September 4-10, 2003

pretzel logic

Molotov Cocktail Party

by Howard Altman

The mayor is late for his Molotov cocktail party.

Everyone else is waiting. Deputy Managing Director Tumar Alexander, the mayorís son and the mayorís pal, Joey Temple.

Sam Katz and his crew.

The cops. Firefighters. An army of nosy reporters.

Anyone in the city who gives a damn.

A day-and-a-half after someone may or may not have thrown an incendiary device through the window of Sam Katz's North Philadelphia headquarters, the city that burns you back is awaiting the return of the prodigal mayor, who is vacationing in Niagara Falls.

But slowly he returns.

This is a bad time for election hooliganism.

Democracy, already under assault from the federal government, needs no such shenanigans, not when voter turnout is already abysmal and people look at the 2000 presidential election and wonder why bother.

For all of you not paying attention, here's the unhappy recap.

Republican candidate Sam Katz opens a campaign office on North 22nd, near Cecil B. Moore. On Tuesday, Aug. 26, words are exchanged. Alexander, as well as Joey Temple -- a longtime crony of Mayor John Street -- get into it with Katz campaign workers and the man who rented Katz the space. Sharif Street, the mayor's son, looks around uncomfortably, like he wants to get the hell away.

That night, an incendiary device may or may not have been tossed through the windows of said HQ.

The Katz people blamed Street. Street spokesman Dan Fee suggested the device -- actually a gas-soaked wick (the purported bottle had been earlier thrown in the trash, where it was presumably taken to a dump) -- was a Katz plant.

Welcome to Philadelphia. Land of You-Can't-Invent-This-Shit.

The following Thursday, reporters are summoned to the Katz campaign's 17th Street office.

Katz greets me by rolling up his pant leg.

"See that?" he says, smiling. "Poison ivy."

A badge of honor from wading through brambles on a golf course.

Katz, who interrupted a vacation at his upstate Pennsylvania cabin to host a press conference condemning the alleged attack, then slips away to powwow with Brian Tierney and the rest of his campaign braintrust. He leaves us early arrivals to our own devices.

Channel 3 producer Jim Barry, always quick with the jokes, quips that, like Kosovo, Philadelphia needs U.N. inspectors.

The Iraqis must be glad we are force-feeding them democracy, I say.

More reporters filter into the HQ. Soon we are lead to the inner room, where we gather in a semicircle in front of a rickety stand that looks like a reject from Ikea, which is Swedish for migraine.

Young volunteer types are told to don blue Katz for Mayor T-shirts and are ushered behind the stand.

There is a pause as the props get into place.

"They need more women," says a campaign worker, cognizant of how it will play on TV.

Finally, it is go time. The hot lights flick on and Katz calls on Street to hustle back to town -- from his vacation -- and figure out what is going on.

He is, after all, the mayor.

And some of his people were involved.

Dismissing Fee's postulation that it was an inside job, Katz says the previous day's ugliness was not the first in this campaign.

A 71-year-old volunteer from Lansdale found a life-threatening message on her home voicemail. Someone else's tires had been slashed.

"There is a line that has been crossed and we need to go back to it," Katz says. "We need to make sure that Philadelphians get a clear message that we are pulling together as a city and not allowing anything or anyone to pull it apart."

When the lights flicked off and the TV types were done, a tighter knot of print and radio people form another ring around Katz.

"Do you think we need election monitors?" I ask.

Katz says that monitors in Philly would be a good thing and reporters scribble furiously.

"There have been violations of civil rights and possibly of voting rights possibly in support of a candidate, " he says. "There is plenty of evidence that voting laws are under siege and that the district attorney is not someone willing to be responsible for that and outside oversight is something that warrants serious consideration."

It takes John Street until the evening of Thursday, Aug. 27, to get back to Philadelphia -- 36 hours after an incident that rocked an already testy campaign and had a good deal of the city in a lather.

Invoking the memory of the civil rights campaign during a hastily arranged press conference, Street strongly condemns violence.

Nice words.

But they should have been delivered right after the trouble started.

I would be completely stunned if the mayor or his son had any involvement in l'affaire Molotov.

That, however, is almost beside the point.

Waiting 36 hours is not leadership, Mr. Mayor. Citing lack of definitive info for the delay is a pitiful excuse.

Sure, the public wanted answers. But it also wanted to see the man in charge do his job.

The pier collapse wasn't big enough to come home for. The Prime Minister of Cote D'Ivoire wasn't important enough to spend time with.

And now this.

Want to be re-elected, Mr. Street?

Try acting like a mayor.