So Now What? Archive

Philly Election Reflection

Posted May 18, 2007 By Dave Thomer

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.

        

Nuts Over Nutter

Posted May 10, 2007 By Dave Thomer

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.

        

More Than The Extra Mile

Posted May 2, 2007 By Pattie Gillett

For the past several months, I’ve been trying to be more consistent about the whole physical activity thing. Although I like to tell myself that it’s primarily about setting a good example for Alex and being proactive about my health and disease prevention, I do admit that it’s, at least to some degree, about how my jeans fit. I may not get my blood pressure taken everyday but I do look in a full-length mirror fairly often.

First, I was all about walking. It’s relatively easy to do, low-impact, and hey, I mastered the basics of it shortly before my first birthday. Over time, to build up my lung capacity, my endurance, and my ability to catch a five-year old making a bee-line towards the sugary cereals in the grocery store, I switched to running. I’m no IronWoman but I can do a 5K on the treadmill if I set my mind to it and I average about two and half miles per day, four to five days a week. Not setting any world records, but I’m pretty proud of it, given that I only started running this past winter.

The hardest part is staying motivated. Some days I simply feel too tired (or like today, too sick) to strap on the Nikes and get my butt in gear.

Recently, while thumbing through an issue of Wired magazine, I found an article about a man who will likely serve as my motivation for my many “tired” days to come. His name is Dean Karnazes, and he’s been called “the fittest man in the world”(Men’s Fitness), “America’s greatest runner” (Outside magazine), and “just plain crazy” by the coworker reading the story over my shoulder in my office lunchroom.

Karnazes is an ultramarathoner. What’s an ultramarathon? Well, think of it as a race for people who think of the traditional length of a marathon, 26.2 miles, as just a warm up. Ultramarathons can vary in length from 50 miles on a given day to several hundred miles over several days and can take place over rocky, unforgiving terrain and in extreme conditions. According to his web site, Karnazes has run through Death Valley in 120-degree heat, as a solo runner against teams in a 200-mile relay, and in a marathon to the South Pole. Most recently, he ran 50 marathons on 50 consecutive days – one in each of the 50 states.

Certainly impresive stuff. Especially when you consider that the guy averages only four hours of sleep per night, according to the Wired interview. But even with all that, what really inspires me about Karnazes is his work to motivate children to be more active, and to create more situations where these children can enjoy physical activities outdoors. His organization, Karno Kids, has raised money for The Conservation Fund, Girls on the Run, an organzation promotes running to middle-school aged girls in order to cultivate good self esteem, and Kids on Trails, a California-based charity that links physical activity with the exploration of important historical outdoor sites.

At a time where nearly one-quarter of school-aged children in this country are obese, Karnazes is a formidible spokesperson for active living and he’s putting his money where his mouth is in a lot of ways. You have to admire that. He certainly makes me want to spend less time on the sofa and more time seeing if I can literally go an extra mile.

        

For the Political and Sci Fi Geek

Posted April 26, 2007 By Dave Thomer

I’m not sure if I’m linking to this post at The Next Mayor blog more because there are new polling numbers, or because of the Highlander references.

Looks like Nutter is moving up. If that gets confirmed, it could throw a monkeywrench into my tactical voting calculations. Gonna be an interesting two weeks or so.

        

Still Falling into the Gap

Posted April 23, 2007 By Pattie Gillett

A quick follow-up to my earlier post which cited stats on the continuing wage gap between men and women, the Associated Press has an article citing a study which shows that the wage gap between equally qualified male and female college-educated workers is evident as early as one year after college and continues to widen over time.

The study, released by the American Association of University Women, found that the women earn 80% of what their male counterparts earn one year after college and 69% of what the men earn ten years after college. Ouch! Moreover, the salaries that women often receive do not reflect their academic acheivements.

Women have slightly higher grade point averages than men in every major, including science and math. But women who attend highly selective colleges earn the same as men who attend minimally selective colleges, according to the study.

Double ouch.

So, the message here is: work hard, study, go tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt to attend an elite school and, Jane, someday you might be able to do the same job as Dick and get paid 30% less.

I visited the organization’s site to check the data and found that they are sponsoring an event called Equal Pay Day for tomorrow, April 24. I really wish I had known about this earlier but it’s still worth looking through the activity guide and checking out the resources. Most are good advice/grassroots action items that can be done anytime. We certainly don’t need a special day to sharpen our salary negotiating skills or help promote financial literacy among the people in our lives, male or female.

I reiterate, this is a topic that’s just screaming for a presidential candidate to make a key part of their platform.

        

Lot of Campaign Left to Go

Posted April 22, 2007 By Dave Thomer

Gonna cheat tonight, since I’m still feeling some annoying congestion. Here’s a link to a MyDD discussion on the effects of the current primary structure. I have a few comments in the discussion thread to that post that I think are worthwhile.

        

Speaking of Substance

Posted April 10, 2007 By Dave Thomer

Turns out that while I was writing yesterday’s essay about substance in the presidential campaign, John Baer was publishing a commentary in the Daily News wondering why the two candidates he considers to have the most substantial policy experience – Michael Nutter and Dwight Evans – are currently trailing in the polls. The answers he cites are the kind of personality-based rationales that show that winning an election doesn’t necessarily entail support for the winner’s policy agenda.

        

Maybe the Tone Is the Substance

Posted April 9, 2007 By Dave Thomer

There’s been a recurring criticism against Barack Obama within the presidential primary discussions at MyDD and Daily Kos, and it seems to follow along the lines of a criticism floating through the overall landscape of the presidential primary. The criticism is that Obama is campaigning primarily on his personality and his let’s-work-together rhetoric, and is not offering either a bold vision of the future or bold plans for what he would do once in office. Neil Sinhababu articulates the criticism from his point of view as an Edwards supporter; Matt Stoller has a post up today arguing that Obama is losing what he calls “the bar fight primary.”

I am not going to say that there is nothing to this criticism. Reports out of a health care forum held recently suggest that Obama does not have nearly as much detail at his disposal on the issue right now as John Edwards or Hillary Clinton do. (Edwards has a seven-page PDF overview of his proposed plan on his website, which is far more than Obama has on his.) There is a segment of the electorate that prizes grasp of issues, and right now I would say Obama is not their candidate. I kinda hope he might be as the campaign goes on, but I can’t say that for sure. And I can understand why some other early adopters might look elsewhere and find what they’re looking for. What I would like to argue is that there is an important substantial point wrapped within Obama’s rhetoric, and it’s one that might make it worth waiting to see if those details arrive.

The major point that Obama is making in his rhetoric is that this has to be “your campaign.” He’s touting the huge number of people who contributed to his campaign in the first quarter and the number of house parties that his supporters organized at the end of March. If Obama can keep mobilizing people like this, I think it has the potential to be a substantive shift in and of itself, because it might help close the gaps between what a candidate says when he is campaigning and what he does once he has to govern.

Let me take a step outside the presidential campaign for a moment. In 2002, Ed Rendell ran for governor and managed to upset Bob Casey for the Democratic nomination on his way to a convincing general election victory. One of the centerpieces of his campaign was a proposal to allow slots gambling at horse racing tracks and a small number of additional facilities in order to finance a more equitable system of education funding in the state. Five years later we have the slots gambling but not the school funding overhaul. Rendell had a huge amount of trouble getting his proposals through the state legislature despite his overwhelming victory – in part because the voters that elected him also elected a Republican legislature, and in part because that bloc of issue-oriented voters I mentioned is not a majority bloc by any means. So there was no major public outcry when Rendell’s proposals did not go through. (And Pennsylvania’s voters are capable of raising an outcry – just look at what happened when the legislature put through a really ridiculous pay hike.) Right now I’m watching Philadelphia mayoral candidates put out policy proposals galore, and the big question is whether they’ll be able to make any of these things happen, in part because they require approval by City Council or – even more daunting – cooperation from the state and federal governments.

So the gap between campaign promise and execution is a key one. Neil writes:

I know perfectly well what Edwards would do — he’d pass an amazing health care plan, take major steps to reduce our dependence on oil, and make an unprecedented effort to fight global poverty. He’s made major policy commitments on all these issues.

But I don’t think Neil can actually know that Edwards would pass an amazing plan, or take major steps. He can probably know that Edwards would propose these things. Once proposed, they would face filibuster threats, lobbying efforts, and tinkering from congressional Democrats. So how do we know that Edwards would be able to get his proposals enacted after running through that obstacle course? You might say, Well, if Edwards gets elected, that must be a mandate for his legislative agenda. But that large group of voters who don’t care or even know about issues dilutes an elected official’s ability to claim such a mandate. Look at Rendell. Look at George W. Bush and Social Security privatization.

So Obama’s legislative record in the state and federal Senate comes back into play as a consideration. He’s built a reputation for being able to get people together and forge coalitions to enact legislation. I think those are useful job skills for a president to have. But Neil is right – legislative skills alone won’t be enough to deal with a high-visibility issue like health care. It would help a lot of if there were clear public pressure on legislators to support a particular plan – it might solidify Democratic support and peel off a few key Republicans. And I believe that Obama’s campaign approach is geared toward shifting our political culture so that such public pressure is easier to mobilize. The Portsmouth Herald wrote the following in its coverage of a health care forum that Obama held recently:

All the views and ideas expressed Tuesday in Portsmouth and at the Iowa meeting will be put on the Obama campaign’s Web site, www.barackobama.com, with an invitation for further public comment. In a few weeks, Obama said he and his policy group would synthesize all the comments and put a draft health care proposal up on the Web site for further comment.

What comes out of that will be announced as Obama campaign’s health care policy, but he said it will really be a template for what he wants to accomplish as president. He said he will remain open to new and better ideas.

Look at that procedure. If Obama really goes through that request-for-comments stage, and then puts out a proposal that takes the feedback seriously, he’ll have given ownership of that proposal to all the people who submitted comments. He’ll also give ownership to other people involved in the campaign, because it won’t just be Obama’s strategy. It’ll be their strategy. And all of a sudden early Obama’s lack of specifics becomes an advantage rather than a liability, because it brings people into the process and amplifies the prospects for change.
Is this a pie in the sky reading? It could be. But it would also track with the things I’ve read Obama say, and with his experience as a community organizer that he cites on the campaign trail. I go back to his first book, Dreams from My Father, because I believe it gives readers an honest glimpse at who Obama is, written long before he was a national figure. There’s a passage where Obama discusses a bus trip to the Chicago Housing Authority with some residents, where the residents were able to arrange some media exposure and get the CHA to listen to their concerns. It so vividly captured what I think of as the promise of democracy that I included it in my dissertation:

I changed as a result of that bus trip, in a fundamental way. It was the sort of change that’s important not because it alters your concrete circumstances in some way (wealth, security, fame) but because it hints at what might be possible and therefore spurs you on, beyond the immediate exhilaration, beyond any subsequent disappointments, to retrieve that thing that you once, ever so briefly, held in your hand. . . .

I began to see something wonderful happening. The parents began talking about ideas for future campaigns. New parents got involved. . . . It was as though Sadie’s small, honest step had broken into a reservoir of hope, allowing people in Altgeld to reclaim a power they had had all along.

I truly believe that Obama cares about unleashing that power. Even in The Audacity of Hope, which is far more obviously a campaign document, I see this commitment. He puts forward an idea of democracy that fits within the theoretical framework described as deliberative democracy – even in his essay on the role of faith in politics, he stresses the idea that as citizens, we owe it to one another to justify our desired political results to one another using reasons that are publicly available. If Obama is really successful at implementing that vision of civic discourse, his campaign will most certainly have a powerful substance at its core.

        

I Gotta Vote for These Guys

Posted April 8, 2007 By Dave Thomer

I find it interesting that fairly important people in Philadelphia politics find it worthwhile to engage in discussion over at Young Philly Politics. I’ve been looking at one thread that’s gotten pretty heated, that focuses on a Daily News report that “outsider” candidate Tom Knox was approached by some top figures in the Democratic Party back in 1999. A Knox spokesperson and a city councilman are just two of the folks in the back-and-forth. It’s kind of funny – a lot of blog communities complain when elected officials just do “drive-by” posts and don’t engage in the comments. So I guess it’s progress when some officials get into a flame war. I can’t help but be a little discouraged.

There’s a recurring theme in the YPP discussion about Knox buying support thanks to the campaign finance loopholes. But I think it also says something about the way the voters feel right now that decades of political service are not seen as an asset. I really hope that one way or the other this serves as a wake up call to the Philadelphia Democratic Party. But we shall see.

        

Corrected Info on Fattah

Posted March 30, 2007 By Dave Thomer

Please note an update to Wednesday night’s post on the Philadelphia mayoral election aand Chaka Fattah’s decision not to release his tax returns. Thursday’s Inquirer reports that there is, in fact, a confidentiality agreement that allows NBC10 to terminate Renee Chenault-Fattah’s contract if there is a breach of confidentiality. The Inquirer says that Chenault-Fattah provided a copy of the contract to the newspaper. On Wednesday the Daily News had reported that NBC10 refused to confirm the existence of such a clause, which led me to make my original posting. At the moment I can’t spot anything wrong with the Daily News’s reporting, and I’m a little uncomfortable at how a news outlet like NBC10 winds up having such influence over a story. But that’s the pitfall that comes with this situation.

Please note a further update to this story: NBC10 has waived the confidentiality requirement, and Chenault-Fattah says she still won’t let Fattah release the tax return information.

I’m starting to think that Chenault-Fattah is the one who comes off looking the worst in all of this. And I’m just cynical enough to briefly wonder if that’s the idea.

It also occurs to me that with Fattah in Congress, where he votes on defense appropriations and telecommunications policy, there’s probably more of a conflict of interest potential with GE (the parent company of NBC10) than there would be if Fattah were to win the mayoral race. What a world.