To quote Ronald Reagan at the height of the Iran-Contra scandal, "mistakes were made." Unlike Reagan, however, I actually know what they were and will explain them.
After a good exchange of emails today with Saidel spokesman Dan Fee, who made clear a good number of things relating to Saidel's first policy paper, "The Saidel Plan to Reform Philadelphia's Government and Political System," I can admit that I overreached in my criticism of the paper and the column based on it in the Daily News.
Fee made an excellent point that the paper set out to be about government reform, not about budget reform and therefore my criticism of the paper for not addressing the issues of employee health and pension benefits was off the mark. I will therefore reserve such analysis (including feedback from budget experts and my own close reading of the 5-year plan) for when Saidel does release such a paper.
As I said during this exchange, I suppose that I got a little overanxious in expecting any candidate to talk about ALL of the issues in his first policy paper. After 18 months of stories about "will he or won't he run," I got excited to talk about actual issues.
As someone whose GPA was probably based a lot on my ability to argue my grades up by half a grade letter, I can appreciate Fee's advocacy on behalf of his candidacy. Saidel's ideas about government reform are sound and a good starting point as we move towards talking about tax reform, budget reform, planning, housing, transit, etc. However, I'm still not completely satisfied with the parts of the paper that deal with reforming the political system for the reasons I laid out in the original post. The new grade is a B+ for content and an A for putting himself out there and flouting the strategy that says, "don't say anything and they can't attack you." Now, let's hope the other candidates follow suit.
So it seems clear that as we move forward we can expect candidates to tell us "what" they want to do. The bigger question may ultimately be, given the dynamics of working with City Council, unions, the Party, the state and federal governments, community groups, the business community, developers and advocacy groups, "how" are they going to do it?