Bill Clinton’s White House staff liked to quip that he came into the presidency as a governor, but left as “America’s Mayor.” Mr. Clinton, like the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate in 2000, Al Gore, wanted to bask in the success of America’s reform mayors. In the 1990s, whether the issue was crime or welfare reform or reinventing policy, innovation had a city hall address. But no longer.

The reform mayors of the last decade emerged from the intellectual ferment of the early 1990s when, in the face of a crippling recession, party politics gave way to talk of a “new paradigm” and intense nonpartisan efforts at problem solving. But the economic downturn of 2001-03 produced very little in the way of serious discussion, let alone innovation. The difference between the response to the recessions can be seen in the books that inspired the two era’s political leaders. In the early 1990s it was David Osborne’s “Reinventing Government,” a virtual manual for restructuring lumbering bureaucracies. In recent years the big book has been Richard Florida’s “The Rise of the Creative Class,” a faddish attempt to wish away the practical problems of cities by importing artists and bohemians. If that model worked San Francisco’s economy wouldn’t have hollowed out over the last 20 years.

The early 1990s threw up energetic reformers like Stephen Goldsmith in Indianapolis, John Norquist in Milwaukee, and Rudolph Giuliani in New York. I was reminded of the fact that they have no successors when I recently attended a symposium on “Innovative Mayors” held at the New School University in Manhattan. The three mayors chosen as national models to emulate were Kay Barnes of Kansas City, Thomas Murphy of Pittsburgh, and Gavin Newsom of San Francisco. And that’s the problem. Ms. Barnes’s claim to fame is the supposed revival of her downtown. But visitors there are stunned by the sterile landscape of skyscrapers without ground-level shopping so that the streets are bereft of the public life that a downtown requires. In Pittsburgh, once “the steel city,” Mr. Murphy has done an outstanding job of cleaning up former brownfield sites along the Monongahela River created by abandoned mills. But as the steel mills left Pittsburgh, so did the young. Now the city with the second-oldest population in America, it is in state receivership, virtually bankrupt. Newsom’s San Francisco, which has never recovered from the dot.com bust, is a largely childless city which repels the middle class even more than it attracts the homeless. Effectively bereft of major businesses, it has turned into an adult Disneyland of trustafarians, nonprofit agencies, and the very wealthy who made their money elsewhere.

The mayors’ rhetoric made no mention of these problems. But what was even more worrisome was the rhetoric from Messrs. Murphy and Newsom. It’s as if the reforms of the 1990s had never occurred. The two of them competed in recycling the liberal cliches of the 1970s and ’80s, a time when big cities foundered. Mr. Murphy said that cities suffer because they were under a virtual “Nazi” siege from red-staters “uncomfortable with diversity.” He’s apparently unaware that as many immigrants now settle in the growing suburbs as the stagnant cities. The message of the Republican ascendancy, he cried, was that “it’s OK to be bigoted.” Not to be outdone, Mr. Newsom, who appears to have taken gesture lessons and looks suspiciously like a man auditioning to a play a mayor on a television show, held President Bush responsible for every long-standing evil afflicting his city while asserting that the solution to every problem was more federal money for social services. Homelessness, he insisted, was primarily a matter of housing. Sadly, in a reprise of past failures, both Messrs. Murphy and Newsom looked to government to replace the family, though Mr. Murphy also touted volunteerism.

In two hours of discussion, their city’s economies went virtually unmentioned except in regard to stadiums and arenas. Excessive taxes, unwieldy regulations, pension and Medicaid reforms, and the possibilities of privatization went unmentioned. The entire conversation could have taken place in 1990, or 1980, or 1970. What has happened is that the re-polarization of politics has allowed mayors to once again rail against Washington without questioning their own liberal priorities. In Philadelphia, Mayor John Street used an FBI probe of corrupt practices to shift the subject from his city’s declining economy to an alleged Republican plot to discredit a black mayor. In fact the federal investigation had been begun under the Clinton administration. In New York’s upcoming mayoral race, Fernando Ferrer, the likely Democratic challenger to Mayor Bloomberg, is already casting his campaign as a fight for “blue state values.” In 2001 Mr. Ferrer’s “blue state values” led him into an electoral alliance with New York’s leading racial demagogue, Al Sharpton.

The old liberal catechism that claimed that the cities were being punished by a callous America for their compassion has returned. As in the past, the damage that it inflicts is sure to follow. But this time even fewer people will be watching or paying attention.

Mr. Siegel is the author of the forthcoming “Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York and the Genius of American Life,” from Encounter Press.