Costume Party

In the scramble for an at-large GOP council seat, David Oh plays the role of Democrat.

by Tom Namako

politics

OODLES OF OH SIGHTINGS: Like he did at this summer's Penn's Landing festival, David Oh has been shaking a lot of hands and asking for votes. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

David Oh was the only person who looked happy to be at the Frankford Terminal at 8 a.m. last Thursday. He shook people's fingers when they wouldn't offer their hand, talked about economic development until their buses pulled in and picked up discarded fliers so he could add them back to his stack.

But if any sleepy-eyed commuter forgot there was an election coming up, the sight of this guy suddenly reminded them. See, most people recognize Oh, but that doesn't mean they know who he is.

"Hey," one woman sitting on a bench said. "I saw you here years ago. Didn't you win?"

Not exactly, he explains.

"I think I saw your ads in the Inquirer," an elderly man says.

That's right, Oh responds.

Finally, some hope: A middle-aged woman in nursing scrubs, whose bus was boarding, caught sight of Oh at the next stand and jogged over. "I just wanted to shake your hand," she says, gushing as though she's met a rock star. Thank you, Oh says, but she's already running back to her bus, which she barely boards in time.

So far, he knows, November's City Council elections are shaping up to be a ceremonial coronation of Democratic primary winners; the seven at-large seats (in which, by law, two seats go to Republicans) are no different.

Oh is one of three people — along with incumbents Frank Rizzo Jr. and Jack Kelly — who want one of those Republican slots. Rizzo's a veritable lock, so it's a two-man race for the other.

Knowing he needs bolstered name recognition is why Oh's badgering people at 8 a.m. And knowing he needs votes in Kelly's stronghold, the Great Northeast, is why he's at the Frankford Terminal. But those alone probably won't get the job done. That's why Oh is at work cultivating his greatest political strategy: acting like a Democrat.

In 2003, Oh ran for the same council at-large spot "without any big-party backing," and won nearly 100,000 votes. While that was no easy feat, it wasn't enough; he fell about 15,000 votes short of Kelly.

The party bosses didn't want him in the race in the first place. Not long before he formally announced his intention to run, several contracts Oh's law firm had with the city mysteriously dried up. "We also had work with private companies like GlaxoSmithKline," he says. "The private companies regarded us very well, but we were unsatisfactory somehow with the city entities."

Today, the word Republican doesn't appear on Oh's campaign literature. The only mention of the word on his Web site is when he touts his Log Cabin Republicans endorsement. Oh's platform is creatively centered around making Philadelphia an "international city." This, he said, involves dredging the Delaware River by 5 more feet so shipping can come in from around the world, building thousands of square feet of sound stages to compete with New York in the filmmaking industry and, vaguely, creating an area where young, creative types share ideas.

So why not just become a Democrat? His response involves his admiration of Abraham Lincoln and how the individual needs the right circumstances like good schools to be successful in life. He does have a more practical answer, though.

"I'm not anti-Democratic," he says. "Everyone has their own philosophy and I like that people have different political points of view. I think we should take different ideas, then take the best of them, and work together."

In other words, Oh is not willing to cast himself as someone whose election-day victory is ingratiated to a political party, a tactic that is much harder to pull off among Democrats than Republicans. This is because Philly's GOP is notoriously weak. Oh claims he was incorrectly quoted on the Young Philly Politics blog as saying, "The Republican Party in this town is essentially controlled by Democrats." Even though it's a misquote, many believe that idea isn't far from the truth. As one insider told City Paper, "Under this current leadership, the Republican party is the largest Democratic ward in the city."

That leaves Oh with no clearly defined voter base or clear party backing. Kelly, on the other hand, has both. So how does a candidate win this kind of election? Ask Michael Nutter.

Oh's campaign increasingly resembles the Republican version of the one Nutter ran, a strategy that brought in votes from everywhere. To keep Kelly's Northeast block at bay, Oh is laying the familiar groundwork with ideas that are pegged as progressive, being a Republican more by ideology than party affiliation, and billing himself as a new, fresh face in an old, stale system. Some people don't like this, of course. Like the firefighter's union board president. Even though the union endorsed Oh in 2003, he wasn't even invited to meet with them this year. Somewhere in between, a new board president took power, and he's loyal to Kelly. But Oh showed up at the union hall for a candidate interview anyway.

"The rank-and-file like me," Oh said last week, being greeted by passing firefighters in the union hall. "I'm not just going to sit back because the president doesn't."

To get an idea of how close this race is, consider who shot back at Oh after his YPP misquote appeared in the Inquirer: it was Frank Keel, generally known as a political proxy and the guy people call in when things need a boost. "The only thing David Oh is independent of is his senses," Keel said.

That's far from the worst. Oh says he's waiting for the bomb to drop in this campaign, a comment with either a subtle racial undertone — Oh, whose parents immigrated from Korea and raised him in Southwest Philly, could become the first Asian-American on council — or an all-out attack on his perceived independence from big party politics.

Either way, Oh said at the Franklin Terminal, he's ready. Not far from where he's standing, on I-95, are Kelly's campaign signs with the slogan: "Fighting for everyone. Two-legged. And four-legged." Kelly's platform has included saving household pets and protecting goose livers from being force-fed and served as the delicacy foie gras. Ads in the Daily News show a small kitten with the words "Jack saved me!"

"These are quality-of-life issues," Kelly said in an interview.

To which Oh responded, "Jack's advertising presumes that the city is not in too bad shape. My priorities show people that I'm concerned about the murder rate and lack of jobs."

As he's talking, a middle-aged terminal employee named Derek Hall walks by with one of Oh's fliers in hand — he was talking to a campaign volunteer who said Oh was a Republican. "You know what you need to do to get my vote?" Hall says.

Oh laughs: "What's that?"

He points the flier at the candidate, and says, "You need to become a Democrat!"

(tom.namako@citypaper.net)