With Ed Rendell and Martin O'Malley just elected the governors of Maryland and Pennsylvania, Gavin Newsom of San Francisco and Antonio Villaraigosa the hot picks to be California's next governor, and Rudy Giuliani gearing up for a presidential run, urbanist Joel Kotkin looks at how Mayor became a hot title. Cities on a Hill gets a nice mention, and Fred Siegel offers his two cents: "Mixed records in the context of failure can look rather impressive."

Elsewhere, Kotkin looks at the ever-widening gap between America's rich and poor:

OVER THE LAST 20 years, the United States has regressed into what one economist calls a "plutonomy" — a society in which the largest economic gains flow to an ever smaller portion of the population. According to recent economic statistics, from 1999 to 2004, the inflation-adjusted income of the bottom 90% of all U.S. households grew by 2%, compared with a 57% jump for the richest 10%. Incomes rose by more than 87% for households annually making $1 million and more than doubled for those that take home about $20 million a year.

Most disturbingly, workers losing the most economic ground are not the uneducated and unskilled but those with high school, community college and even four-year degrees. Overall, the middle class, in relative if not absolute terms, has lost purchasing power, especially in big coastal cities where the highest earners and the super-rich have driven up prices for housing and the cost of living. Globalization and automation have not only hurt manufacturing workers but also mid-level managers, engineers and software programmers. Despite enormous media and stock market hype, for instance, the U.S. has lost more than 700,000 information industry jobs since early 2001.

Kotkin proposes what could be called a new New Deal — "A comprehensive program to rebuild the nation's highways and bridges, upgrade its ports, construct and expand its energy lifelines and enlarge its public transportation systems could generate hundreds of thousands of good-paying jobs."

The vast infrastructure approach hasn't been successful in Japan, though. Another answer would be an overhaul of our educational system. Instead of still more subsidies to colleges that increasingly function as institutions of advanced remedial learning, what's needed may be an overhaul of our failed primary and secondary public school system.

UPDATE: Joel Kotkin writes in:

"Much of Japan's infrastructure investment went to areas, like the countryside, that are losing people but had political power.

The U.S. needs to boost access to the heartland, some of which is now booming, as an outlet for its growing population. I do not think most Americans want to live stacked like containers in cities or suburbs along the coasts."