The myth of rising stars

Oh, dear.  The beclowning continues by the mainstream media.  Seems like they would keep at least a few stringers in those distant benighted flyover country locations such as Atlanta.  Stringers who could keep them from writing laugh out loud lines such as 

Bottoms, 50, whose national profile rose when her response to unrest in her city over the summer was generally well received, is seen as a rising star in the Democratic Party.

And Atlanta is, technically, fly through country, the old southern tale being that to get to heaven you have to connect through Atlanta.

The Democratic Party and its doppelgänger, the mainstream media, is always looking to Atlanta City Mayors for "rising stars" even though they are mostly trailed by debris of corruption and incompetence.  They are only rising stars in the context of a shrinking bench of players.

From Atlanta Mayor Declines Role in Incoming Biden Administration by Jennifer Epstein.  Local Democrats were so eager for Mayor Bottoms to be considered for some federal cabinet position.  Excessively eager.  They were happy to go along with myth-making.  The reality is that Bottoms was a senior official in the prior mayor's administration; a former mayor under multiple FBI investigations for corruption as has been a city tradition for years.  

When she was elected mayor, there were questions about election integrity given an astonishingly thin win of some 750 votes.  Since then, she has not put her stamp on much of anything.  She has proposed no policies or legislation.  The City Council, an institution with its own issues, passes legislation and by a quirk of the city charter, unless it is explicitly vetoed by the Mayor, it becomes law.

In the very first week of two of BLM/Antifa riots, Bottoms worked in close coordination with the Governor of the State and that attracted favorable comment.  But then some of her officers manhandled some protestors and she threw them under the bus, suspending and/or firing them.  

The State police officers and the surrounding counties withdrew their officers.  Soon after an Atlanta Police Department officer shot and killed a man who attacked two police and then fled while firing one their tazers which he had wrestled away from them.  Bottoms immediately suspended both and then fired the officer who shot, long before any investigation was held.

The Atlanta Police Department, already understaffed, then began experiencing work-to-rule practices, retirements and resignation from officers going to law-and-order jurisdictions in the immediate vicinity which were willing to pay market salaries and not throw officers to the mob at the least prompting.  

City services are negligible and unreliable, crime (particularly violent crime) is rising rapidly, city schools (which have always been a drag on the city's reputation) are still closed.  Bottoms is mayor in title only.  She has been AWOL since long before the Biden administration began scouring of the bottom of barrel for people to fill administration roles.  Since those searches began, she has been seen by Atlantans only when she is doing some national morning new shows as she tried to position herself for a cabinet position.  

“Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms was honored to have been offered a role in the cabinet, which she respectfully declined,” senior adviser Rashad Taylor said in a statement on Saturday. “The mayor’s focus remains on the people of Atlanta and the great state of Georgia.”

Bottoms had been rumored to be under consideration to be secretary of Housing and Urban Development or to head the Small Business Administration, a cabinet-level post. A reporter for the New Yorker said Friday she’d been offered the less prestigious role of ambassador to the Bahamas. The transition denied that report on Friday, and Taylor did again Saturday.

Ambassador to the Bahamas?  Oh, dear.  I don't dispute that it is a role in which she would be unlikely to cause problems and might be within her capacity.  Possibly.  But certainly not HUD level of consequence - a role for which she has no competence.

I can see why she did not choose to join the administration if all they had to offer was Ambassador of Bahamas.  She is Mayor of a 500,000 person city and being offered to be Ambassador of  nation of 390,000.  I thinking the Biden administration has her measure but from her own self-interest, her only perspective, what was on offer was not near as good as what she already has.