Mayor has a story to tell: The Book of Nutter

The conference table in Michael Nutter's City Hall office is piled with reports that track his tenure as Philadelphia's mayor.

Nutter asks if a visitor has seen a listing of all the awards his administration has won in the last seven years. He retrieves from his desk the 16-page list of 152 awards from nearly as many organizations.

Keep it, Nutter says.

It's just one chapter in the Book of Nutter.

On Jan. 29, the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce heard a reading from that book.

Nutter's 39-minute sermon on the state of our city would have rung familiar to anyone who has perused the remarkable library of data-touting reports his staff has compiled in the last year.

The Book of Nutter - one chapter is a bound book called "Priorities & Accomplishments" - crafts the data into a big-picture narrative.

Is this designed to repel political attacks on Nutter's legacy?

He knows well the danger of being a lame-duck mayor with questionable popularity.

He took aim during his own 2007 run for mayor not at rival candidates but at then-Mayor John F. Street. Consider the first line of Nutter's first campaign television ad: "Only one candidate for mayor stood up to John Street when he was wrong - Michael Nutter."

Nutter now says the city's residents don't know the complete story of his time as mayor and can't get it from the occasional newspaper story, website post, or television report.

Is he trying to prevent this year's candidates for mayor from seizing his narrative?

"The brutally honest answer is, it's much less about that than it is about making sure that the public and the candidates have the facts," Nutter said. "Because there really is only one set of facts."

His staff combed through the data, selected those facts and packaged them into what could pass for campaign literature.

"I thought it important as we move into the year that people, the public first and maybe the candidates secondary or tertiary, have factual information that sets a standard, sets a bar, sets a benchmark from which and for which their statements, proposals, and ideas should be measured," Nutter explained, adding that he hopes to avoid a "fanciful debate" full of "all kinds of flourishes."

So far, no candidate - either declared or likely to - has gone after Nutter.

Still, attend a public event with Nutter and you can understand the defensive nature of the effort.

On the Sunday before November's election, the mayor was loudly booed when President Obama mentioned his name during a Temple University rally for Tom Wolf's gubernatorial campaign.

The White House press corps turned to Philadelphia reporters, asking if the hometown crowd was really booing Nutter.

The local reporters were not so surprised.

Anyone who has played in politics as long as Nutter has knows a winning effort requires offense as well as defense. The Book of Nutter could also read as a hefty resumé.

The mayor is 57. This is not his last job.

"It won't be," Nutter says, laughing. "It can't be. I can't afford it."

For all the data he has compiled, Nutter is not sure any of the facts will matter to his next employer.

"First, I don't know what I'm going to do," he said. "Second, I don't know if some of these will really be important for whatever I might do, because I don't know what that will be."

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@byChrisBrennan