April 28-May 4, 2005

city beat

Time Trials

the other side: Former CP staff writer Deborah Bolling didn't have much downtime before her new gig in the mayor's press office turned hectic. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

Fresh on the job, the mayor's new spokeswoman faces a tough assignment.

by Doron Taussig

If you're in charge of the mayor's public image, and it's only your second week on the job, there are certain things you don't want to hear. For instance, that a major national magazine tagged your boss one of the three lousiest mayors in the country. How do you spin that?

Sitting in her spacious new office last Friday afternoon, Mayor Street's acting communications director, Deborah Bolling, took stock of a tough week. A former City Paper staff writer, Bolling joined Street's press office in September and assumed the helm in March after the director and first deputy left the administration. With just a few months' experience, she became responsible for managing the reputation of a mayor struggling with a corruption probe. Then, along came Time, and Bolling was forced to dive into her first political crisis.

Raised in the Elmhurst section of Queens, N.Y., Bolling does not speak in the deliberate, sterile cadence that many press secretaries adopt. Rather, she pontificates aggressively, refers to the mayor as a "cat," and occasionally terminates phone calls by saying "holla," or "I'll holla," depending on who is expected to call whom. Nor does Bolling exhibit a subservient, mayor-first modesty: she doesn't take credit for the mayor's successes, but she has referred to herself, semi-ironically, as "the fabulous Deborah Bolling." Fabulous or not, Bolling is petite (which she rarely mentions) and black (which she brings up quite up a lot) — and she is viciously protective of Street.

Bolling has worked in television, movies, radio, and for daily and weekly newspapers, including the Inquirer (she's even produced videos for Flavor Flav). She is, in her own words, a "communications expert," though she never planned on working in media relations.

During her recent two-and-a-half-year gig with City Paper, Bolling wrote a story profiling former Communications Director Barbara Grant who, like Bolling, worked in media before press relations. While reporting, the author spent time tailing her subject; her story reveals an obvious respect but also a thinly veiled revulsion at Grant's job. The piece begins, "Every few minutes, without fail, Barbara Grant's phone rings," and a later section recites Grant's long daily schedule as if describing a car accident.

"I thought she had a horrible gig," Bolling admits. Nevertheless, Bolling was ready to leave City Paper when Grant offered her a job. She harbored visions of joining a three-woman "dream team" with Grant and deputy Luz Cardenas, so the subsequent departures of Grant and Cardenas, who started a private company called Cardenas, Grant and Negron Communications, took her by surprise. Still, she says she has never felt like she was taking over a sinking ship (Grant and Cardenas offer different reasons for leaving the office, but both say it was not because of the state of the mayoralty). Bolling takes the departures as an "odd compliment."

"They couldn't leave until they found someone who they felt could do the job in their absence. And I was that person."

The Street administration knew that the Time article was coming because Time had called for a comment, but they didn't know exactly what it would say. When Bolling first saw the story, she was surprised by the weaknesses she perceived in Time's methodology. The article, penned by a writer from Philadelphia, essentially argued that despite several successes in neighborhood development, the corruption probe had prematurely turned Street into a lame duck. Meanwhile, some of the "top-five" mayors were lauded for efforts to accomplish things that Mayor Street had already done.

"That was just straight-up silly," Bolling says. "In his second administration, he's doing as much or more as mayors have done in their first administrations. I mean he hasn't lost steam, he's not running out of gas."

Nevertheless, the article required a response — and a fast one.

On Sunday, April 17, the day the Time story started to break, a Street "crisis team," including Bolling, former Communications Director Dan Fee, Deputy Secretary of External Affairs Shawn Fordham, and Secretary of External Affairs George Burrell, among others, convened by phone. According to Fordham, it was decided that the mayor would not respond publicly until the next afternoon, once the press had been assembled. Burrell would be the lead spokesman, and Fee and Bolling would forward press calls to him. Fordham says it's not strange for someone other than the communications director to assume this task. "You can't expect a person who's only been here a couple of weeks to do that," he explains. "George is comfortable handling tough situations. ... I think she did an excellent job being a part of this."

The team planned to attack the Time story for failing to establish a consistent methodology in its mayoral rankings and generally defend the Mayor's record. Bolling and Fordham did not discuss any other specifics about the mayor's response, but, whether intentional or instinctive, two themes were evident: appealing to Philadelphia's natural parochialism and complaining about a glut of negative coverage, which could conceivably shame the press into some positive spin.

On Monday, the mayor held a press conference. "You bunch of piranhas," Bolling growled to the gaggle of reporters. "You smell blood?"

When the mayor took the stage, he painted Time as an outsider, declaring, "I don't think Time magazine is located in this city. They don't understand this city." Then he suggested, as Bolling had, that the press is disproportionately interested in negative stories — "I knew you'd be here, somehow" — and went on to recite his accomplishments.

The next day's local news was, from the mayor's perspective, pretty favorable. The Inquirer ran a front-page column by frequent critic Tom Ferrick defending the mayor. The Daily News ran an editorial titled, "Yo, Time Mag: Our Mayor Does Not Suck!" DN Columnist Elmer Smith and the Inky editorial page also leaped to Street's defense. The worst local press Street received may have come from City Paper Editor in Chief Duane Swierczynski, who argued that worst-mayor status "implies a level of achievement that, quite frankly, is beyond John Street." (Bolling, whose time at CP did not overlap with Swierczynski's, says that the column was "way off the mark.")

It's hard to say whether the Street team's response was a major influence on this coverage, but the result was that the Time story had been turned on its head. The local press reminded itself of Street's positives.

Back in her office, her phone ringing like Grant's once did, Bolling takes a shot at minimizing some of the mayor's other problems.

"Corruption? So what?" she says. "I hate to be so flip about it, but this is not the only city where it's happening, and it didn't begin under John Street."

The press dwells on the corruption because it's a negative story, which makes sense because, "I know bad news sells papers."

So why the defensive reaction to the Time article? Bolling insists that there was no master media strategy. She and her colleagues just got out there quickly and told it like it is. The reason the local press came to Street's defense is simple: Time didn't know what it was talking about.

"It was encouraging to see that [the local press] got it, because they're generally very critical," Bolling says. "It was kind of like, "I can talk about my mother, but you can't talk about my mother.'"