The Drum Major Institute, a progressive, nonprofit think tank, is highlighting two Minnesota elected officials this week.

Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak appears on MayorTV, an initiative focused on pushing urban and city-level issues into the national political debate.  Although Rybak took the opportunity to hype his endorsement of Barack Obama in the Illinois senator’s presidential bid, he also made a  passionate case for Obama and his opponents in the race for the White House to look closely at urban issues.Are presidential candidates focusing too much on rural, homespun issues?  DMI’s Andrea Batista Schlesinger, in a Huffington Post blog entry promoting MayorTV, seems to think so:

Yet we are an urban nation. More than 80% of Americans live in cities. Urbanites drive 90% of our economy. In pandering to rural voters, presidential candidates ignore the bread and butter issues that most Americans deal with every day — housing, transportation, infrastructure, crime, education.

Have the presidential candidates lost touch with urban America? Are “urban issues” code for poor people and ethnic minorities, and thus to be avoided at all costs? Should the candidates have an urban agenda? What should it be?

DMI is also highlighting Minnesota’s Attorney General Lori Swanson with a mention on its Top 10 Public Policies of 2007.  The mention comes as a result of Swanson’s anti-predatory mortgage policies, of which DMI writes, approvingly, “A number of states, as well as the federal government, have legislation in the works that builds on the Minnesota model.” 

In August I covered a congressional hearing at which Swanson offered some cogent testimony on Minnesota’s new approach to predatory mortgage lending.