Tonight my son made the poignant observation: “Daddy has too many meetings for the Democrats.” I was at the Delaware County Democratic nominating convention last night. There was a local meeting last week also, so I guess it does seem like a lot.

Not too much to report of general interest from the convention. No floor fights. Bob Brady was there. He spoke for about three minutes. Joe Sestak was there spoke for–er–longer. We heard from Auditor General Jack Wagner. I’ll be darned if he doesn’t have an eye on the Governor’s mansion a few years out.

It doesn’t hold any real significance, but there was a straw poll on the presidential race. I believe the tally reported was Clinton 92, Obama 85, Edwards 12 (despite his pullout earlier in the day). These are your party stalwarts, and there’s not a consensus. (If anybody was there and has corrected/updated numbers, please feel free to chime in.)

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.

A couple weeks ago, Delaware County filed a lawsuit against the FAA challenging the FAA’s flight path redesign plan. In Swarthmore, the Republican mayor and a Democratic borough councilman joined as plaintiffs to the suit. The Swarthmorean carried an item on the topic that should be useful for anybody who would like more of an insider’s view of the suit. Unfortunately, the Swarthmorean  doesn’t produce an on-line edition, so I’m reprinting the article here with the permission of the author:

Last Friday Swarthmore Mayor Eck Gerner and Swarthmore Council member Geoff Semenuk became plaintiffs in the Delaware County lawsuit seeking to halt the FAA air-space redesign plan that seeks to redirect an open-ended number of departing flights over the center of the county. The suit, which Semenuk says is “currently the best chance to stop the FAA” seeks to show that the FAA failed to fully comply with the legal requirements of the plan’s Environmental Impact Study.

Among other points, the suit contends that the FAA failed to properly study noise levels by looking at averaged noise of a 24-hour period rather than the specific noise associated with an actual plane flying overhead or nearby. Another target of the suit is that the FAA failed to properly factor in the positive airline traffic effects of its own approved and under-contruction 17-35 runway extension. “The FAA predicated their plan on conditions they knew they were improving with this other project ,” Semenuk added.

Although Gerner and Semenuk were happy to lend support to the hard work of County Council Chair Andrew Reilly, who has spear-headed this bi-partisan effort and was kind enough to speak to Borough Council on this matter last year, they admit that the issue is bigger than just this particular lawsuit. “No one wants the airport to fall on hard times, most of us use it and depend on it in varying degrees,” said Gerner. “The shame of this is that delays could be ended tomorrow if the FAA forced the airlines to spread their schedules more evenly during the day instead of over-booking those popular rush hours.”

“So when the FAA says that because of flight delays it has to fly fully-fueled and sold-out passenger planes at full throttle and only a few hundred feet above the center of the second most densely populated county in Pennsylvania, they are clearly being disingenuous,” said Semenuk.

Last week in one of her final public speeches before leaving her post as head of the FAA in order to become the president and CEO of a company that lobbies the FAA to adopt automated air traffic control technology of the sort she has been publically promoting for a number of years, Marion Blakey made this admission: “To be clear, the airlines need to take a step back on the scheduling practices that are at times out of line with reality. Passengers are growing weary . . . And if the airlines don’t address this voluntarily, don’t be surprised when the government steps in. Drawing down the schedule at Chicago was not my happiest hour, but it could come to that on the East Coast as well.”

In Chicago in 2004, the FAA stepped in and forced the airline industry to reduce the number of takeoffs and landings between 7 a.m. and 8 p.m. to 88 per hour, down from over 130 or more, reducing delays by 24.5 percent in 2005.

Why the FAA doesn’t simply make airlines comply with common sense isn’t a mystery though, the FAA charter is to promote the airline industry as well as ensure its safe operation. Semenuk adds, “It is a shame that our federal government can only seem to respond to a crisis instead of guiding an industry to adopt safe and reasonable practices. The airlines wouldn’t lose any money, people would still buy tickets to get from point A to point B. If I was forced to fly at 10 a.m. instead of 8 a.m. I’m not going to cancel the trip. I’d much rather have a reliable off-peak travel time than risk turning my trip into some delay-ridden day long saga.”

When asked what the public could do, Gerner and Semenuk agreed that citizens should contact both the FAA and even individual airlines with comments. “The airlines want to make profits, and the FAA want to help them do that. If they think that real people in real numbers are noticing that their industry is undertaking poor practices, perhaps then they will voluntarily make more sensible schedules,” said Semenuk.

Gerner and Semenuk also noted that Swarthmore’s elected representatives Congressman Sestak, State Senator Erickson, and State Representative Lentz were also standing shoulder to shoulder with the County Council and the citizen plaintiffs in support of Council’s efforts. Reilly, Sestak, Erickson, and Lentz acknowledged gratitude for everyone in our area that has already written letters and attended local forums addressing this issue.