primary is tantamount to election. (There are no Republican city council members, and the last Republican mayor served in the 1960s.) During a crowded primary in 1999, O’Malley (who is white) ran against three well-known African American candidates. Rawlings-Blake persuaded her father that her fellow city councilman O’Malley would make a good mayor and deserved Pete Rawlings’ support. His influence in the city’s black community in turn aided O’Malley’s victory. O’Malley has been a political ally ever since, and allies in the state house are great assets for mayors of financially struggling big cities. Rawlings-Blake also learned much from her mother, adds University of Baltimore president and former Baltimore mayor Kurt Schmoke, who lived a block away when young Stephanie was growing up and knew her family well. Her father may have been head of the House Appropriations Committee, recalled Schmoke, but “her mother was all big smiles and big hugs—she’s a pediatrician!” The smiles and hugs may be there, but Nina Rawlings is a doctor with a steely interior, says Rawlings-Blake. “My mother fought like hell to get into medical school when there were few women and many fewer African American women in medicine,” she says. “She wanted to serve her community as a pediatrician. She certainly wasn’t into it for the money.” Rawlings-Blake attended public schools in Baltimore and graduated from the city’s all-girls Western High School before heading to Oberlin. “Oberlin gave me a better understanding of how different people were,” she says. “Our parents were proud of our history but they wanted us to value diversity and respect different races, cultures, and ethnicities. Oberlin really reinforced for me how it’s important not to judge a book by its cover. It was a very accepting place.” She may have picked up something about the practicalities of politics and government in the classroom of Paul Dawson, Oberlin professor of politics, who teaches a seminar on turning political thought into real-world action. “There’s always a tension in the class between kids with ideals who disparage political trade-offs,” Dawson says. “Many an ideological hunch won’t survive the crucible of electoral politics.” Rawlings-Blake didn’t wait long after Oberlin to enter the crucible. She returned home, attended law school at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, and became the youngest person ever elected to the city council in 1995, the year she got her law degree. Schmoke was mayor during Rawlings-Blake’s first term. She learned much from her senior colleagues there, he says. “She was a good listener, a student of city government, and good at constituent service.” In some ways, Rawlings-Blake is part of a new generation of black office holders, says John Bullock, a political science professor at Towson University, just outside Baltimore. The earlier wave of African American politicians came out of the civil rights movement, while the current crop are more likely to be technocrats. (Another mayor in that mold was Oberlin classmate Adrian Fenty, who served one term from 2007 to 2011, down the road in Washington, D.C.) “I got to see my father make a difference in our community,” says Rawlings-Blake. “He also spent a lot of time as I was growing up introducing me—with books or in person—to influential black leaders. I got to see what was possible for my future.” “They’ve gone to good colleges, law schools, or grad schools,” Bullock says. “They don’t ignore the realities of race and ethnicity, but that’s not their calling card.” When “Snowmageddon” arrived on top of the oath of office, Rawlings-Blake’s years of experience asserted themselves. She had as much preparation as anyone, says Clarke. “She knew the city government, had administrative experience as council president, understood how agencies operated, and knew who was who.” She went out into the city’s residential neighborhoods with the snow- plows. The TV cameras were there when she backed up a call for volunteers after the storms by showing up to shovel off the sidewalks around a city elementary school. “The snow was a challenge, but she handled it well,” says Schmoke. “She gave people confidence in her leadership.” During the snow cleanup, she met the people at the other end of the city government pyramid—the mechanics who kept the fleet on the road, the plow drivers, all the people who worked through the crisis. “I quickly saw what parts of government were working and what parts I needed to focus on,” she says. The big part of her new job, making decisions for the city, didn’t faze her at all. “I feel like it’s what I was born and trained to do.” The only thing she didn’t expect as she came into the top office was the spotlight’s glare. As a council member, she was part of a team but didn’t have to face the constant attention beamed at the mayor. “I just did not think about that part of the job at all,” she says, although she has grown accustomed to it since. Certainly by then, she knew what she was getting into and had a sense of what she wanted to accomplish. Perhaps her goals for Baltimore could be compressed down to a single number with many ramifications—the 10,000 new residents she wants to attract to the city (the census of 2013 saw a reversal of a six-decade population decline). To that end, she lauds Baltimore’s attraction for millennials; its relatively low housing costs (compared to Washington or New York); its top-quality museums, symphony, and theater scene; and its universities and renowned hospitals. Still, she knows the first thing people elsewhere in the country ask about her hometown and has an answer at the ready: “I don’t know any mid- size city that doesn’t have some form of The Wire, but that’s not all that Baltimore is.” (The gritty HBO show was set in Baltimore.) Like many other cities, Baltimore is two cities in one. There are vibrant, livable, mostly safe neighborhoods and a busy downtown. New develop- ment and conversion of old factories and warehouses extend for miles down the waterfront where freighters once docked. Then there are the not-so-nice areas that need attention. Every mayor in recent memory has faced that dichotomy, and Rawlings-Blake is no exception. “Your view of the city is out your window,” she says. Improving the view from those windows is not an impossible goal, but doing so means addressing the same problems facing other big, older cities: public safety, public education, job opportunities, and the revenue to pay for city services within a balanced budget. She keeps a sharp eye on the public purse, even when that creates some pain. Previous administrations failed to face up to the city’s structural deficit, which outside consultants she commissioned said would balloon to a cumulative $750 million in a decade. That led to a lot of what she delicately calls “difficult conversations” with a lot of people. “My commitment is not to my popularity but to the well-being of the city.” Politically, the toughest part was a massive shift in pension plans for the city’s police and fire departments that increased contributions from employees while moving to a defined contribution plan for new hires, an approach that led to some departures from the ranks. 22