Great Expectations

The Great Expectations blog is up and running.

Look in this space for postings by the Great Expectations team of editors and writers, which includes Chris Satullo, the Inquirer's Editorial Page Editor, editorial writer Dave Boyer and Inquirer columnist Tom Ferrick.

We'll watch for trends in the various local races, focusing on the contest for mayor, and we will comment on the latest developments. Naturally, we welcome your comments as well.

Just for the record, there are 52 days to the May 15th primary.

It ain't over 'til it's over, but I am placing a bet that U.S. Rep. Bob Brady will be removed from the Democratic ballot for mayor because of his failure to file a complete financial disclosure form.

The Philadelphia city elections this year have no shortage of candidates, and no shortage of blogs writing about them.
How will this blog be different?
First, this one will try to be more about the election than the campaign.
What does that distinction mean? Well, the campaign is what candidates -- and their strategists and flacks and flunkies -- try to do to win.
The election is different. It's something that happens inside the brains, and the hearts, of voters. It begins with their assessment of their city, what's right with it, what's wrong with it, and what they'd like to see done to bolster what's right and to address what's wrong.
It then moves to voters' assessments of their candidates - their records, their statements, the way they smile and wear their suits, the messages (witting or unwitting) that their TV ads send about who they are.
It cultiminates in those thousands and thousands of private choices in the voting booth on Election Day.
Here, on the Great Expectations blog, we'll try to be as concerned with the election as the campaign, with what voters are thinking, dreading and dreaming, as with what the hustling candidates are trying to sell.
This blog is part of a year-long project in civic dialogue co-sponsored by The Inquirer Editorial Board and the Project on Civic Engagement at the University of Pennsylvania. The project is funded in part by grants from the Lenfest Foundation and Knight Foundation.

Any mayoral hopeful who shows up for the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance and the Arts & Business Council of Greater Philadelphia “It’s About the Arts!” forum next month with a sample of his grade-school fingerpainting will get ... What's that? Oh, yeah, that part's made up.

Not the forum part, though.

In what should be a good chance to hear the candidates on key arts-funding issues, the alliance and arts arm of the business community will gather on April 15 from 2:00 PM to 3:15 PM at the Academy of Natural Sciences on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.

(Doors open at 1:30 PM. Register for the limited-seating event at www.philaculture.org/forum.)

Join us for this April 5 event focusing on citizen-expert dialogue.

This event will be held from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. at The Inquirer building, 400 N. Broad St., Philadelphia. Registration and refreshments will begin at 5:45 p.m.
This program is being co-sponsored by the Philadelphia Cross City Campaign for School Reform. It is intended as a preparatory session for the mayoral candidates forum to be co-sponsored by Great Expectations and the Cross City Campaign on April 12.

Judge Patrick Toole this afternoon ruled that U.S. Rep. Bob Brady can amend his ethics statement and remain on the May 15th Democratic primary ballot for mayor.

The full text of the Toole ruling wasn't immediately available, so it's hard to say what his reasoning is -- though the fact that he has allowed Brady to amend his form implies that the judge thought it was incomplete.

Brady failed to include the various city and state pensions which he receives. He also failed to list about $160,000 in payments made to his Carpenters Union pension account by the union since 1999.

In previous cases, various county judges have taken a live-and-let-live atty-tood towards the state Ethics Law and its stringent disclosure provisions. The law leaves no room for error. It says that if you omit items you are off the ballot. No fines. No fees. You are outta here.

Now, it is on to the state Supreme Court, which has taken a less kindly view towards such ommissions in the past.

Gov. Rendell stopped by the Editorial Board today, bringing along Gov. Janet Napolitano of Arizona, a fellow Democrat.
Their main purpose was to pitch Napolitano's ideas on how state governments can breed technological innovation, which will be the signature theme of her one-year tenure as head of the National Governors Association.
We asked Napolitano, who is a very impressive person, how she liked her state's "clean election" system, which provides public funds to those who abide by campaign donation limits, and allows them to get more public funds (up to a point) when their free-spending opponents opt out of the system or self-fund.
She liked the system fine, she said, having won two gubernatorial elections under it. But she allowed as how the paperwork could get nit-picky and the tendency of candidates to file specious claims of violation against one another got tedious.
That got us talking about the self-funded candidate, millionaire Tom Knox, who's making such a perplexing, unmerited splash in the Philly mayoral campaign.
And that got Rendell explaining to his colleague from the Southwest how Pennsylvania campaign finance works. She may be from the Southwest, but in this realm Pennsylvania is the true Wild West. No rules, not right.
"Wait," she asked, jaw scraping the floor, "you have no state limits at all?"
Nope.

The two Democratic mayoral candidates with the lowest household incomes have higher rates of charitable giving than their wealthier rivals.

Michael Nutter and his wife, Lisa, donated about 1.4 percent of their income to charity over a three-year period. Their combined income averaged about $163,000.

Dwight Evans gave about 1.2 percent of his income to charity. His highest salary during the three-year period was $86,521.

Bob Brady and his wife, Debra, gave 0.8 percent of their household income to charity. Their combined income averaged more than $238,000.

And then there's multi-millionaire Tom Knox.He and wife Linda averaged about $6.2 million in income, but gave less than 0.7 percent to charity.
(Chaka Fattah provided a summary showing more than $13,000 in charitable donations over two years. But it's not possible to calculate his household's rate of charitable giving because his wife, NBC10 anchor Renee Chenault-Fattah, won't disclose her salary).
By the way, the national average for charitable giving in 2003 was 2.3 percent, according to the Urban Institute.
- Dave Boyer