The Last Word

Monday morning quarterbacks dissect the mayor's race.

by Daryl Gale

As always, election wrap-ups are presented with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, which allows one side to strut and gloat their I-told-you-sos, while leaving the other side to wallow in coulda, woulda, shoulda. With last week’s mayoral election, there are the added elements of divisiveness and bad blood that made this one of the most contentious mayoral races in city history.

All summer, incumbent Democrat John Street and Republican challenger Sam Katz traded volleys over various issues and campaign missteps -- bouncing from broken windows to stolen phone records to phony letters to the editor -- but everything changed on Oct. 7, when an electronic listening device was discovered in the mayor's office, uncovering an FBI probe into city corruption and forcing both camps to rethink their strategies.

First District Congressman and Democratic City Committee Chair Bob Brady agrees that the FBI probe was a factor, but insists it wasn't the deciding factor.

"We were up 7 or 8 percentage points before the bug was found," Brady says, "and after that the numbers continued to climb. But the trend had been set already, especially in white wards. John Street had more appeal in white areas than anyone, especially the media, gave him credit for."

According to The Philadelphia Inquirer’s post-election numbers, Street pulled 26 percent of votes in predominantly white wards, while Katz only got 10 percent of votes in predominantly black wards. The overall numbers illustrate Street’s reversal of fortune even more clearly. When both men ran against each other in 1999, Street eked out a victory of fewer than 10,000 votes. Last week, Street won by more than 78,000 votes. While Street managed to get 43,000 more votes than he got in 1999, Katz got 25,000 fewer votes.

"Voters are a lot more sophisticated than the media gives them credit for," Brady continues. "It was never black against white, it was about those quality-of-life issues that affect everyone equally."

Street campaign manager Shawn Fordham expresses a similar lack of surprise when questioned about his candidate’s popularity in white wards.

"Look, we consistently did well in those wards," Fordham sighs, as though he’s answered the question a thousand times. "We made phone calls to 82,000 homes -- mostly white Democrats, and we found that we had 35 to 40 percent of those people, and this was before the bug. All that happened after the bug was found tended to solidify those people who were already for us, including the white voters."

Fordham is quick to point out that 30 to 35 percent of the mayor’s re-election staff was white, and while some supporters may have injected race into the campaign, the staff stepped gingerly around the subject.

"The Katz campaign wanted to bait us into a discussion about race, but we didn’t play along," he says. "What you saw, and what we wanted to emphasize, were the fundamental differences in our campaigns."

And what about the contention that the bug made the big difference in the race? Or that Street’s strategists used the FBI probe to its own political advantage? Fordham listens and laughs heartily.

"Any campaign manager who would depend on an FBI probe to give his candidate a bump would have to be nuts," he snickers. "That’s the kind of thing that sinks campaigns, and if we didn’t have a solid record of 25 years of service to the people, it probably would have sunk us too."

The Street campaign’s real worry, according to Fordham, was that the FBI probe would consume both candidates and supplant the issues of the campaign altogether. Throughout the bug controversy, Fordham says, Street played cheerleader, constantly telling the staff not to lose focus and to stick to the strategy they had first formulated, namely, to define Katz as a lockstep Republican and force him to wear his party on his sleeve.

"I’ll tell you what: The Katz tax plan was more of a bump for us than the bug," says Fordham. "We wanted to put his party out there, and that GOP tax plan he unveiled allowed us to pick him apart."

Political consultant and Democratic strategist Neil Oxman takes his postmortem evaluation a step further.

"Toward the end of the campaign, things were breaking the mayor’s way and white Democrats decided to come home," Oxman says. "When those numbers start to move, it becomes an avalanche."

Oxman, though, reserves his harshest criticism for Katz campaign chairman and GOP insider Brian Tierney of Tierney Communications.

"Tierney is an insufferable self-promoter who ran a horrible campaign," Oxman spits, "and now he’s just using the FBI probe as an excuse for his woeful performance. He ran a completely awful campaign. Those TV commercials were some of the stupidest ads I’ve ever seen."

Told of Oxman’s comments, Brian Tierney laughs mirthlessly.

"I’m not going to get into a pissing contest with Neil," Tierney says. "Just suffice it to say he didn’t have access to our campaign and doesn’t know what he’s talking about." Tierney tends to agree, however, with Oxman’s avalanche analogy.

"I don’t know that anyone could have overcome what happened after the bug," he says. "There was a 20-point swing over a five- or six-day period in mid-October. We were fighting an uphill battle from the beginning, and it was always a question of trying to thread the needle, but the chances just got slimmer and slimmer."

Republican City Committee Chair Vito Canuso was equally eager to present his take on the race. If you were expecting handwringing and self-doubt, though, you’ve come to the wrong guy.

"There’s just no page in the playbook that covers FBI probes," Canuso jokes, "so I’ll admit that to a point we were flying blind. That said though, Mayor Street lied throughout the campaign and the press was unwilling to challenge him. He lied about the Blackberry, and the whole "timing’ aspect of the probe, and especially that ridiculous nonsense about some white, Republican conspiracy out to get him."

Canuso says it was Street supporters like Ron White and Chaka Fattah who injected race into the contest, and the media was too cowardly to call them on it for fear of being labeled racists themselves.

"How could we answer that?" Canuso grouses. "If the press allows Street and his people to get away with that nonsense, how is our issuing a denial going to help our credibility? It became obvious to us that anything that happened, anything we did or said -- they were going to play the race card on us."

A perfect example, he says, is the infamous flier distributed by the GOP City Committee urging voters to "Take Back Philadelphia."

"That whole supposed "controversy’ was absolutely ridiculous," says Canuso. "Politicians and political parties have been using that phrase for decades -- "we have to take back our city, our state, or our country’ -- and no one put any kind of racial connotation on it. [Democratic presidential candidate] Howard Dean is using it right now against the Republican Party, but you don’t hear anyone crying "racism’ over it. But as soon as we use it -- one of the oldest phrases in politics -- we get accused of racism and they’re calling on Sam Katz to denounce us."

Canuso says that he doesn’t think any Republican candidate could have withstood the impact of Street’s "us against them’ propaganda machine -- but he admires Katz for trying.

"Sam did a great job under trying and unpredictable circumstances," he says. "He was trying to unite the city, which you see is now more divided than ever. It was a noble effort."

Even with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, Canuso is confident that the Republicans put up the best effort possible, and wouldn’t change a thing. If there’s someone to blame for Katz’s defeat, he says, it’s the city itself.

"It’s a sad thing that the city has proven they’d rather try to manage the decline rather than stimulate growth," he says. "The city isn’t willing to move forward with bold and innovative ideas, preferring to stick to the devil they know. That’s not Sam’s fault."

Both Canuso and the Democratic strategists agree that the battle for the hearts and minds of Philadelphia isn’t over, and they’re already looking forward to locking horns again in 2007.

"Politically, four years is just around the corner," Canuso says, willing to laugh again. "We’ll be back."