As you may have seen on the main site, I went to the first campaign forum of the fall season last night at the Free Library. You can check out the video summary of the event here:
Admittedly, the only thing you learn from the video is that both candidates favor giving the mayor more control over the school district and that Election Day is November 6th. That last bit of information may be critical for a lot of people who are likely to forget that there's an election this year. As short as it is, however, it's very likely the only video coverage you'll see.
Before we get to a summary of what was actually said by the candidates last night, let's get a little "meta" and break down the coverage of the event.
I was fortunate enough to pull up in front of the Free Library at exactly 6:30pm, which meant that the "Two Hour Parking 8am-4pm" and the "No Stopping from 4pm-6:30pm" time was over, making parking free. As one of the first cars to arrive in the post "No Stopping" time, I was able to get a spot directly in front of the building.
I unloaded equipment and walked across the street where I greeted Larry Eichel of the Inquirer, a very smart reporter who seems just determined as I am to find something interesting about the "contest" part of this campaign. We joked a little about how difficult it would be for me to find a spot for my tripod and camera given the army of television crews that were undoubtedly already inside jockeying for a spot near the mult box. I told him that my goal for the evening would be to find the one point on which Nutter and Taubenberger disagree.
Turns out that my mock fears of a scrum around the mult-box were unfounded (or founded?) since I was able to set up my tripod and plug in right next to the box in the back of the auditorium. There wasn't a single television camera in site. After testing my equipment to make sure everything worked, I grabbed by camera and went back outside to see if I wanted to shoot exteriors.
When I got out there I saw Dave Davies who ask me if anything exciting was going on. Since exciting was hardly the word to describe the scene in the auditorium, I used the opportunity to turn the conversation to one of our other common interests - our woeful Philadelphia baseball squad. He made some reference to 1977 which would have completely escaped me (I was 2) if I hadn't heard the story about leaving Greg Luzinski in left field for the ninth inning of Game 3 of the NLCS.
At that point, I saw "that news van" from Channel 6 pull up so I hurried back inside to throw some elbows to protect my spot. As it turns out, Action News didn't send a reporter, nor did they seem to have any intention of getting good sound from the event. The cameraman shot the candidates walking on stage, a couple more shots from the back of the hall, some shots close to the stage, a few pans and close ups of the crowd and then got the heck out of there. He was in the room for all of 25 minutes.
Fox 29 also sent just a cameraman but at least he plugged into the system to get some good sound. I didn't get to see the Ten O'Clock News but a search of their website reveals nothing about last night's event. Unless Channel 6 did the story after sports and weather, they didn't have anything at 11.
Other than that, I saw 3 or 4 still photographers, apparently with the Evening Bulletin, Inky and Daily News.
The coverage in print, which includes an article in The Evening Bulletin, emphasized the cordial tone of the affair:
Daily News -
Democratic mayoral candidate Michael Nutter and Republican nominee Al Taubenberger engaged in another friendly wonk-fest last night at the Free Library's central branch.
While the candidates emphasized different points in their answers to questions from an audience of about 400, not a single disagreement between the two emerged from the exchange.
Davies, wiley veteran that he is, dug up perhaps the only dirt to be found last night - that the moderator of the event was a Nutter supporter:
One other measure of the lack of partisan edge to the forum: No public notice was taken of the fact that the moderator, William Sasso, the Free Library Foundation's board chairman, was an early supporter, fundraiser and contributor to Nutter.
Larry Eichel actually found a point of disagreement between the two candidates:
One area of disagreement did emerge: how to deal with the planned move to full-value reassessment of residential properties in the city.
Democrat Nutter said that he supported the shift, if it could be done in a revenue-neutral fashion and with safeguards to limit annual tax increases for homeowners, particularly seniors and people with low incomes.
But Republican Taubenberger opposed it, saying that the assessment of a home should be based on what the buyer paid for it - regardless of when it was purchased - rather than current value.
Eichel has a little bit of an advantage there since he's written extensively about full-value assessment and has therefore developed an immunity to the eye-glazing that affects the rest of us when this complex topic gets brought up.
[An aside: I'll leave it up to Brett Mandel at Philadelphia Forward to explain why Taubenberger's idea is just as unfair (if politically easier to sell) as the current situation:
Cap Assessment Increases or Freeze Assessments — Assessments must keep pace with changes in value or the system will become even more unfair. Rate reductions or tax deferments are better tools to help homeowners.
For example, if assessment increases are capped at 5% and two homes worth $100,000 today increase in value at different rates (one at 5% per year and one at 20% per year), after five years the owner of the first house will be paying taxes based on an assessment of 100% of potential sale value but the owner of the second will be paying taxes based on an assessment of only 51% of sale value.
Now I'll leave it up to you to decide whether you agree with that or not.]
Eichel also calls the event "full of smiles and chummy kidding" - a little different from the Local 98 fueled invectives hurled at Sam Katz in 2003.
The Bulletin did the yeoman's work of event stenographer, dutifully recording most of the issues that were brought up and the candidates' answers to those questions.
Hopefully we'll able to tease some more fundamental differences in policy out of the two candidates. My quick breakdown of the event, including what, in my opinion, was the real difference between the two candidates, will follow in the next post.
Comments (1)
If the only thing learned was the date of election day and the mayor should have control over the school-board then a real result is going to be > TROUBLE.
Football season is up and running and sadly the only folk who care about November 6 , is the media.
November 6 , voters will do what's sensible to them and to most of them what's sensible is not voting November 6. lol.
Posted by Jasper Zeigler Jr | September 7, 2007 10:54 AM