing way to present these problems for the national stage. The War on Crime and the War on Drugs (which kill more Americans than the War on Terror) sound terrible. But maybe we just need to think about ways to spin this subject.

Here’s a sound bite to start with: America’s 100 largest metro areas consume only 12 percent of the country’s land area, represent 65 percent of the country’s population, 67 percent of our universities, 68 percent of our jobs, and generate 75 percent of the country’s GDP. Don’t we deserve a little respect?