THE OTHER ROCKY

Standing at the top of the imposing stone staircase leading up to the
entrance to City Hall on a blustery late August day, Salt Lake City
Mayor Rocky Anderson finishes his speech denouncing George W. Bush, a
man he calls "the most dangerous President the country's ever had," a
leader he believes has precipitated an "incredible moral crisis" for
America. Then, with no police escort, no men with guns protecting
him, he bounds down the steps and descends into the five- or
six-thousand-strong crowd. He's instantly mobbed. Hundreds of people,
gathered to protest the presence of Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and
Condoleezza Rice at the American Legion convention in the nearby Salt
Lake Palace, push toward him. Many appear desperate simply to catch a
glimpse of the thin, medium-height, silver-haired man in the black
suit, pressed white shirt and black-and-white-striped tie. They
strain forward to shake his hand, to pat his back, to hug him, to
talk with him or simply to throw words at him.

"You've got enormous balls!" a woman cries out. Without batting an
eye, Anderson, in his deep bass voice, retorts, "Word's got out."

With his chief of staff, Sam Guevara, running ahead and turning back
to snap digital photos, Anderson--who claimed to have spent more than
thirty hours hunched in front of his computer honing his
speech--joins the back end of the demonstration as the crowd proceeds
up State Street to the federal building. He detours briefly to argue
with some middle-aged women heckling him with bullhorns (at the
urgings of state Republican Party leaders, thousands of the state's
residents have been calling City Hall in recent days to protest
Anderson's planned participation in the demonstration) and then
continues walking. At the federal building, protest leaders deliver a
petition to the offices of Utah's senators, urging them to begin
impeachment proceedings against George W. Bush.

"You should run for President," people keep telling him, as they mill
around in front of the heavily guarded federal building. Mindful that
this is his last year in office, Anderson doesn't pooh-pooh the
sentiment or issue exaggerated disclaimers. Instead he answers,
carefully, that you need money to run, that you need a state machine
backing you--which, in a place as virulently conservative as Utah,
known until fairly recently as "the Mississippi of the West," is not
going to happen for Anderson--that you need to know when to shut up
and not speak your mind. Successful national politicians listen to
handlers and spin doctors, and that's something he won't do.

Clearly, the 55-year-old mayor, a lapsed Mormon with more than a hint
of the charismatic preacher about him, has given serious thought to
the possibility of trying to become President Ross "Rocky" Anderson.
But he's realized that despite the current unpopularity of Republican
machine politicians, given the contours of the contemporary electoral
system and primary process, a man such as himself can't win. "I'd be
torn to pieces," he replies to one of his supporters. "If I thought I
could win, I would. This country certainly needs leadership."

In the mid-1990s Rocky Anderson, a successful local attorney and a
longtime community activist who sat on the boards of several leading
nonprofit organizations in Salt Lake City, ran for an open
Congressional seat. To the dismay of Utah's conservative Democratic
Party machine, Anderson, who first made ripples in local politics
back in the 1970s, when he worked as an attorney with Planned
Parenthood to open up Utah's restrictive antiabortion and
anticontraception laws, won the primary. In the general election,
however, he lost. Shortly afterward, he decided to run for mayor of
Salt Lake City, and in 1999 he achieved an upset victory as a
doggedly populist, anti-machine candidate.

Over the past seven years, Anderson has transformed the city. While
outsiders who know little of the nuances of Utah politics might
assume this nerve center for the Church of Latter Day Saints to be a
bastion of conservatism, among those who track urban policy trends
the city has become synonymous with some of the most creative urban
government thinking in the country. In 2005 Anderson became a
founding member of the New Cities Project, a group linking
progressive mayors from around the country, and one that holds
meetings twice a year on the fringes of the US Conference of Mayors.

There is a sort of Camelot-in-the-Wasatch feel to Salt Lake City
these days. Many of the mayor's younger staffers, plucked out of
activism and into administration by the activist city government,
call to mind the Clean-for-Gene college kids who campaigned for
Eugene McCarthy in 1968: Dressed smartly, coiffed to a conservative
T, many are having their first experience inside the halls of power.

Like his city, the grandiose religious and civic architecture of
which points to ambitions for greatness lacking in most midsize urban
centers, Anderson thinks big. He has pushed to implement the Kyoto
Protocols locally, mandating that all city buildings use
energy-efficient light bulbs, replacing SUVs in the city fleet with
hybrid cars--his personal car is a Honda Civic that runs on
compressed natural gas--almost doubling the city's recycling capacity
in one year and starting a program to recapture and use for
electricity generation the methane produced at the city's water
treatment plant and landfill. "Global warming," he avers, "is clearly
the most urgent issue facing our planet--we have an enormous moral
obligation to change government policy and incorporate changes in our
business and our government and our individual lives. Kant's
categorical imperative has never been more applicable."

Largely because of his policies around global warming and the
reduction of carbon dioxide emissions locally, in 2005 Anderson was
honored with a World Leadership Award in the category of
environmental work. In November the International Council for Local
Environmental Initiatives brought Anderson to a summit at the
Sundance Resort, in Utah, to discuss with other mayors ways to reduce
urban usage of fossil fuels.

The Salt Lake City mayor has also changed the way city officials
interact with their constituents, making his administration one of
the most accessible in the country. Once a month, on a Saturday
morning, Anderson and his staff, dressed casually, will walk around
different neighborhoods, talking with locals and holding open mikes
where residents can air their concerns. On Wednesday evenings every
few weeks the mayor makes himself available for "one-on-ones" with
his constituents. "He has the ability, if there's a social boundary,
to break through it," says community liaison staffer Gwen
Springmeyer, a longtime probation officer who initially felt the
mayor was too out of kilter with the mainstream but who has since
become a diehard fan. During the 2002 Winter Olympics, despite the
concerns of security experts, the mayor opened up the third floor of
City Hall for parties, bringing together world-class athletes with
some of the poorest of Salt Lake City's residents. He also rented out
the Jewish Community Center for two more parties for locals. In
passing, friends mention that he's been known to invite homeless
people to sleep in his house.

Anderson has restructured the city's criminal justice system and,
suspicious of the tenets of the war on drugs, thrown the Just Say No
DARE program out of the city's schools. Instead of pushing for more
and more low-end offenders to be sent to jail or prison, he has built
one of the country's most innovative restorative justice programs,
for which he was nominated for a second World Leadership Award--in
December the judges in London announced that Stuttgart, Germany, had
edged Anderson's city for the prize. Mental health courts now channel
mentally ill criminals into mandatory treatment programs rather than
dumping them behind bars; a misdemeanor drug court similarly replaces
punishment with treatment; and the city now has one of the most
active victim-offender reconciliation programs in America. People
arrested for driving under the influence or soliciting prostitutes
are sent through a comprehensive course of counseling rather than
automatically being handed criminal records.

"I had the most unorthodox interview of my life," Sim Gill, Salt Lake
City prosecutor for the past six years, recalls. When Anderson
contacted him, Gill, originally from Chandragar, India, was a deputy
DA for Salt Lake County and had built a reputation for thinking
outside the box when it came to sensible punishments for criminal
defendants. "We sat and discussed the meaning of life for the next
hour, and ethics, and social responsibility. We connected on a
principle of community service; he's very passionate about wanting to
solve community problems. The question isn't whether we can fill up
our jail beds. The question is, are we filling them up with the right
kind of people? Jail should be a place we [only] put people who are a
risk to our community."

On other fronts, Anderson has gone out on a limb to defend gay rights
and has been an outspoken opponent of wholesale sweeps against
illegal immigrants. He has turned the city into one of America's top
relocation centers for refugees from war-torn spots of the world.

And last but not least, he has repeatedly taken on big developers,
from "sprawl mall" advocates to those in favor of unregulated
suburban growth in the large Salt Lake Valley region surrounding the
182,000-strong city itself.

"You do not expect this [these policies] to be coming out of this
municipality, out of this state," Gill says. "And therein lies the
hope of our political agency. That's what's wonderful about
democracy. It is the freedom of dialogue to take hold. The landscape
of democracy is always fertile to conversation, and has to be.
Anderson's raising issues that need to be talked about. People
forget: Democracy requires an ongoing dialogue."

In the corner of the mayor's office in a large cage is a green
parrot. (The bird's name is Cardoso, and while Anderson has managed
to teach him to do a chicken imitation, so far he's had no luck
getting the bird to talk.) On the wall opposite Anderson's desk is a
four-image montage of John Kennedy, painted by psychedelic art guru
Peter Max. In the outer conference room is another Max quartet, this
one a series of images of Anderson, whom the artist counts as a
friend. Other objects of note in the office: a photo of City Hall
with a gay pride flag hanging on the flagpole outside, a replica of
the Olympic rings, articles on Anderson's election victories, a
snapshot of the mayor with then-President Bill Clinton.

More than thirty years ago, as an undergraduate at the University of
Utah, Anderson studied political philosophy, religious philosophy and
ethics. He read books by Sartre and other existentialists, and, he
remembers, he had a "powerful epiphany. We can't escape
responsibility, there's no sitting out moral decisions, and whenever
we refuse to stand up against wrongdoing we're actually supporting
the status quo."

When I ask Hartley whether he thinks that it's Anderson's actions
instead that border on the treasonous, there's a long pause. Finally
he says, "It's one thing to be antiwar, but to do it in a way that
undermines respect for the President emboldens the enemy--it makes
them think, Why shouldn't they fight against what we're trying to
accomplish overseas? Anderson's language is incredibly inflammatory."

Countering Hartley, sculptor and architect Steven Goldsmith--who
first met Anderson in the 1970s--believes the mayor's combination of
intellectual rigor and straight talking has made him something of "a
folk hero of the American West."

When Anderson was elected mayor in 1999, Goldsmith was brought aboard
as the city's planning director, with the goal of rejuvenating the
downtown--in part by using money leveraged around the upcoming winter
Olympics--by expanding the light-rail system, encouraging the
creation of vibrant restaurant dining hubs, creating from scratch a
premier jazz festival and helping to bring cutting-edge cultural
events and speakers to town. The city even instituted a citywide book
club. "Once Rocky emerged," the architect recalled, "you couldn't
help but listen to this thinker. People attached themselves to Rocky's voice."

CONTINUED BELOW

Seventy-three-year-old Robert Archuleta, the mayor's now-retired
adviser on minority affairs and a longtime organizer among
lower-income and minority Utahans, once gave Anderson a statue of
Cervantes's Don Quixote, as well as a poem he'd written titled "Don
Quijote, el Alcalde?" (Don Quixote, the mayor?). "He kinda reminds me
of him. He's fearless," says Archuleta, a short man sitting in his
small Westside home on the poor side of town, wearing a white vest,
suspenders and gray trousers, his white hair a mass of curls. "When
he sees something that is wrong and needs to be fixed, he's just
fearless." Another senior employee quotes a Jack London poem, using
its description of man as a meteor as a metaphor for the mayor.

"It's a great lesson in social discourse," says Goldsmith of his
friend's tenure. "It's a great lesson to the kids of the city to
stand up and do what's right. He addresses the social conscience of
this community, and there's nobody else here to fill it."

The mayor's combination of pragmatic quality-of-life policies as well
as ambitious, even utopian, programs around environmental issues has
won him many enthusiastic fans. And his ability to improve Salt Lake
City's infrastructure and make local government far more responsive
has won him support even among people who do not necessarily
sympathize with his outspoken prognostications on national and
international politics. That's the formula that has allowed him to
win two mayoral races, despite vocal opposition from most of Utah's
political leadership.

With only a year left in office for Rocky Anderson, where does he go
from here? In a more rational system, Anderson, having more than
demonstrated his leadership during eight years in the mayor's office,
would be a strong candidate for national office--a viable
presidential contender, perhaps, and certainly Cabinet-level
material. He would, for example, make a strong Secretary of the
Interior. But despite the success of a new breed of Democratic
populists in the November midterms, generally America's political
system still gives a tremendous edge to machine-backed candidates.
Given that he lacks the backing of state and regional party
groups--or, to rephrase it, has the misfortune of being a strong
liberal in a state and region with conservative party machines--could
a man like Anderson, who plans to work on environmental and human
rights issues once he leaves City Hall, ever make his way to Washington today?

As we move beyond the midterm elections, gratifying though they were
for progressives, and into the next presidential election cycle,
that's a crucial question. Clearly, there are leaders of tremendous
moral and intellectual caliber out there--Anderson's example shows
this, as does the rise of many strong liberals in the incoming
Congress. But can the same system that catapulted Bush into the White
House raise those people to national prominence at an executive
level? Is today's system flexible enough to allow the emergence of
national leaders and Cabinet secretaries who are thinkers as well as
politicians, men and women of principle as well as ambition? Perhaps,
but Anderson and others like him face an uphill path. After all, we
have grown used to seeing candidates who appeal to the lowest common
denominators in our politics win.

Rocky Anderson will likely never attain national office; but perhaps
his most important legacy will be showing the country that voters, in
some places, do make lofty choices when presented with truly
inspiring candidates.