Now that we’re officially past the holiday, a final post in 2007 from the profane world of politics.

As recounted in an earlier post, I continued to be involved in electioneering for municipal candidates in 2007. If you don’t care to read the whole story, my ward’s Township commissioner candidate pulled off an upset victory by 12 votes.

Now, a word about the opponent. Of all the Republicans I have ever worked with in the past, the GOP candidate for our ward is the one I have the most respect for. He was a fantastic and impartial judge of elections for our ward. I know that he would have been open and approachable. Although he and I have very different political perspectives, I believe that had he won, he would have been somebody I could work with, neighbor to neighbor. In fact, the problem was not so much with the candidate himself, but with his cohorts, some of whom I cannot tolerate in their official capacities. (As neighbors, perfectly fine. But running the town? Ptooey!) A Republican-controlled local board would have had a pipeline back to the usual war-boarders from the GOP side.

I started to compose a genial letter to the editor for a local paper about the opposition candidate, thinking that perhaps I could ease some of the divisiveness that can turn up in the campaign season. My personal respect was heartfelt. Boy, am I glad I didn’t send that letter!

The day before Thanksgiving, we received word that local GOP chair Mike Maddren was filing a challenge of the election results, claiming a machine malfunction that apparently only impacted one button on one machine.

Maddren does love his political sport. It was he, the story has it, who paid $10 to challenge the right of Joe Sestak to vote in the 2006 election, despite Joe’s owning a home in Edgemont and his lifelong voting record in Delco.

The challenge seems to have been undertaken despite his candidate’s lack of enthusiasm for the possible remedies. The whole affair seemed to be punitive, or simply ungracious. Maddren must surely be burning about having snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in two consecutive Township elections. Purely supposition, of course, but it also rang of the county bosses trying to flip the bird at our chair, David Landau, for his audacity at shining the sunshine on the machine’s secret world in 2007.

In the end it turned out to be a non-event. As it has been explained to me, the judge threw out the filing on procedural/technical grounds.

As the story goes, Frank Catania himself had a hand in a rechecking of the pertinent machines by members of the Election Bureau. They found the machines to be operating correctly. Of course, they did the entire test with no counsel or Democratic party officials present, so even if they had found a problem with the machines, they’d pretty much spoiled the evidence. That’s the how they roll over at the county courthouse.

At any rate, even though our rivalry is often cheerful, this year’s lump of coal goes to Maddren for his continued hyper-lawyering and attempts to game the system.

In the meantime, I’m looking forward to attending the swearings-in of my fellow Democrats in a couple weeks. Then I will probably start to turn my attention to some of those up-ticket races. What’d I hear about there being some sort of presidential election coming up?

Post mortem time for the failure of Democratic victories to materialize in the Philly suburbs. What follows is the full text of a letter that was sent to all of Delaware County’s employees before the election.

The Democrat[sic] candidates for Delaware County Council have launched an all out assault on the integrity and character of the County’s government employees. They have been checking the party registration of County employees! David Landau, Ann O’Keefe, and John Innelli have insinuated that the only reason county employees like yourself have jobs is because of patronage, nepotism, and employees’ active engagement in partisan politics. As the only candidates with elected municipal government experience, we know that public and government service can often be a thankless task. But for the Democrats to drag the integrity and character of hard-working county [sic] employees like you through the mud for political purposes is unacceptable.

We know these personal attacks cannot be easy for you to take, and that is why we are writing to you today. Please know that we value your service to the residents of Delaware County. You provide important and vital services to residents that make Delaware County a great place to live, raise a family, work, and operate a business.

There is a reson that Delaware County has one of the lowest operating budgets in the Delaware Valley. That reason is the exemplary service of County workers like yourself, individuals who dedicate themselves to assisting local residents and working to ensure that the county is run in a fiscally responsible manner. In fact, it is this dedication from County employees that has helped result in no County tax increase in the past three years and no County tax increase in 7 of the past 10 years.

The Democrats [sic] smear tactics, false negative attacks, and politics of personal destruction should not be rewarded. That is why we hope we can count on your support and the support of your friends and family on Election Day, November 6th. For more information on our positions on the issues please visit our website at www.delco2007.com [sic]

If elected we [sic] will all be proud to work with you to continue good government in Delaware County.

Sincerely,

Christine Fizzano Cannon, Tom McGarrigle, Andy Lewis

I’m not going to react to this note at length, but I want to toss in several observations:

• 3100 employees plus their close family members represent a large number voters in an election that only turns out about 75,o00 (yes?) voters.
• Nowhere is it more true that perception is reality than in an election.
• In translation, the media translation of the “Case against the Courthouse” was “Delaware County employees are bad, and only have their jobs because they’re all Republicans.”

From my position as blogger-raging-against-the-machine, readers tell me the story that needed to be told: it’s not that County employees only have jobs because they’re registered Republicans, but that they’re all registered Republicans because that’s the only way anybody will let you have a job. Nobody actually believes that all of those employees are loyal GOP stalwarts. No, the Republican bosses simply make their employees render unto Caesar….

I hear it all the time. You canvass a household of registered Republicans. You’re told at the door, “Don’t worry, we’re Jimmy Carter liberals here. We’re just registered because my husband’s livelihood depends on it– you know, County government.” Or the spouse whose career advancement is threatened–directly, overtly–not because she is a Democrat, but because her spouse is. So exactly who is prying into the registration of others? Really?

In the end, the “Case Against the Courthouse” was a message that, like Othello’s love, worked not wisely but too well.

“The Case” garnered a lot of media attention, but like a California wildfire, it quickly burned out of control.

The case to be made, if the one-party rule was to be a central campaign issue, was against the Party bosses. The problem in Delco has always been the control of the system by a shadow cabinet, the vaunted war board. You know: McNichol, Catania, Judge, Sexton.

The message that should have been going out to County employees was: “We don’t care what party you’re a member of, but from now on, you’re going to be free–and we all are going to be free–of coercion and intimidation.”

* * * *

By the way, did the GOP candidates really get away with saying “the reason we haven’t had tax increases is because we compensate you for $h!t?

Between a crazy few weeks at work, and the run-up to the election, I fell into one of those blogging wormholes. I’m only now beginning to emerge from it.

Like many Dems in Delaware County, I’m still stinging from the failure to make headway against the Big Red Machine at the County Courthouse. I’m sure that the coming few days will bring us various post-mortems and recriminations (rzklkng has one set), and I may end up with a few of my own once I’ve had a chance to reflect.

As much as I was pulling for David Landau and Frank Daly to punch through at the County level, I spent my day grinding at ward-level electioneering. My number one priority as a ward captain was getting out every last possible vote for our local Commissioner candidate. Nothing short of overall Board control was at stake in our ward’s race.

Our guy was running in his first ever election against a well-known and well-liked local guy with previous experience on the Board of Commissioners. In all honesty, it shouldn’t have even been a race. But I credit our candidate for his pavement-pounding stamina. He reached out and found a constituency of the loyal base plus all of the new, young families who have moved into town in the last half dozen years. If I had to describe our voter profile it was the “quality of life” voter.

I was having a friendly chat with the opponent’s wife around 6:00 PM. I predicted a squeaker based on the voters I’d seen at the polls. I was sure that it was within 40 votes. I knew from my strike lists that our voters were coming in, and some of the ones we’d called in the afternoon with reminders to vote showed up in the early evening. The Republican GOTV effort kicked into a higher gear in the last hour, and the local GOP boss was even placing calls in our Ward. The last half hour was not going our way.

In the end, our candidate won by 12 votes, 289-277. Unbelievable! And those 12 voters not only determined the ward race, they ultimately kept the Board of Commissioners in a 4-3 Democratic majority.

When I think of the year I spent on this little municipal election: collecting signatures on our candidates’ filing petitions, stuffing envelopes, doing lit-drops, and otherwise being a general nuisance to my less political neighbors, how relieved I am to know that in the end we left nothing on the table. A seven voter swing would have thrown the election, and the Township, the other way.

So while I still fret about the bigger fish to fry, I’m satisfied to know that a gang of grassroots volunteers and a really good candidate can pull off the upset victory.

For those of you who enjoy a cute quip from my son, here’s what the Democratic Lad said of our future commissioner on the way to the polls:

“I really want Matt to win, but I still think I want to vote for John Edwards.”

At the end of last week, David Landau made another installment in the “Case Against the Courthouse.” This time the department in the spotlight was Data Processing, where 36 out 36 employees are registered Republican. Sounds strange doesn’t it? This is an area where experience would seem paramount in employment decisions. But you have to remember that Data Processing is the department that was run by John McNichol, the GOP boss from Upper Darby, until very recently.

This brings the percentage of Delaware County employees who are registered Republicans in the departments investigated by Landau’s campaign to a whopping 98%, or 250 out of 255.

There is still a slight Republican registration advantage County-wide. And because the Council is exclusively Republican, it’s not a surprise that department heads are Republican.

Certainly one shouldn’t pretend, as Republican Council Chair Andy Reilly does, that party isn’t an absolute factor in employment in Delco. Ask any rank-and-file county employee, even a committed conservative, off the record.

But one has to ask why it is so essential that every clerk and secretary subscribe to a political orthodoxy.

This is a really critical issue to correct now. The demographic shift in Delaware County continues. Within a short period of time, the GOP machine’s dominance will be permanently dissolved. We will enter an era where the two major parties are on roughly equal footing, so that political control will shift back and forth based on the performance of elected officials and the mood of the electorate.

At that point, we need to have in place a stable class of competent public servants. We can’t have a mass exodus every time control of the Council switches. The good employees who are in place should stay, and deserve to be recognized for their performance, not their esteem in the eyes of political bosses. They are essential to the continuity of government–Democrats, Republicans, and all others alike.

With only a few weeks left in the campaign, Delaware County Council candidate David Landau has already delivered five installments in his “Case Against the Courthouse.”

In a nutshell, what Landau has been explaining to voters is that their invisible County government is nothing but a pure patronage mill. It’s not just that elected officials are under the thumb of party bosses–the partisan lockout extends to almost every job at every level of our local government. Almost everybody who works at the courthouse is a registered Republican, and many are donors and party activists.  There is no civil service class in Delaware County. You want a job? Pay homage to the bosses, big and small.

My whole reason to get involved in local politics has been to participate in the struggle to break the machine. I’ve been grateful and proud that David has been so steadfast and effective in highlighting the extent of the problem with Delco government. Methodically, his case has marched through offices that should be run in an open, non-partisan way, but aren’t. The controller’s office, sheriff’s office, election bureau, voter registration, tax claims, tax assessment–the list goes on and on.

All are open to abuses of power by unchecked partisan control.

Some Republicans are taking offense to Landau’s use of the term “corruption.” And to be honest, that’s a term I feel a little uncomfortable in tossing around. I have no personal direct evidence of wrongdoing by any particular member of County government. It’s a broad brush to use, and I don’t like to use words with criminal implications to describe things I cannot prove.

But here’s what I will say:

The Republican-only Delco government is broken.
The GOP Delco machine is coercive.
The all-Republican Delco government is inefficient.
One-party rule in Delco lacks sufficient checks against abuses of power and revenue.

And that should be bad enough in any functioning democracy.

No, the subject title isn’t referring to a future presidential election. No, it’s not about the London Olympics either.

2,012 is the staggering number of consecutive unanimous votes conducted by the all-Republican Delaware County Council since 2003, according to The Evening Bulletin.  This gang is to be congratulated for what must be one of the longest winning streaks in elected officialdom. In four years, with over $1 billion of tax revenue spent, not a single dissenting vote of conscience.

To steal a (rare) good one-liner from Senator Bob Casey, when five people agree 2012 consecutive times, four or them are clearly unnecessary.  Unfortunately, only three seats are open this fall, but I’ll take what I can get.

The three Democrats running for Delaware County Council held a press conference on the steps of the Media courthouse to advance their list of proposed reforms to county government. In the course of Alex Rose’s reporting of the event in the Delco Times, it sounds to me as if County Director all but admitted that the Delaware County Council routinely and deliberately violates the Pennsylvania Sunshine Act.

County Director Marianne Grace later explained everything on the agenda has already been discussed and examined throughout the week leading up to the council meeting.

By the time council votes publicly on the items, everyone understands what they’re voting on and why, so there is no need for council to discuss, she said. Some agenda items are routinely summarized during the meeting for the audience anyway.

The point of the PA Sunshine Act is not only to have public meetings at which official votes are recorded. No, the point of the Act is to allow citizens to witness and respond to the entire decision making process of our elected governments.

65 Pa.C.S.A. § 702. Legislative findings and declaration

(a) Findings. — The General Assembly finds that the right of the public to be present at all meetings of agencies and to witness the deliberation, policy formulation and decisionmaking of agencies is vital to the enhancement and proper functioning of the democratic process and that secrecy in public affairs undermines the faith of the public in government and the public’s effectiveness in fulfilling its role in a democratic society.

[Later…]

65 Pa.C.S.A. § 704. Open meetings

Official action and deliberations by a quorum of the members of an agency shall take place at a meeting open to the public unless closed under section 707 (relating to exceptions to open meetings), 708 (relating to executive sessions) or 712 (relating to General Assembly meetings covered).

Council meetings aren’t televised, and they’re held at 10:00 AM Tuesday mornings, when most of us are at work. If you want to see your one-party Council perform a rigged show of governance, you can spend a half day of your vacation time to fund out what they’re up to. [Meeting Schedule].