So it was red meat night at the Republican convention, and one expects the usual attacks and swipes at the opponents. Third night at political conventions for both parties can get rough.

I’m just wondering if there are any Republicans out there who are aware of the semiotics of an arena full of middle aged white people, arms raised over their heads, gleefully yelling “Zero! Zero! Zero!” about the most successful black American politician ever.

Sarah Palin became Governor of Alaska after serving two terms (totaling four years) on the “city” council of Wasilla Alaska. And then she became mayor of the same “city.” For residents of Pennsylvania, Wasilla would roughly translate to “borough.” Wasilla’s population is equivalent to sleepy little Hummelstown or Swarthmore, PA; the population is quite a bit smaller than almost all of the Townships in Delaware County, which manage to operate quite well despite the fact that they usually do not even have mayors.

Palin has only completed two years of her first term managing the government of her tiny state. Alaska has a population of roughly half the size of Dallas, TX. It’s legislature is constitutionally required to be in session for no more than 90 days per year.

I would get her selection as a perverse choice for Secretary of the Interior, but there is really only one requirement for a veep selection. A good veep candidate doesn’t necessarily  have to be from an important swing state; or pass particular political litmus tests; or even be sympatico with the President. S/he must  be obviously qualified to be President if required to do so.

McCain is too clever for his own good, and too desperate to prove he’s still a maverick.

Better get a Democrat elected in 2008. Then hope that he/she has a successful first term. Reallocation of house seats, and therefore electoral college votes, is likely to create the net effect of the loss of one mid-sized blue state. Based on the projections of EDS and Polidata, I quickly and unscientifically break down the allocation shifts.

Clearly bad: Texas +4, Arizona +2, N.C. +1, S.C. +1, Georgia +1, Utah +1; New York -2, Mass. -1, California -1, New Jersey -1, Pennsylvania -1, Michigan -1, Illinois -1, Minnesota -1.

Maybe good: Nevada+1, Oregon+1; Ohio -2

Impact unclear: Florida +2; Iowa -1, Missouri -1, Louisiana -1

The impact on the makup of the House is less obvious, because we may be shifting some red districts in blue states for newer, bluer districts in a few red or swing states. But in terms of the electoral college, this clearly argues that the Democrats are going to have to make inroads into the South or Southwest in the next few cycles.

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?

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.