It is Election Night, and Mayor Nutter is happy. “It looks like we are going to win,” he tells me. “We are 50 percent of the 77 percent [reporting precincts].” Surrounding him are his campaign manager, Kevin Kinross, his director of communications, Desiree Peterkin-Bell, and his special assistant, Luke Butler. They are reviewing the election results, with mounting glee, and Nutter’s soon-to-be-delivered acceptance speech while the mayor’s wife, family, friends, and supporters socialize around them in a 12th-floor suite at the Warwick Hotel. Nutter’s 16-year-old daughter, Olivia, sits in an adjoining room studying for the next day’s AP history test on the Constitution (she deserves an A for the introduction she gives her father at his victory celebration later that evening). With Mayor Nutter’s victory a foregone conclusion, the mood is jovial and relaxed, the only uncertainty being when Republican challenger Karen Brown will concede so the mayor can head down to the mezzanine to give his speech. And then the real party will begin—for the guests, that is. As Nutter stated in that speech, “This is just the beginning. We have much more work to do.”

  Nutter with President Obama earlier this year before a town hall meeting on clean energy

The mayor is scheduled to be up at 5 am the next day for multiple appearances on local news shows, followed by a raft of radio interviews, and then he is off to the White House for the African American Policy in Action Leadership Conference, discussing topics dear to both President Obama’s agenda and his own. Chief among them is how to strengthen the economy through the American Jobs Act, job training, community development initiatives, strategies targeting poverty, providing access to capital for growing businesses, reforming the education system, and protecting civil rights.

Nutter’s administration formed a very strong partnership with the White House during his first term through almost weekly contact with the Obama administration, which frequently seeks City Hall’s support for the president’s initiatives. The president came to Philadelphia on Election Day; the mayor greeted Obama at Air Force One, where the President summed up their relationship as such: “He’s a great partner of ours.”

Matters of Principle 
Ethical is the first word that comes to mind when talking about Nutter with those who know him. Take Butler, his oh-so British and ever-present special assistant who brings to mind Ron Weasley from the Harry Potter series (seeing the two of them together cues the Odd Couple theme song). He joined the mayor’s campaign from England—where he had been working for a political consultancy firm—precisely because of the man’s ethics. “When I knew I was moving to Philly from London [for graduate school at Penn], I did some research and read about a guy called Michael Nutter who was running for mayor. People said that he was smart, that he was the ethics guy—and that he had no chance of winning! I met up with him when I got here and joined the campaign, which at that stage was about five people in a tiny room in the Wachovia Building.”

“In this day and age, when the public doesn’t trust its elected officials,” says David Cohen, Comcast executive vice president and chairman of the Board of Trustees for the University of Pennsylvania, “Mayor Nutter has proven that he’s a man of his word. When he ran four years ago, he had a simple but ambitious platform that included reducing crime, improving public education, and returning ethics and integrity to the government.” Indeed, framed on both the mayor’s wall and the back of his business card, you will find The Athenian Oath that the citizenry of ancient Athens had to recite:

“We will never bring disgrace on this our City by an act of dishonesty or cowardice. We will fight for the ideals and Sacred Things of the City both alone and with many. We will revere and obey the City’s laws, and will do our best to incite a like reverence and respect in those above us who are prone to annul them or set them at naught. We will strive increasingly to quicken the public’s sense of civic duty. Thus, in all these ways, we will transmit this City not only, not less, but greater and more beautiful than it was transmitted to us.”