Announcement about keeping job rather than doing the job

Midmorning Tuesday, the word around the newsroom was Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke was planning an announcement that afternoon. Good, I thought. There are several topics the city’s top leader should address.

Maybe his main topic would be gun-related crimes that have dominated news cycles.

Berke’s signature Violence Reduction Initiative, designed to attack gang and gun violence, isn’t working all that great. It seems as if there are communication breakdowns in our criminal justice system. Is that politics at work? Who knows.

Be that as it may be, the results are unacceptable.

Launching VRI was not the mistake; we’re all for every attempt to save lives and curb crime. The mistake seems to have been in the execution and lack of buy-in from all players.

That is a matter of leadership, so maybe Tuesday’s announcement was going to be about the next aggressive step toward fighting gang violence and gun play. Nope. OK, maybe this was going to be an announcement about the next phase of growing the city’s tourism business that has been nurtured over the last few decades.

So maybe Mr. Berke’s announcement was a way to enhance a robust tourism economy or even announce a new attraction to complement the breadth of what the Scenic City already has to offer. Maybe it’s even about the next big thing coming to Chattanooga, because there are real dollars coming to our town, and our town has to embrace its opportunity. Nope. Hmmmm, well, maybe he was going to take a few questions about the details of a scandal within his office — beyond a mere dismissal, “I’ve already discussed that.” Nope. Maybe, then, there was an outside chance the mayor with the Stanford education and the well-recognized family name would publicly discuss controversial, albeit secondary, topics. The thought process behind the bike lanes that are somewhere between kudzu and varicose veins in their unstoppable expansion or where the city leadership stands on the much-debated Medal of Honor museum in Coolidge Park would have been fine talking points. Again, nope. By now we all know Berke took to the podium to announce he wants to be mayor for another four years.

He’s running again. On the range of surprise, it falls between death and taxes and the sun rising in the east.

Berke hit the high notes of his first term, including an eye-popping drop in unemployment by almost 50 percent. If you think that was engineered by previous regimes that took the bullets developing and redeveloping Enterprise South and making the tough choices in the moment, well, OK.

But Berke gets to ride that wave because he is handling the wheel at the moment. That’s Politics 101 — embrace the success and wear the bad, even if a lot of it was sown by previous administrations.

It was very well choreographed, this announcement in which Berke formally announced he’d like to keep his job.

And that’s as it should be, because, sadly, modern-day politics is more show than substance.

It was a mix between propaganda and pandering, filled with sunshine and roses, as well as acknowledgment of issues with a scarcity of real ideas.

So we got an announcement from the mayor as to why he wants to remain the mayor.

We’re still waiting for a formal announcement either addressing the issues or instilling confidence in the populace in the moments of need for our city.

That’s the difference in wanting to stay the mayor and announcing you should remain the mayor.

Contact Jay Greeson at jgreeson@timesfreepress.com and 423-757-6343.