Author: Christopher Wink

Bob Brady

The man, who has led the city’s Democratic Party since 1986 and been a U.S. Congressman since 1998, joined the 2007 mayoral race in January, as reported by the Daily News.

Copied from here WHYY’s Super Tuesday Blog.. this will soon be edited and personally written, apologies…

Let me introduce you to Philadelphia’s Democratic City Committee Chairman Bob Brady (pictured). Brady’s day job is honorable representative of the First Congressional District of Pennsylvania, a area that includes a lot of south, west, and southwest Philadelphia and parts of Delaware County just over the border.

As party chair, it is Brady’s job to gather the Democratic leaders of each of Philadelphia’s 69 wards1 and preside over them as they decide which candidate in a given election they will throw their collective weight behind.

Today this esteemed group of Philadelphians (which count City Council members, state representatives and other elected or high level political officials among themselves) met to figure out which of the two remaining candidates for the Democratic nomination for President would get their support in the form of “an official endorsement.”

Why is this important? Good question.

During a general election having the entire party apparatus behind a Democratic candidate is a great help in turning out the vote in Philadelphia where 8 out of every 10 voters are registered Democrats and traditionally vote for overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates (unlike in Southwestern PA where most people are registered Dems but have been known to vote Republican – the so called “Reagan Democrats”).

During a primary, especially such a high-profile one as this Presidential primary certainly is, most of Philadelphia’s registered Democrats have to choose between two or more Democrats. When faced with such a choice and given the huge amounts of information that they’ll get through the media and campaign advertisements, the backing of the ward leaders means a lot less.

In fact, in the last high-profile primary election – the Philadelphia mayor’s race – Congressman Brady had the backing of the ward leaders and got trounced by current mayor (and former ward leader) Michael Nutter.

It’s not even clear that either Obama or Clinton will come away with the backing of the entire Philadelphia Democratic City Committee. Several of the higher profile ward leaders have already publicly backed Obama while others have thrown their support to Clinton. Clinton also has the very public backing of Mayor Nutter and Governor Rendell.

So what of the “adults only” comment? In this story by WHYY’s Susan Phillips, Congressman Brady gave a preview of what to expect in the room with the 69 ward leaders:

It’s a tough meeting. It’s Philadelphia and politics is for adults. Only adults need apply.

To be fair, if you listen to the story you realize that Brady was saying this with a trace of his characteristic wit and charm and it’s more a statement about the actual folks in the room and how heated such meetings can get than a statement about politics in Philly.

But the question is: how long will it be before some of the younger generation start to get included in these meetings? As a young voter, would you even be interested in seeing what happens when 69 men and women, many of them well into their 50s and 60s, get together in a formerly-smoke-filled room to hash out decisions like this?

1For voting and election purposes Philadelphia is divided up into 69 wards. Each ward is further divided into several much smaller “divisions” that cover a 4-5 city blocks and have 600-800 voters each. When you register to vote, depending on your address, you will be assigned a Ward and Division. You can elect your division’s two leaders who are known as “committee people.” All of the committee people in the ward get together to elect the ward leader.

Al Schmidt: an element of change in the city's Republican Party?

The Philadelphia Republican City Committee has added a new gun, according to an article by CityPaper.

Al Schmidt has been named to the new position of deputy director, charged with voter registration. He had spent better than six years in Washington, D.C., serving the Government Accountability Office, but now he’s the right hand man of the party’s General Counsel Michael Meehan, and other party leaders like Chairman Vito Canuso and Executive Director Joe Duda, who also serves as a Philadelphia city commissioner.

Schmidt views his mission as a long-term endeavor because Republicans need to engage exciting and worthy candidates for office, like in 1992, when Ron Castille, Frank Rizzo and Sam Katz were all running for mayor. That was an exciting GOP primary.

Photo from Neolibertarian.net.

Philadelphia magazine: Can Michael Nutter be a reformer?

Can an established Democrat in a city that has seen nothing but Democratic rule for more than 50 years really be a reformer?

Back in January, Philadelphia magazine had a great profile of Philadelphia’s likely next Mayor, who is charged to answer that question. The story, written by Jason Fagone, and appropriately called “Michael Nutter’s Dilemma” ran with the tagline: Is this man too much of a reformer to be mayor? Or so hungry to be mayor that he can’t be a real reformer?

There is Nutter the media marvel, who was lauded as the smart, savvy, outside candidate:

The moral narrative fills the gap in Nutter’s bio by suggesting a set of character traits and instincts that would serve him well as CEO of the city. Even the way he’s running his campaign — declaring his candidacy four months before his nearest competitor, thereby subjecting himself to the city’s new limits on fund-raising — boosts his executive cred. “There was never any mystery or cloud,” Nutter told a group of his donors at the Ritz-Carlton, contrasting himself with Fattah, Brady, Evans and Knox, who hadn’t declared yet. “Is he going to run? Is he not going to run? It’s called decision-making… all of you are business people. … That’s what being a chief executive is all about.”

Continue reading Philadelphia magazine: Can Michael Nutter be a reformer?

Atlanta: give me your Republican mayors

I may be finding a trend.

At some point, two party systems went missing in our country’s great cities, and no one seems to care.

Scant a city is without some complaints of at least a lackluster Republican Party, yet I am finding a dearth of even academics or journalists who know where – or even when – they went in most cities.

Atlanta is a perfect example.

I had trouble finding book sources in Temple’s library and even Internet sources noting historical political party information of Atlanta mayors. Indeed, I couldn’t figure out when the last Republican was.

I first reached out to Dr. Gregory Hall, a professor of political science at the respected and historically black Morehouse College in Atlanta. He kindly passed my query out to his colleagues. The result was a whole lot of apologies, but no real answers.

Because of that common reaction that seems to nestle somewhere around ‘no one asked, so no one cared, so no one remembered,’ another common reaction I have gotten is those most knowledgeable working to find where a Republican may have been.

I got just such a reaction today, after moving away from academics.

Upon a recommendation from Dr. Hall and following my own path, I moved on to the newspapermen of Atlanta, a city of 486,000. I sent out emails to a handful of reporters from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the big paper in town.

Today, I received this from David Pendered, who was described as having “the longest institutional memory” by Jim Tharpe, Pendered’s fellow political writer at the Journal-Constitution, in an email from May 30.

Date: Wed 20 Jun 18:59:12 EDT 2007
here’s a thought, but it would be a stretch for your theory: atlanta had a wealthy mayor in the 1960s named ivan allen. he basically ensured the city stepped up to appropriately handle martin luther king jr’s funeral. and he had a habit of just writing personal checks to pay a bill for a city service he thought shouid be provided to residents, but the city didn’t have the money. that could be viewed as a patrician republican. but there’s no doubt he was, at the time, a democrat.

It seems that the top academics and journalists in one of the largest cities in the country have no idea when City Hall was last run by anyone other than a Democrat. Strange.

It may be that a two-party system in the urban America is more complex than I am thinking of it. What makes a Republican in a city when he has to cater to demographics unlike those of his national party. Business ties and a fiscal focus may seem a traditional conservative, but if a city’s population won’t elect Republicans, they naturally tend to viability, in this case becoming Dems, a natural case of survival.

Mark that for important paper topic.