Mayor. Michael A. Nutter

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СКАЧАТЬ in great spirits that Thursday. But on Monday, when my phone rang, I knew what I’d be told. Two deaths have had a huge personal impact on me: my grandmother Edythe, and John Anderson. I realized that his staff would be as devastated as I was, so I went to the office, and this was the first time that I ever spoke to the news media.

      Anderson’s funeral was held at his father’s church, and it was a typical political funeral, attended by family, real friends, and the political poseurs and faux friends who show up for all of these funerals. The funeral itself was a very difficult lesson for me in how the political universe operates. People engaged with me, or not, in a very different way now that my guy was dead and I was at the bottom of the political pecking order. I was at a loss: to have been attached to someone so beloved and then to have this suddenly end, and to become, overnight, a nonperson in the world of Philadelphia politics.

      Anderson’s death left a vacancy on the City Council and on the general election ballot in November, of course. Under these circumstances, the Democratic Party gets to replace the person—and the party replaced Anderson with someone who was the complete opposite of the social progressive politics that Anderson stood for. This happened because the replacement, Francis X. Rafferty, was the chair of the public property committee, and in 1983, the City of Philadelphia, like many other big cities, was trying to figure out cable television. Cable TV fell under the purview of the public property committee. The mayor’s office and the City Council were at an impasse over cable TV. The mayor wanted one cable company for the entire city, and the City Council wanted to carve the city into four cable franchise areas. They also insisted that one franchise be African American or a minority-owned company. A battle was raging over the franchising of Area 2, between two African American cable TV companies.

      The Democratic powers that be wanted support for one of these franchises over the other, and the council would have a vote on each of these four cable districts. The cable franchises had to be approved by the city, and that legislation ran through the public property committee, of which Rafferty was the chair. He had just lost the primary as an incumbent, and was going to be out of office, but the council needed his vote to prevail on the cable TV franchise. So they filled Anderson’s vacant seat with Rafferty, with what appears to have been some kind of an understanding or a commitment concerning his vote related to a cable television franchise in this one contested area of the city.

      Politically, ideologically, and temperamentally, Rafferty could not have been more different from Anderson. I was shocked and disillusioned by the decision. This was a hard, hard, lesson for me to learn, at twenty-six years old. The political decision making followed a calculus of narrow self-interest and short-term strategic horse trading that seemed so contrary to the impulses and spirit that Anderson embodied and that had drawn me into the political scene in the first place.

      In any case it seemed that I was suddenly out of politics, because my guy had died and I had entered the business with him. He was my mentor and my political muse. He was why I had gotten into Philadelphia politics. Apparently my aspirations and ambitions for public office were over. So in January 1984, I went back to a friend of Councilman Anderson, Malcolmn Pryor, who owned an investment banking firm, got my Series 7 and Series 63 securities licenses, and began working in finance.

      But then in the summer of 1984, a bizarre series of events indirectly drew me back in to politics. Another at-large city councilman, Al Pearlman, had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. He asked his ex-wife to bring his gun to the hospital—where he subsequently shot and killed himself. He was fifty-four. The Philadelphia Inquirer remembered Pearlman as a “self-made man with Rizzo’s tough style.” This shocking turn of events also had political consequences for Philadelphia: It created a vacancy in the city council at-large ranks.

      After the cable TV–driven appointment of Anderson’s replacement, Mayor Goode had promised a friend of Councilman Anderson that if ever there were a vacancy during his term, he would make sure that he got appointed by the party. He kept his word, and Angel Ortiz became the Democratic nominee to fill the seat of the deceased councilman Pearlman. Ortiz and John had been very close friends, and Ortiz asked me to manage his special election campaign in the 1984 general election. I did so with the understanding that I’d probably only stay with him for about a year, because I had my plan to run for City Council in 1987 as Anderson and I had decided in 1983. So I was his chief of staff and legislative assistant. This is the unusual turn of events that brought me back into the political game, and I wasn’t leaving any time soon!

      I left Councilman Ortiz toward the end of 1985 to go work on Ed Rendell’s election for governor in 1986, and to run for ward committee person. I won my first elected office in 1986, after losing in 1982 and 1984. I was back in the game!

CHAPTER 4

       Aren’t You on City Council? What Are You Going to Do About That?

      I ran for City Council in 1987 according to the plan that I had developed with Councilman Anderson, against an incumbent named Ann Land. She’d been in office for about six years, and had been a member of Philadelphia’s Democratic establishment for some time. Earlier in her life she had campaigned for John F. Kennedy. I lost this election by 1,882 votes. Not that I think about it very much! It was a close race, and it was just the two of us. In this first race, in 1987, the Fourth District was majority white by 55 percent. But in the ensuing years it would be closer to a 50–50 split. During my first campaign I knocked on ten thousand doors. I introduced myself. I put my face on posters, and people wondered why I would do this in the eastern part of the district, which was overwhelmingly white. I explained that the Fourth District needed to know who I was, and voters there seemed to appreciate my honesty. In the 1987 campaign Roxborough was 95 percent white, and I got 17 percent of the vote. Four years later in 1991, I would get 34 percent, and in 1995, 64 percent of that vote.

      I vowed on the night that I lost in 1987 to run again in four years. Meanwhile I went back to the investment banking firm where I’d been working. The firm’s owner had been a good friend of Councilman Anderson and appreciated my commitment to public service, but he would gently remind me that I could make a lot more money in investment banking. I worked there for three years, came back in the 1991 election, and won.

      From the start, I planned to be a pretty active legislator. I had grown up through the City Council process, and I genuinely liked the council. When I joined I knew many of the members from my work with John Anderson, although not necessarily that well.

      I had a tremendous team to support me while serving on the City Council. Debra Brown was the first person I asked to work in my City Council office. After I won the election, and not knowing Debra’s exact address, I went back to the block where I thought she lived and knocked on doors until I found her, and offered her a job. Unquestionably loyal, a tremendously hard worker, and a good person, she had a bird’s-eye view on all that happened, from the City Council to the mayor’s office. Debra is also special because she shares my daughter Olivia’s birthday! I first met Bobby Johnson because he was a longtime friend of John Anderson and his family, and based on that relationship and friendship he joined my council office, working mainly in the district office in Wynnefield, and then joining my mayoral administration. Bobby is just an all-around good man—low key, fun, highly reliable, and a good friend to many. Wadell Ridley’s daughter and my daughter attended daycare together, and we have been friends a long time, through many battles. Wadell was part of my office, and, along with Steve Jones, was involved in all of the political campaigns and activities. I turned to Arlene Petruzzelli when I was looking for someone to run my district office in the Twenty-First Ward, which includes Roxborough and Manayunk. The ward leader had recommended her, and Arlene was hard charging, funny, and down to earth—a wonderful and sweet woman, who died a number of years ago after retiring СКАЧАТЬ