May 18, 2011

Primary Day 2011: Some Wins, Some Losses.

There are Also Lessons Learned

By Stan Shapiro

Primary Day 2011: Some Wins, Some Losses.

There are Also Lessons Learned

It was a mixed bag for Neighborhood Networks and for progressives on Tuesday. We did win some important contests. Two fine incumbents were re-elected to Council, Blondell Reynolds Brown and Maria Quinones Sanchez. They will do what they can to make the lives of women, children and ordinary people living in the City’s neighborhoods, better. Marge Tartaglione, the head of the City Commissioners’ office, who has been famously uninterested in performing the actual duties of her office in any effective way, has been deposed. And her replacement, NN-endorsed candidate Stephanie Singer, is a brilliant mathematician committed to expanding the electorate. We will have more people voting in Philadelphia because of Singer’s win, and hopefully that single fact will lead to many more victories to follow.

Furthermore, as of this writing, civil rights lawyer Kathryn Boockvar, a wonderful, NN-endorsed candidate for Commonwealth Court, is leading in that race. Hopefully she will prevail.

But we also faced some stinging defeats. Sherrie Cohen lost her Council At-Large race by 1,600 votes. Andy Toy trailed Sherrie by another 5,000 votes. Jeff Hornstein, NN’s choice in the First Councilmanic District, and Greg Paulmier, our choice In the 8th, also lost, by wide margins. If one or more of these had won, the next Council could have become a center of progressive activism, open to all kinds of new, forward-looking ideas.

So we won four and lost four, but that’s not good enough. There’s too much at stake to settle for half a loaf. So what can the progressive community in general, and NN in particular, do better next time?

Well, we have to better do what NN came into existence to do, namely get to know our neighbors. Whatever you might say about the Democratic machine, you have to give it this one thing: its foot-soldiers, the thousands of Committeepeople who are the eyes and ears of the Party all around the City, are deeply embedded in their communities. I’ve personally spent many election days working for progressive candidates all around Philadelphia. And I’m always startled at the fact that wherever I go, the regular Committeepeople I work next to, greet and meet countless voters as warmly as they would family members. And these voters are happy to get guidance from these helpful pols, especially about the large number of contests that they know virtually nothing about.

The Democratic Party and its machinery are deeply entrenched in the heart of Philadelphia’s communities and that gives them an enormous advantage. Unfortunately they use that advantage to help elect too many candidates who are in the game only for themselves. But we can deplore that fact all we want. Unless and until we are willing to root ourselves in our neighborhoods as the Party has done, it’s going to be hard to turn our politics around....

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