With the power of Youtube, it’s interesting to look back at what political advertisements of the past looked like.
It should be no surprise that a stack of TV ads made it online from the failed 1987 Republican campaign of former Democratic Mayor and South Philly folk legend Frank Rizzo. Let’s give them a look.
Continue reading Frank Rizzo 1987 mayoral campaign TV advertisements
I promote ridiculous attempts at Internet fame.
Barack Obama was back in Pennsylvania defending comments he made while in San Francisco over the weekend.
In case you missed this nonsense, check out a nice review of all the talking heads from Sunday morning’s political talk shows below.
Hat tip to Josh Marshall of TPM for the video.
Outgoing State Senator Vince Fumo and his likely replacement John Dougherty, notorious (and occasionally in trouble) business manager for Local 98 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, are not known to be friends.
Fumo is retiring Nov. 30 after 30 years of service, due, at least in part, to his looming September trial on 139 different counts of corruption.
But, it seems that Dougherty may take over for the legendary South Philadelphia row-house Machiavelli and Mensa member. Dougherty is expected to win the Democratic primary on April 22, and, what, haven’t you learned yet that Republicans don’t matter in this city?
Talk his had of his two other Democratic rivals, Center City activist Anne Dicker and Main Line lawyer Larry Farnese, but little is made of the Republican challenger, Jack Moreley. Add the First State Senate district to the list of elections in which the primary serves as the election.
He got a nod in a Philadelphia Daily News article on the candidates’ varied views on Philadelphia approving plans for slot-casinos.
Photo edited from one courtesy of Hallwatch.org.
It came as little surprise when former Philadelphia Mayor and current Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell endorsed Sen. Hillary Clinton in her bid for the U.S. Presidency back in January.
But few may have guessed how much time and energy he would devote to her presidency. I can’t help but think how this effects politics in Philadelphia, particularly as Mayor Michael Nutter joins Rendell and Clinton’s competitor Sen. Barack Obama continues to roll up other city government endorsements in Philadelphia.
Whether this further split the city’s Democratic Party that already has lines along reform and machine, or simply assure some foothold for Philadelphia no matter which Democratic candidate gets the nomination when and if it comes to urban funding and legislation. The Clintons have been friends to Philadelphia before, largely though Rendell, would Obama be the same?
See an interesting interview of Rendell by Bill Maher on his Real Time program, during which Rendell speaks on his support for Clinton.
Photo courtesy of CBS News.
For the next month, at least, I am a student journalist.
I have been a proud staffer at The Temple News serving the community of Temple University in Philadelphia for four years. While I have reported for the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Philadelphia Business Journal and elsewhere, there are few places I’ve learned more than in Room 243, the newsroom of The Temple News, and otherwise in my functions as a student journalist.
There are so many complications to it all.
Particular to working at a big university in a big city, I am inevitably competing with professional journalists, without seeming reactionary or amateurish. Competing with the very people whom I hope will want to hire me. At a school like Temple a great deal of our coverage is high profile enough to merit attention from the faces that make Philadelphia the fourth largest media market in the country.
Because of the power of the United States, everyone is interested in our electoral process. Fortunately, someone finally created an easy-to-follow description of the process for viewers around the world.
In a story missed by Philadelphia media, Sen. Barack Obama is clashing with Philadelphia’s old style politics, as first reported by the Los Angeles Times.
Fourteen months into a campaign that has the feel of a movement, Sen. Barack Obama has collided with the gritty political traditions of Philadelphia, where ward bosses love their candidates, but also expect them to pay up.
The dispute centers on the dispensing of “street money,” a long-standing Philadelphia ritual in which candidates deliver cash to the city’s Democratic operatives in return for getting out the vote.
Continue reading Barack Obama clashes with Philly-style machine politics
An interview transcribed last week for yesterday’s edition of the Philadelphia Business Journal.
Name:
Joseph P. Campbell
Title: President and CEO
Company: Royal Bancshares of Pennsylvania Inc.
Education: Embry-Riddle Aeronautical Institute, associoate’s degree, 1966; University of Florida BA and BS in corporate finance, law and secondary education, 1970
Career History: Royal Bancshares general manager of real estate division in Chester County (1970-1981); Royal Bancshares board of directors (1982-1991); Royal Bancshares managing director (1991-1999)
1. The bank has been owned largely by the Tabas family since 1980, when the name changed from Bank of King of Prussia to Royal Bank. How has that affected its development?
It was the smaller of two banks owned by two brothers… we were looking for a vehicle to get into the banking industry and wanted something that, as I like to say, already had the cash register ringing. We walked in the door and applied our management style to it. It was positive from day one… We gave it a larger regional scope, in moving branches from King of Prussia to Philadelphia. We wanted to make it a larger bank… we took our business model, our biggest asset that we knew what the other side thinks. We are not bankers by training, we came into it another way. We’ve stayed with what we knew, real estate, and grew in new ways.
2. You started as a bus boy at Tabas family hotel in Downingtown 40 years ago and became president and CEO. How has that experience affected your view of business today?
Dan Tabas was really my mentor, and there’s no greater ladder to success than having a great mentor… We’ve always looked at our business on a family basis. Every shareholder meeting I go to, I say… your employees are your greatest asset. Everything in life is a people business. Success or failure can be tied to how you treat people in business. The teller downstairs has a more important job than I do. I can be out of the office on a Wednesday… and no one would know. If that teller was out, she’d be missed.
3. Why did the company decide to add Royal Asian Bank in 2004? What has it brought to the company?
Continue reading Q&A with Joseph P. Campbell, CEO of Royal Bancshares
Michael Smerconish has lots of opinions.
As posted here last week, Montgomery County, a suburban county just northwest of Philadelphia, now has more registered Democrats than Republicans for the first time since the 1970s.
He has an opinion about that.
Smerconish took issue with the argument that the suburbs going bluer has to do with Democratic Philadelphians moving and “taking their registrations with them.”
That was a partial explanation for some shifting patterns from the end of World War II until the 1970s, but not now.”
Instead, it has to with national politics, Smerconish wrote.
It’s not that the party isn’t conservative enough to win the suburbs; it is that the party is too conservative and has lost touch with a suburban constituency.
Fault for that lies in the party’s national image. Impressions of political parties are established nationally. People don’t usually join a political organization based on their sense of the county commissioners, the competence of the row officers, or the performance of the borough council. They choose the party whose platform, they believe, most closely resembles their general views. And those platforms flow from the federal level. They are personified by national players.
Of course, this is another vote in a debate that will have to find its place in my paper, which is growing, but needs to be finished in the next two to three weeks: how large a role do national politics play in local elections?
Photo from America’s Voice in Israel.
