This is sad:
One of the first skirmishes of Pennsylvania’s presidential primary
is set to take place here Friday, when the campaigns of Senators
Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama vie for the endorsement of this
city’s ward leaders.
It may sound like a parochial affair, but Mrs. Clinton is sending
her husband, Bill, and Mr. Obama is sending one of his prominent
supporters, although it’s not clear yet who that will be. The attention
of a former president to a group of ward leaders is an indication of
the stakes here in Pennsylvania, the biggest state, with the most
delegates, that has yet to vote. The primary is April 22.
Sad, but a necessary step in winning Philly. Philadelphia is an object lesson in the danger of one-party rule. You can't win here without bribing the local party officials, like the ward leaders, and the mayor. Who is Mayor Nutter supporting?
There's your answer. Will Bunch explains:
As for Nutter endorsing Clinton, well that die was pretty much cast the day that Barack Obama made the boneheaded move of backing the clearly loser candidacy of Rep. Chaka Fattah,
thanks to their mutual close ties to Obama's chief advisor, David
Axelrod. Nutter's countermove is Politics 101 -- the friend of my enemy
is my enemy -- and not at all surprising.
If only Obama had not made that mistake, he'd have Philadelphia, and Pennsylvania, and the nomination in the bag. Weird.
As it is, Fattah lead the cheers at the Obama afterparty in West Philly on Tuesday - which was attended almost solely by black ward leaders. (I know, because I was there.) But Fattah is not the mayor - the mayor was at Clinton's afterparty, at a faux-Irish bar where a lot of cops hang out, Finnegan's Wake, in the whitest part of town. The mayor has some control over the spigots on the city's patronage system. So who do you think ward leaders who backed him are going to want to support?
There's another key player, Congressman Bob Brady, the local party chairman, who is overseeing the presentations by Bill Clinton and Obama's spokesperson, whoever that is, to the ward leaders:
Brady, in an interview, said the committee also will hear from a
surrogate for Obama, but the Illinois senator's campaign has not yet
confirmed who it will be. Among the possibilities, he said: wife
Michelle Obama, or Sens. Edward Kennedy or John Kerry.
Brady said there will "not necessarily" be a vote to endorse in the
presidential primary. "I'll know tomorrow when I get there," he said.
Asked whether there was sentiment among his ward chieftains to make a
committee choice, he said he would find out at the meeting.
Brady, a superdelegate, has undoubtedly been pursued by both candidates for a long time now. But Brady is also the most powerful politician in Philadelphia, more so than the mayor, because he controls the vast majority of the money. Now they have to offer him whatever he wants in exchange for his support.
The good news for Obama is that Brady and Nutter are not exactly best friends. The other good news is that the city of Philadelphia is 46% African-American.
Update: Welcome, Eschatonistas! Susie, in comments, corrects me by saying that Nutter has almost no control over patronage, compared to Brady. Also, Nutter and Brady are allies at least to the extent that Brady stayed in the mayoral race to ace out Tom Knox and install Nutter, who is from a different part of the machine than Brady, but is still of the machine.
Another person who knows more than me is Chris Bowers:
I expect the ward leaders to have about as much of an impact on this
election as they had in the 2007 mayoral primary, which was next to
nothing. The power of ward endorsements comes largely in
lower-information primaries, where the people who show up to vote are
handed an "official Democratic ballot" of the local ward endorsements
that was also sent to them in the mail a week or two earlier. These
voters generally are willing to vote for any Democrat, and the one they
see on the "official Democratic ballot" sounds about as good as any
other Dem. In low turnout, low-information elections where the voters
don't know much about the candidates in the primary, this is
devastating (and also the source of ward power, since it is through
these lower-information offices that jobs can be doled out). However,
in hotly contested, high-visibility primaries where all of the voters
know more about more than one candidate, it plays virtually no role.
I think there is a lot to this, but on the other hand, turnout in the black wards will be crucial in this primary, and the ward leaders have a big impact on GOTV, whether voters get rides to the polls, whether voters can find the polling place, whether machines "break", etc. If Clinton can get those ward leaders to dog it on election day, it would be to her advantage. Bowers says the stakes come down to a swing of 6 delegates:
There are four congressional districts in Philly, two of them entirely
in the city. Those two congressional districts, PA-01 and PA-02, have
seven and nine district-level delegates respectively. Obama's margin
can be anywhere form 9-7 to 12-4.
One other thing about Brady: He's a big part of the local union scene, and the unions will also have a major impact on turnout, both in terms of endorsements and providing muscle for intimidation purposes, ripping down signs, etc.
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