Al Schmidt never had a chance

Not even the combined weight of Philly’s media establishment could save him: The Republican candidate for controller only collected 28 percent of the vote.

Schmidt carried the hopes and dreams of a lot of folks who would like to see a genuine opposition party rise up in Philadelphia in order to give the fat, lazy and complacent Democrats a little bit of a spark to try to run City Hall honestly and effectively.

After last night, there’s two options:

• Treat Schmidt like Barry Goldwater: Not as a devastating loss for his party and movement, but as a necessary first (painful) step to rebuilding the Philly GOP to provide the competition.

• Look elsewhere.

I’m not always sympathetic to Republican candidates, but Schmidt deserved better support than he got. His head might be hanging low this morning, but hopefully he and his pals see the first option as a real opportunity, instead of deciding to let the city’s hidebound GOP establishment go back to collecting patronage crumbs.

SEPTA Fail

Probably light political blogging here today, folks. Trying to stay abreast of developments in the SEPTA strike for PW’s main website.

The Philadelphia media establishment really wishes the GOP would get its act together

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?

My final thoughts on the Second Amendment … for now

They’re in this week’s column for Scripps Howard:

Given that the Supreme Court ruled last year to strike down the D.C. gun ban, it’s probable the Chicago case will end with a similar result. Perhaps that’s the proper way to interpret the Second Amendment. But let’s engage in a little Constitutional heresy here and state the obvious: The Second Amendment is not always and everywhere a good thing.

In Kansas, where I grew up, it’s not so bad: Guns are used mostly for hunting and to provide owners with some peace of mind that they can defend their families from (rare) threats. This is unsurprising. The Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution for an agrarian culture where – despite the occasional fatal duel – firearms were an essential tool for survival in a still-wild and dangerous land.

In Philadelphia, where I live now, guns have a more malign use: To kill people. Lots of them. Gun violence – enabled by a firearms industry that is in turn protected and enabled by the Second Amendment – plagues this and other big cities. If society benefits from the crossfire that turns some neighborhoods into a war zone, it is not readily apparent. And one wonders if the Founding Fathers envisioned such scenarios when they consecrated the right to bear arms. They were just men, after all, fallible like everybody else.

This is not a call to repeal the Second Amendment: That political battle might well rip this nation apart. But maybe we should acknowledge that not all freedoms are unmitigated goods, that they sometimes create a cost and a burden to society. Striking down Chicago’s gun restrictions might be good and proper law – but it might not be all that great for Chicago.

A protest against the new arts tax

Or: How I spent my lunch break…

Harrisburg to Philly: Do Not Drop Dead

And thank goodness for that.

Is Mayor Nutter bluffing on the budget?

Over at The Clog, Isaiah Thompson writes that Mayor Nutter won’t really shut down the city and lay off all those cops and firefighters if Harrisburg doesn’t come through on the city’s budget package. It’s a bluff, and everybody knows it:

But there are two problems with the mass bluff – if, of course, that’s what it is.

For one thing, not everyone gets it. And the police officers and librarians and such watching this drama unfold probably aren’t making popcorn for the show: I imagine they’re scared.

For another, it paints the situation as a false either/or situation: either Harrisburg passes our plan or its fiscal doomsday.

There’s a third problem for Nutter, actually, and it’s a huge one for him. What if Harrisburg calls the bluff? After all, it’s getting pretty late in the day for legislators to sign off on the budget package. If they don’t meet Nutter’s deadline, two things can happen:

• Nutter goes ahead with the shutdown and the layoffs, potentially burning himself into the pages of Philly history as the most-unpopular mayor ever. And that would be saying something wouldn’t it?

• Nutter admits he was bluffing, keeps the libraries open and the cops on the job — and immediately loses all credibility forever.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Nutter has put his entire mayorality on the line here. He’s in the corner. The only way he succeeds and lives to fight another day — even with some diminished support — is if Harrisburg approves the city’s budget package, oh, yesterday.

UPDATE: Well, if it’s a bluff, maybe it worked.

Rallies for health insurance reform

From Young Philly Politics:

We’ve beaten back right wing opposition in the last few weeks and emerged with more support for real reform. Now it is time for the final push. Take part in one of the 13 Let’s Get It Done events all over Pennsylvania. Tell your Representatives and Senators that it is time for action. They must go back to Washington and move health care reform forward. And tell your friends about the Health Insurance Reform campaign and these events by clicking here.

In the Delaware Valley you can join us at one of two events:

Thursday, September 3, 12:00 noon / 1900 Market Street/ Philadelphia, PA

Public Health Insurance Option or Insurance Companies: Which Side Are You On? Rally at Blue Cross and then march to Senator Bob Casey’s office in support of the public option in the Kennedy HELP Committee bill.
RSVP here

Saturday, September 5, 10:30 am / Lions Park / Bristol, PA / 10:30 am

Rally for Health Insurance Reform with Representative Patrick Murphy

After these events, we want to ramp up phone banking from Philadelphia into other parts of the state where we have few shaky Democrats. You can phone bank at home. Just get in touch with me at MarcStier@hcanpa.org and I’ll send you a list and talking points. Or come to one of the phone bank events we will start having next week. Details soon.
RSVP here

Well done, Mortimer Dawson of Mt. Airy

After my column about Philly racism in last week’s PW, I received a little bit of mail. It was almost all A) overtly racist and B) barely grammatical. It’s the kind of stuff that makes you giggle to read it, a little self-satisfied at your superiority over the cretins.

Which is why I have to congratulate Mortimer Dawson, whose letter to the editor in this week’s PW puts me in my place pretty smartly, without slurs or vile accusations. It’s worth reprinting here in full:

Let me get this straight. Joel Mathis moved to Philadelphia, not for a job, not to be close to family, not to experience life in the big city, but because he wanted his son to grow up around black people? And once he gets here, he’s surprised to learn white and black Philadelphians don’t always get along? Had he heard of us before moving?

Joel, it’s a big town with plenty of rotten apples. Before despairing too much, stop wringing your hands, take a walk up to the Toleration statue in Valley Green, and spend some time reflecting on this amazing place you’re now fortunate to call home. Lots of thoughtful Philadelphians, much wiser than silly little you, have been working on these problems a long time.

And Joel: not all of Philadelphia’s racists are white, and not all of its victims of race are black. Your examples reveal more about you than about us.

You’ve been here a little more than a year. Well, Joel, one thing Philadelphians of all races do agree on: we don’t like getting pissed on by outsiders.

Welcome to the big city, bozo.

MORTIMER DAWSON
Mt. Airy

He nails me pretty good, doesn’t he? And I’d normally object to the “bozo” reference at the end, except that I think he earned it. Mortimer, if you’re out there, I’d sincerely like to buy you a drink sometime soon.

Why Philly needs gay marriage

I’ve been surprised, since moving to Philly, that a lot of the pro-gay-marriage activism in this city has been focused almost entirely on California and Proposition 8. Maybe I’m missing stuff – I don’t hob-nob with Philly’s gay activists – but that’s kind of weird to me. Philly’s relatively gay-friendly, from what I can tell, but there aren’t marriage rights here. So why no fuss?

I thought about this again last night, reading a piece in National Journal about a gay couple from Ohio. One of the partners got sick while on a trip to Philly, and it got complicated.

Having just been told, at 3 a.m., that his partner of three decades might die within hours, Mike Brittenback was told something else: Before rushing to Bill’s side, he needed to collect and bring with him documents proving his medical power of attorney. This indignity, unheard-of in the world of heterosexual marriage, is a commonplace of American gay life.

Frantic, Mike tore through the house but could not find the papers. He would need to retrieve them from a safe-deposit box. Which was at a bank. Which did not open until 9 a.m.

Somehow Mike made it through the next six hours, “crying and frantic and all kinds of awful things running through my mind,” fetched the documents, and got on the road. By some higher mercy, those lost hours did not cost Bill his life. When Mike arrived in Philadelphia on Saturday afternoon, Bill was still alive, though in grave danger.

Mike had packed clothes for a week.

And that’s what the fight for marriage is about: Not simply the right to love each other — no law can force or prohibit that — but the right to care for each other.

My relatively open-minded conservative friends say they don’t have a problem with gay couples loving and caring for each other. They just don’t want to give up “marriage” as being exclusively a straight institution. But that’s a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too conflict I can’t reconcile. Sure, some states allow gay couples the legal right to care for each other through civil unions. But a lot of states don’t go that far. And so gay couples are forced to deal with indignities and obstacles that heterosexual couples don’t experience — and would never stand for, frankly.

So Philly needs gay marriage. Pennsylvania needs gay marriage. Loving, committed couples need the right to care for each other. It’s that simple.