Making the American Renaissance Real

Let us compare two men by their accomplishments and let the chips fall....
Which one do you believe is a true leader? With "leader" defined as: One who takes care of his people first and himself second. - RB

"What can become of an old Pennsylvania steel town?"
"The MAYOR of Braddock, Pennsylvania, John Fetterman, M.P.P. ’99, trudges around this decimated steel-mill town—with its vacant buildings and grimy air—in size 13 high-tops and gas-station-style work shirts, carrying the weight of a restless but resolute energy. He frowns a lot. Never does he crack that politician’s 'meet and greet' smile. Nor does he particularly go out of his way to solicit attention, although with a shaved head and six-foot-eight linebacker frame, he is hard to miss. 'My looks worked against me at first,' he says, 'because people thought I was a skinhead.'”

"Fetterman is an outlier in an outlying town. He is a white man with an Ivy League degree and some family money who spent his twenties in existential wanderings—following interests in social work, business, and public policy. But about seven years ago he chose to put down adult roots in this bombed-out historic town on the Monongahela River, eight miles from Pittsburgh. Home to Andrew Carnegie’s first steel mill, in 1875, and first free library, Braddock has lost 90 percent of its population since World War II—and many of its grand old buildings to lack of maintenance and landlord absenteeism."
Wrought from Ruins, Harvard Magazine, Nell Porter Brown, Sept-Oct 2010

"Mayor of Rust"
"With appearances this past year or so on 'The Colbert Report,' CBS News Sunday Morning, PBS and CNN, John Fetterman has become the face of Rust Belt renewal. He was dubbed America’s 'coolest mayor' by The Guardian and the Mayor of Hell by Rolling Stone. The Atlantic put him in its 'Brave New Thinkers' issue of 2009. In contrast to urban planners caught up in political wrangling, budget constraints and bureaucratic shambling, Fetterman embraces a do-it-yourself aesthetic and a tendency to put up his own money to move things along. He has turned a 13-block town into a sampling of urban renewal trends: land-banking (replacing vacant buildings with green space, as in Cleveland); urban agriculture (Detroit); championing the creative class to bring new energy to old places (an approach popularized by Richard Florida); “greening” the economy as a path out of poverty (as Majora Carter has worked to do in the South Bronx); embracing depopulation (like nearby Pittsburgh). Thrust into the national spotlight, Fetterman has become something of a folk hero, a Paul Bunyan of hipster urban revival, with his own Shepard Fairey block print — the Fetterman mien with the word “mayor” underneath. This, the poster suggests, is what a mayor should be."
Mayor of Rust, New York Times Magazine, Sue Halpernfeb, 11 Feb 2011.