Bush’s fast-talking homelessness czar visits City Hall
If you were directing a movie about the man charged with ending homelessness in the U.S., the last person you would cast for the part could be the guy who actually has the job.
Philip F. Mangano is back at City Hall this morning, joining Mayor Francis Slay and U.S. Sen. Kit Bond to announce funding to aid veterans.
Technically, Mangano, who visited the Post-Dispatch yesterday, is executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness.
But homelessness czar seems a more fitting title for the fast-talking New Englander tapped by President George W. Bush to travel around the country pitching “results-oriented” and “evidence-based” programs.
If housing people depended on the sheer speed of Mangano’s speech, we’d all be living in four-bedroom mansions. Mangano’s hands are so expressive when he talks that it looks like he is directing flights at Lambert.
Mangano, always impeccably dressed in his frequent visits to St. Louis, sports a mane of white hair combed back, olive skin and bushy eyebrows.
In other words, he’s no Larry Rice.
Mangano’s philosophy involves using “plans fashioned around business principles” to tackle chronic homelessness.
It’s not unlike the Bush administration’s approach to education — No Child Left Behind — which brought benchmarks and “annual yearly progress” into the classroom.
Mangano frames homelessness not as a moral or social issue, but an economic one — basically, that it’s less expensive in the long run to get someone off the streets permanently than to constantly shuttle them between shelters, hospitals and jail cells.
He quotes new-age thinkers like Malcolm Gladwell and is not reluctant to challenge the social service orthodoxy.
“If our intention was job security for people who work in homelessness programs,” Mangano said of past efforts, “the results were perfect.”
Mangano claims that former White House chief of staff Andrew Card personally gave him the blessing to make ending homelessness a bi-partisan push — which would explain both Slay and Bond’s presence at City Hall today.
Even so, Mangano is not himself as politically flexible, suggesting that he would not stick around for a John McCain or Barack Obama administration — “I serve at the will of this president.”
When asked about the contrast of a well-coiffed Washington official offering ways to deal with the nation’s most destitute citizens, Mangano says he’s learned a lesson that plenty of homeless folks have probably found out the hard way.
“No matter how you dress,” Mangano said, “you get criticism.”
For more on Mangano’s visit — including audio in which he attempts the world record for mostwordssqueezed into a single minute –visit the Post-Dispatch’s editorial blog, The Platform.
Let’s see…
A Bush Administration official comes to town, money in hand, and you can’t stop making fun of him… his clothing, his hair, how he speaks.
And not a word about the program he was here for…
Sweet Jake, real sweet.