New Partisan

From The New York Post

The politics of paranoia have taken hold in Philadelphia - and this may be a preview of the next year’s presidential election.

As Mayor John Street & Co. tell it, the Republican conspiracy that began with the Florida recount and moved on to the California recall has come to Philly - a plot to destroy Democrats and even democracy.
Incredibly, the discovery of an FBI-planted bug in the mayor’s office - which turned out to be part of a two-year investigation into the granting of no-bid city contracts in the City of Brotherly Love - has re-energized a torpid Street campaign.

Pre-bug, Street was stuck running on a record of minimal accomplishments, while his opponent, Republican reformer Sam Katz, could hammer him on Philly’s rapidly rising murder rate and falling population (it was one of just two major U.S. cities to shrink in the ’90s). Post-bug, Street is running against President Bush in a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than four to one, and which Bush lost by nearly 350,000 votes in 2000.

So far, it’s working - but it may prove a pyrrhic victory for both Philadelphia and the Democratic Party.
The race is a rematch of the 1999 Street-Katz contest, which was decided by less than 10,000 votes. Pre-bug, both sides had been struggling to grab the small number of decisive swing voters. Now Center City liberals, once leaning toward Katz, look upon the mayor as a victim of John Ashcroft’s repression. And in a city where Marion Barry has become an oft-mentioned folk hero, Street is now polling at an incredible 93 percent among blacks, and black turnout is expected to be at record levels.
National Democrats have been using the election as a test case for rallying the party’s base, especially black voters.

* James Carville, at a rally that was taped for his reality-TV show, “K Street,” claimed, “There is an entire history of using federal investigatory power in federal courts to affect political outcomes … You decide your future. You don’t turn it over to John Ashcroft.”

* Jesse Jackson added race to the matter, claiming a longterm habit of politically inspired probes and prosecutions against black leaders. He encouraged blacks to turn out for Street because of the investigation, claiming it “will inspire people. It will wake up people who perhaps were asleep or lackadaisical.”

* Terry McAuliffe, head of the Democratic National Committee, conjured up the ghosts of Florida: “You know what they did to get power … Imagine what they’ll do to keep power.”

And the party’s big guns, Bill Clinton and Al Gore, were due to show this weekend.

It’s gotten very ugly. Members of politically potent Local 98 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (whose thuggish exploits have long drawn the attention of the courts) have disrupted numerous Katz events, yelling epithets at the candidate and his wife, and creating an atmosphere of outright menace. When asked, Street has shrugged this off as “just part of the rough-and-tumble campaign.”
And - in a city Democrats have controlled for more than a half-century and where the party runs most all the poll machinery - all the pieces are in place for massive voter fraud: As of 2000, 98.6 percent of Philadelphia’s eligible voters were registered - an unbelieveable ratio; as many as 100,000 of the registrations are likely falsified. Homeless men are routinely paid to vote and driven to the polls.
And the Katz team has documented thousands of voters registered to vacant lots and tiny properties (dozens of people registered at one dilapidated 1,500-sq. ft. parcel, for instance), many of them newly registered in the last four years.

The real question about the FBI bug was: Which crime were the feds probing? Street, who admits that money buys influence, has already been involved in a fistful of scandals, including a $1.1 million airport maintenance contract received by the mayor’s brother, a hot dog vendor. Then there’s the case of the Mercedes-driving black Muslims getting more than $3 million in city funds to run schools where pipes freeze and unpaid teachers routinely quit in the middle of the school year.

Philadelphia has paid a price for such shenanigans, having lost some 21,000 jobs under Street while the region’s suburbs - not hobbled by the city exorbitant taxes, including a wage tax and a “business privilege” tax - have added more than 30,000 jobs. The city’s young and educated routinely leave for greener pastures.

So a Street victory - especially one achieved via cries of victimization, tough-guy tactics and perhaps voter fraud - is likely to accelerate Philadelphia’s long-term collapse. Who will want to live - or invest - in a crime- and fraud-ridden, kleptocratic city where shakedowns and pay-for-play politics are the order of the day?

A win for John Street is one more step toward a national Democratic Party isolated in cities where those who can leave, do - a party mired in its victim status. There may indeed be a plot to destroy the Democratic Party - but it seems the people behind it are Democrats.