Politicians – Christopher Wink

During today’s interview with Ellen Kaplan, former issues director of Sam Katz’s 1999 Republican bid for mayor of Philadelphia and current staffer at the Committee of Seventy, she mentioned the success of Katz’s 1999 campaign director Robert S. Barnett.

I had heard the name, even having mentioned Barnett once before here, back in September when noting his take on the effect of President Bill Clinton on the 1999 mayoral battle between Katz and John Street.

Bob Barnett was one element of a bipartisan, but Democratic-leaning crew leading Katz’s 1999 campaign, which included veteran consultant Neil Oxman, policy director Linda Morrison, and issues director Ellen Kaplan, all Democrats, and Republican consultant Christopher Mottola, as reported by CityPaper.

Continue reading Bob Barnett: former Sam Katz campaign director

We have called for and expected the end of mainstream institutional racism in the United States since about the third day after it was exported to this country, maybe 400 years ago.

Back in 1999, when white Republican Sam Katz was challenging black Democrat John F. Street, Katz’s surging success in a city that had nearly as large a black population as white seemed to embolden that notion. Indeed, Katz seemed to make inroads in black communities that hadn’t voted more for a Republican than a Democratic mayoral candidate since 1972, when W. Thatcher Longstreth took on legendary Frank Rizzo, often derided as an outright bigot. Katz won the endorsement of John White Jr., a black former City Council member who lost to Street in the Democratic primary, as reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer.

When less than two months before the 1999 election, Martin O’Malley, a white Democrat, won over black voters in his party’s primary to beat out a field of mostly black candidates, the comparisons were sure to be made, as was done by the New York Times.

Continue reading Post-racial urban politics: hardly