This Is Not News

There’s a great post-mortem discussion of the 8th District Council race over at Young Philly Politics. One of the blog’s founders is the son of one of the three candidates who challenged the incumbent; he came in a very close third and the incumbent was re-elected. The discussion thread also includes some thoughts about the at-large council races, where a group of would-be progressive reformers failed to take any of the nominations.

It’s funny, because the headline story of the election is that Philadelphians voted for reform by putting Michael Nutter and Tom Knox first and second in the mayoral election. But 14 out of 17 Council incumbents were re-elected. Two of the ousted three were only recently elected in a special election during which the party ward leaders selected the Democratic candidate, so they did not have as much of a chance to build an incumbency advantage. The third oustee was Juan Ramos, a first-term incumbent with an at-large seat. News reports suggested that Juan Ramos had annoyed some people in the party structure and been cut from their endorsement ballots. Plus Juan Ramos was competing for the Latino vote with another at-large candidate named Ben Ramos who had a better ballot position. Furthermore, the three new Council members all had support from significant parts of the party power structure – they could draw on support from the local electricians’ union, Chaka Fattah’s organization, or some combination thereof.

The takeaway from this, judging from the discussion, is that reformers trying to go it completely alone are likely to get squished. The alternatives seem to be working to create an alternate organizational structure that can compete with the existing power structures, or find ways to become part of that structure. The former option would seem to hold the most promise for reformers to maintain their independence – but it takes time and money that no one seems to have. The latter option isn’t exactly a short term fix either, and it opens you up to having to make compromises.

In my “history sure does rhyme” moments, I find myself thinking about Jane Addams. She tried twice to organize political opposition to the machine boss and got nowhere. Her neighbors just didn’t see the political structure as the same kind of problems that she did, so her organizing efforts failed. I’m not sure I see that changing much in the near future, so I’m more sympathetic to the work-from-within approach and all the compromises that go with it. It’ll be interesting to see to what extent the conversation about 2011 starts now, and what effect that has.

Boy, when I said it was gonna be an interesting two weeks, I wasn’t kidding, was I?

Michael Nutter has become the clear front-runner in the mayoral primary. You can read some of Chris Bowers’ thoughts on that over at MyDD; Chris’s ward is one of those endorsing Nutter, so you can get a sense of the logic. Other candidates have clearly set their sights on Nutter – today Pattie and I each got two separate pieces of direct mail from Tom Knox calling Nutter a “typical politician,” and I saw a TV ad with the same theme. I gotta laugh at that. The purer-than-thou campaign might have worked before Knox held a press conference with another member of City Council to support her bid for the Council presidency. Then again, if there is a Throw All the Bums Out mentality in the city, maybe the message will stick. I tend to doubt it.

I’m actually surprised at how ineffectual other candidates have been in trying to take down Nutter. I can certainly understand the concerns over the stop-and-frisk and state-of-emergency elements of his crime plan, and I’d expect city unions and neighborhood groups to be concerned about his tax-cutting enthusiasm. But those messages aren’t getting a huge amount of play, and when someone tries to raise them, they seem to whack themselves in the foot – witness Chaka Fattah’s comments in the last TV debate where he suggested Nutter needed to remind himself he was African-American, a comment many people (including myself, but not everyone) thought was a low blow.

Ah well. They’re dropping off the voting machines on Saturday. Then the fun really begins.