I have to applaud your post here “Dan”. I like the fact that you posted it with links to an article from the Inquirer, the definition of the word candidate from Dictionary.com, a link back to the Next mayor web site incase we forget where we were, the committee of seventy web site, which I guess was to give your post more of an authoritative feel and then ended the post with asking for help from Obi-Wan the great political mind of our time.
I am not saying I disagree with you here, but I must say you do not sound like you know what you are talking about. First you attack Fletman by saying she could have just looked in the dictionary, or rather dictionary.com (who can be bothered with actually opening up a real live book and turning pages), and find that the word “Candidate” means:
“ a person who seeks or is nominated for an office, prize, or honor.”
What you failed to mention is that the word according to Dictionary.com says that the word also seems to mean

” A student who has nearly completed the requirements for a degree.” OR
“One that seems likely to gain a certain position or come to a certain fate: young actors who are candidates for stardom; a memorandum that is a good candidate for the trash can.”
That is three separate, all be it related, definitions for one word yet you have decided that the “Common Usage” is the first definition but I guess that has nothing to do with the fact that it fits into your post. In fact I would bet if you did a search you would find that right now there are more PhD Candidates in the city of Philadelphia then potential candidates for the 2007 mayoral race. I would go one step further and say that on an average day in the city of Philadelphia the words “He or She is a doctorial candidate” is said more often than who is the candidate for any elected position in the entire Tri state area. But of course I could be wrong
Now, I also have to say you are not talking about “ordinary usage” the correct way. As you noted Fletman is Saidel’s attorney, and being as such she is talking about the legal phrase “ordinary usage” which has to do with statutory interpretation. The article of which you are talking about is over a case dealing with how the word “candidate” is to be interpreted in the campaign finance ordinance, which is a statue. The ordinary usage is the definition of the word which the everyday educated person would attribute to it, which a court happens to decided in case law. As you yourself said, Fletman cite to two state Supreme Court cases which said what the ordinary usage was and I am positive the attorneys and judges in those cases did more then do a Google search of the word candidate.
I bring this up only because your post would have been funny if any of it was correct, the only part of it that made any sense were the little quotes you copy and pasted from the article itself.

Sweet! Somebody's reading these posts!

Thanks for the input, WasAllTaken. That was pretty funny.

btw, Dan is my real name. No need to put it in quotes.

And because it's tough for tone to come through in blog comments, I want to be perfectly clear that I'm not being sarcastic.

I'm also interested in how you think this decision bodes for the ultimate fate of the new campaign finance laws. Do you think that ultimately the court will strike them down as outside the city's power to regulate elections? Assuming the commonwealth doesn't take any steps to create its own limits (a safe assumption given its history), what can the city do?

More broadly, how do people feel, in general, about this issue?