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If three makes a trend, then we’ve quickly arrived there:
•PhillyMag:
But the perennial weakness of the Philly GOP isn’t just a Republican problem. It’s a problem for Democrats and Independents, too — for anyone who cares about the city and wants it to be better. Politics is supposed to be adversarial. In America’s two-party system, the assumption is that both parties try to win. If that assumption breaks down — if one party unilaterally disarms, as it has in Philadelphia — strange things start to happen. You end up with a Jurassic power structure, populated by large, lazy creatures incapable of adapting to new climates, like diseased stegosauruses whaling at each other in the hot sun. You end up with a broken city. A broke city. And if things get bad enough, like they’ve gotten in Philadelphia in 2009, you end up rooting for some very strange heroes. Heroes who, in any other time, you’d probably walk away from, backward, slowly.
• Stu Bykofsky in the Daily News:
Under Democratic monopoly, Philly residents have: the highest city tax rate in the nation, craven Council members cashing in on DROP, an incompetent Board of Revision of Taxes, a 25 percent city poverty rate, a pinball pay-to-play system, a Department of Human Services that kills kids, a school district with a near-50-percent dropout rate and city workers who don’t pay their taxes.
As a wholly owned subsidiary of the over-promising and underperforming Democratic Party, Philadelphia is failing.
• Kevin Ferris in the Inquirer:
Rob Gleason, the state party chairman, says, “I expect a person who’s the leader of a party to conduct a vigorous operation, raise money, have staff and committee people, and win elections. . . . I just haven’t seen that in Philadelphia since I’ve been state chairman.”
That doesn’t hurt just Republicans, Gleason says.
“Not having a viable operation allows the Democrats to run wild . . . and not be accountable,” Gleason says. “So you wind up with a dysfunctional school system and city government, and the city becomes a giant stone dragging Pennsylvania down into the Delaware River.”
It’s kind of hard to argue these points: One-party dominance will always lead to calcification and corruption. That’s not good for the city.
Here’s the problem: The modern GOP — increasingly rural, always anti-safety net, occasionally race-baiting, more willing to tax non-profit theaters than smokeless tobacco — isn’t really a good fit for Philly. There was a Philadelphia Republican who was pretty decent at collecting votes: His name is Arlen Specter, and he was chased out of the party. And do I have to remind anybody how the GOP-controlled General Assembly let Philly twist in the budget wind for the entire summer?
There might be individual Republican candidates — like Al Schmidt, who is running for city controller — who might do a fine job. But Republican winners in Democratic big cities — think Michael Bloomberg in New York — tend to be considerably more liberal than the parties they represent. In Pennsylvania and elsewhere, there’s simply less room than ever for that kind of ideological diversity within the GOP.
So, yeah, theoretically it would be good if Democrats had a little competition to run the city. But today’s real-world Republican Party doesn’t really like Philly; how could it possibly compete for votes here?
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