I have to give a little shout out to my second favorite Philly politics blog, Young Philly Politics, for this post and the comments it spawned. During the exchange that followed the post about Michael Nutter's call for a delay in the special election for Student City Council, YPP contributor, charlesdog12, expressed his discontent with all of the likely candidates who have lined up for the mayor's race so far. His criticism of Nutter, and to some degree the rest of them, was based a lot on their embeddedness within the political system of ward leaders and committee people and their indebtedness to that system and those power players.
I couldn't help but use this opportunity to pick the brain of someone who has clearly put a lot of thought into this race and its implications for the future of the city. With the appropriate credit to YPP, I'd like to reprint the exchange here:
So where does that leave us?
Submitted by Dan Pohlig on Tue, 09/19/2006 - 1:44pm.
Not to get this thread off in too much of a different direction, but I've read through and seen plenty of reasons why people shouldn't vote for any of the "likely" candidates but nothing about who should be the candidate. If you don't like Nutter or Evans or Knox or Fattah or Brady or Dougherty or Saidel or Brady or Williams, then who's left?
Whom would you support? No need to name names - unless you have some names - just a general idea of the kind of person is all I want to know.
Would it be an outsider who hasn't held office before? Just remember that no one that has been mayor since the reform era of the 1950s came out of "nowhere" - they've all held some kind of office prior to becoming mayor and opponents of people who do come from out of nowhere always use that against them - effectively.
Maybe if we take some time to paint the picture of what the next mayor should look like, then we can move on to figuring out who that person is going to be.
To which, he responded:
good question
Submitted by charlesdog12 on Tue, 09/19/2006 - 2:07pm.
I wish that I had an answer, but I don't. I mean what we need and what will happen are two different things. We need someone who has worked within the system but is still an outsider, which is extremely hard to find, especially in a Citywide race. We need someone to fight for what they believe in and who realizes that it's the people who are important, not the issues that you can fit into a 30 second sound bite.
My whole point was just that non (sic) of these guys gets me excited and that I wasn't a Nutter basher as much as I am a person who calls it like he sees it. I値l bash anyone, with only one condition. It has to be true.
(emphasis added by me)
So let me pose the question here, even as my colleague Wendy D. (not Wendy W., I know... it gets confusing for me too) is working on a video package about leadership for the 2006 gubernatorial race, what kind of leader are you looking for? Is that person to be found within the ranks of political party structure that exists in Philly now? Does that person have to come from those ranks or from government?
By the way, my response to charlesdog12's answer can be found here. Let's just say, I'm about as fed up with the way we choose leaders (re: Council members) as Tom Ferrick is, judging from his column in today's Inquirer.
Comments (7)
That's the problem. The current system in the city is set up so that you have to be an insider in order to get anything done. If anything, I think that electing a complete outsider could be a really bad idea, unless it's a really exceptional candidate.
Until some changed are made to the system, the corruption is going to stay and, since the only way to get things done is often corruption, whoever makes those changes could well have to use the corruption to do so. I think that's one reason the worst possible candidate always seems to get elected in Philadelphia: people who care are disgusted by every blemish on a candidate and will often go as far as to abstain from voting because they all have something questionable in their past. Meanwhile people who don't care, or stand to benefit from the corruption, will vote for and actively advocate the most corrupt candidates of the bunch. This, in turn, leads the average voter who doesn't care much about politics to be influenced by the hype and vote against their best interest.
Does this make sense? In short, I think that the best candidate for this particular election is one who has the influence to get things done, and has demonstrated that he or she can do just that. However, that candidate also has to have demonstrated a will to do the right thing in the cases that actually count.
Posted by Dave | September 20, 2006 1:34 PM
P.S. What's up with the "questionable content" filter? This is the second time I've had to figure out what it didn't like about a really long post -- as far as I could tell, it was complaining about the phrase "being owed political favors"
Posted by Dave | September 20, 2006 1:37 PM
I guess that wasn't it...
Posted by Dave | September 20, 2006 1:55 PM
Some people I would like to see run for mayor:
Brian O'Neill
John Taylor
Joan Krajewkis
Anna Verna
Posted by chris | September 20, 2006 4:12 PM
We're working on the questionable content filter. It was nailing me for the combination of letters "tee oh [space] pee el" as in "pay t* *lay." Who know with these internets?
Posted by Dan | September 20, 2006 5:10 PM
Yes, that's the error I got, too. I couldn't figure out what it meant, so I figured it was some sort of internal error message from the application.
Thanks, now I'll know what to look for.
Posted by Dave | September 20, 2006 9:20 PM
That's a question to which we may be able to come up with our answers, but the only people who can really answer it are folks who served as mayors themselves (and maybe David L. Cohen). We're trying to get some of them to talk to us about that very question.
Posted by Dan | September 25, 2006 7:59 AM