That’s how Linda Morrison now felt.
II
The Christmas tree lighting ceremony in the City Hall courtyard, another new feature of city life ushered in by the Rendell administration, was spectacular, as always. City Hall itself was ablaze with thousands of tiny lights that had been painstakingly placed on its borders, making the massive structure actually look warm. The long expanse of the parkway, from Logan Circle to the foot of the art museum, had been lit up with twinkling snowflakes, paid for by the Legg Mason investment firm. It was a fact he kept in mind when he later called the city treasurer, Kathryn Engebretson, and said that such largesse really did deserve a little bit of city business (“Legg Mason did the snowflakes on the parkway, so we thought it would be nice to reward them immediately”).
The ceremony itself, replete with appearances by Eric Lindros of the Philadelphia Flyers and Shawn Bradley of the Philadelphia 76ers, only added to the occasion. Even the church youth choir, singing the carols with a kind of James Brown subtlety, so that each word sounded like a bullet through glass—not “Joy to the world” but “Joy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! to!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! the!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! world!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”—prevented anyone from dozing off.
Rendell loved these occasions, and he may have particularly loved this one since a significant political scandal, the first real one the Rendell administration had faced, was being uncovered with fanaticism by the Inquirer. It had to do with a state senate race that under normal circumstances would have received barely more than obligatory coverage. But this one, between Republican Bruce Marks and Democrat William Stinson, had true statewide implications. Whichever party won it would retain control of the state senate in Harrisburg and the power of the state’s budget purse strings. Given that Democrats outnumbered Republicans by two to one in the district, Stinson should have been the surefire winner. But he was such a bland and unremarkable candidate that panic set in, and several weeks before the election, Rendell sent private letters to his A-list of fund-raisers, telling them that contributions to the Stinson campaign were far more important than contributions to the Democratic National Committee. “This is an urgent, top priority plea for you to give and/or raise as much money as possible for Bill Stinson’s Senate campaign within the next week,” wrote Rendell. “We need a minimum of $100,000 from the Rendell Finance Committee no later than next Monday.… I do not impose upon my friends often, but I need the help now. Please don’t let me down.”
Stinson won by a bare 463 votes out of the 40,000 that were cast, and the Democrats were immediately alleged to have stolen the election. The Inquirer, in an effort that ultimately included the efforts of forty-three reporters, turned the allegations into reality. The paper uncovered hundreds of cases in which voters, many of them Latinos, had been outrageously manipulated, talked into signing absentee ballots, which were obliquely described to them as a “new way to vote.”
Ironically, it was Rendell’s off-the-cuff comment that stoked the Inquirer’s curiosity and led to the relentless coverage. In its initial story on the troubling outcome of the November election, the paper cited cases of three dozen voters who apparently had been fraudulently induced to cast absentee votes for the Democratic ticket. Rendell threw down a gauntlet in response, declaring that no investigation of voter fraud would be merited unless the number of questionable ballots reached one hundred.
The mayor would have been better off simply putting a red bull’s-eye on his backside and letting reporters take whacks with their little notebooks. Given such a challenge, it was little wonder the paper ultimately uncovered more than five hundred questionable ballots, as if saying to the mayor, “Is that enough, or should we go out and get some more?”
The stories were long and in some cases remarkably repetitive, feeding the angry belief of the mayor and others in the administration that the true goal of the paper was not public service but the personal aggrandizement of winning a Pulitzer. The story only intensified, to the point where a former public official and well-placed Democratic fund-raiser privately begged Cohen to get the mayor to convene a blue-ribbon panel to study possible reform of the election code, not because it would serve any constructive purpose but because it would help the Inquirer win the damn Pulitzer and thereby get the paper off the story.
“This is their Pulitzer application,” said Tom Leonard, a former city controller, in a heated conversation with Cohen. “They’re looking for governmental action.” Leonard was savvy in his assessment on several levels: Pulitzers are often won on the basis of results and reforms, and Pulitzers were also the great sustenance of the Inquirer, with seventeen won between 1972 and 1990. His thinking apparently was that a blue-ribbon panel might be enough of a result to “sate” the paper. He even had a name in mind to head it, a former U.S. attorney well-known for righteousness, and he thought such a move would put Rendell, whose every word seemed only to inspire the paper even more, on the side of the angels. But Cohen rejected the idea because he thought it would look utterly transparent and also because he doubted it would in any way diminish the paper’s coverage.
The election story beat on mercilessly, taking up huge chunks of the front page in December. But other than those working for the paper and a handful of those directly involved, there was always some question of how many others in the city truly cared about it to the insatiable degree that the Inquirer did—a scandal without a broad constituency. The mayor himself obviously didn’t like the coverage. He found no public motive in what the Inquirer was doing; the fact that the paper had uncovered astounding examples of election fraud seemed of no moment to him. But at a certain point, he seemed resigned to the continued onslaught of it and to the worst of all possible fates: “Who the fuck cares if they win a Pulitzer anyway? The readers don’t care.” And given the condition of the city and the daily question of its ultimate survival, there were more important issues to become distraught over anyway.
The year 1993 was in its final day. The halfway mark of the administration had been reached—and far more than that in a psychological sense because portions of 1994 and 1995 would be occupied by the mayor’s bid for reelection. The line on the graph of the administration had shown an unbroken upward movement since Rendell took office two years earlier. But in those last breaths of 1993 came the kind of news that would render any chart meaningless.
Without being given any clear right of appeal, the city was told that consolidations in the Internal Revenue Service would cost Philadelphia about 3,800 jobs over the next five years. The announcement was crushing, coming on top of the closings of such vintage Philadelphia businesses as Whitman’s Chocolate, Mrs. Paul’s Kitchens, and After Six. All told for the twelve-month period ending September 30, 1993, the city had lost an estimated 21,400 jobs. Under the IRS plan, Philadelphia would suffer enormously while other areas of the country, such as Ogden, Utah, would benefit greatly, a circumstance that once again cemented the view that the federal government’s policy in its treatment of the cities wasn’t simply one of benign neglect but was one of deliberate dismantlement. It wasn’t just the loss of jobs that was crippling; it was the types of jobs—decent ones in the range of $20,000 a year that provided good benefits and didn’t require an abundance of sophisticated skills, jobs that were perfect for thousands of city residents and impossible to replicate.
With an urgency in his voice that at times bordered on desperation, Rendell spoke by phone to the Democratic National Committee chairman David Wilhelm, asking him to arrange thirty minutes of time with the president and the vice president to discuss not only the IRS decision and the continuing crisis of the navy yard but also the crisis of America’s cities: “We have let loose an absolutely ferocious school of piranhas in the name of reinventing government, and this school of piranhas eats indiscriminately, and they don’t give two shits about America’s cities. It’s not just Philadelphia, David; it’s all large urban centers. We are getting unintentionally screwed up the rear by the administration.”
Mo
ments later he spoke with Marcia Hale, in charge of intergovernmental affairs for the White House, and he said something to her that he never would have said in public because it would have undercut all the bread and circuses, all the confetti throwings and summer pool submergings and roof nailings and mascot fightings and menorah lightings and Mickey Mouse appearances that were, more than anything else, sustaining the city. There were times, many times, when the mayor postured to make a point, exaggerated because he thought exaggeration was the only way to make people understand, but this wasn’t one of those times. Alone in his office he spoke from the place where he always spoke best and most clearly, from an unclouded heart.
“Putting aside my mayor’s hat for a second, we’re dying,” he said over the phone. He was sitting at his conference table, leaning ever so slightly, with one hand pressed against the side of his head. As always, his left leg frantically pumped up and down, as if, by the very rhythmic frenzy of the action, he could just speed everything up, make everything happen that needed to happen. “We’re dying,” he repeated with a little more emphasis this time. “Forget all the good things I’ve done; Philadelphia is dying. It’s happened a lot more slowly since I took office, but we’re dying.”
III
Several months later, at the end of March 1994, Rendell and Cohen found themselves on a Metroliner headed for Washington for a private meeting on the housing authority with HUD Secretary Cisneros. As they found seats in the dining car, the two men seemed relaxed and happy to be out of the chaos of City Hall. Cohen, who rarely accompanied the mayor on his forays to the nation’s capital, had come armed with a briefcase full of paperwork that he hoped the two of them could get to during the train ride. Rendell didn’t mind doing paperwork but seemed equally interested in the fat-free chocolate muffins he had bought at one of the little vending booths in the station just before the train pulled out. Despite their divergent styles, they had eerily assumed twinlike behavior in certain areas. Both had brought along brown-bag lunches for the ride, and even though they had ordered separately, both had gotten the same thing: Russian-dressing hoagies with a side of turkey.
They were in good moods for a variety of reasons. Despite their protests that the Inquirer’s coverage of the state senate race had been sensational and overheated, a federal judge had taken the unprecedented action of voiding the results of the election. But a few days before the train trip to Washington, they had gotten wind of news that made them feel vindicated, and they could barely conceal their glee. The Pulitzers wouldn’t be announced for another several weeks, but the initial judging, the worst-kept secret in all of America, had already taken place, and the Inquirer wasn’t even a finalist. The paper’s editors and reporters said repeatedly that a Pulitzer Prize had never motivated the coverage, but Rendell and Cohen reveled in what they were convinced was the paper’s humiliation, particularly since the paper had built its reputation on winning journalism’s most prestigious award. “I was significantly worried that [the judges] would be seduced by those thousands of column inches all saying the same thing,” said Cohen. “It has restored my faith in the Pulitzer process.”
“I am satisfied,” said Rendell. “I think they worked incredibly hard to drive a story line and exaggerate and embellish.”
Two days before the train ride, a profile of Rendell had appeared on the front page of the Sunday Washington Post. Long and mostly laudatory, it had certified Rendell as the great dragon slayer on behalf of the cities. He tried to be humble about it, moaning that he could never again show his face at a U.S. Conference of Mayors meeting without risking “assassination.” But despite his efforts to minimize the story, the glow of it had clearly carried beyond that of the usual publicity fix. Four years earlier Rendell had been seen as a has-been politician trying to make a desperate comeback. Now he was a star, not just a star of the city but a national star, Vice President Gore’s words about him forever committed to print in one of the nation’s most prestigious papers: “America’s mayor.”
It was a crowning moment, and as the train sped past Wilmington and the two men laughed and joked and dipped their hoagies into their little vats of Russian dressing in perfect sync, it seemed hard to believe that any other single moment of the administration could be better than this one. In that rumpled suit, with that bemused look on his face, inviting everyone around him to try one of those fat-free chocolate muffins and see, see, how it tasted like the real thing, Ed Rendell was America’s mayor.
But in between the moments of relaxed banter, Cohen continued to go through the contents of his briefcase, and he pulled out the results of a private citywide poll of voters. The poll documented Rendell’s stunning popularity in the city, with a 76 percent approval rating. It also showed that a majority of those polled, 52 percent, thought conditions in the city were better than they had been a few years ago.
But the poll pointed out other trends as well, trends that were foreboding not only in terms of what Rendell had achieved but also in terms of what lay ahead for a city that was as divided as ever along class and economic lines, a city where the gap between the haves and the have-nots wasn’t simply a gap but was perhaps an unbridgeable gulf. The poll also suggested that in running his administration like a Broadway musical, with a great series of showstoppers to make up for a bleak and depressing story, the mayor may have reached his peak.
A criticism of Rendell had always been that he was a downtown mayor driven by downtown interests to the virtual dismissal of the neighborhoods. He bristled at that, sending his critics vitriolic letters noting the millions upon millions that had been spent in the neighborhoods. He also argued that economic development, regardless of where it was located, meant jobs for people in the neighborhoods. He was right about that, but he also knew that it was perception that counted, and the poll showed that the vast majority of the electorate remained unconvinced about his commitment to the neighborhoods. “Voters overwhelmingly think you care ‘mostly about the problems of downtown businessmen and Center City’ (64 percent) instead of ‘mostly about the problems facing average people in the neighborhoods’ (28 percent),” the pollsters concluded. The number-one problem in the city, the poll showed, was fighting crime and drugs, and nearly 70 percent thought the mayor could be working “a lot harder” to try to solve it. The poll also showed that 50 percent believed that the mayor, after starting fast, was now slowing down.
From a political standpoint, the poll concluded that “there exist several weaknesses that a potential opponent could try to exploit next year.” Dwight Evans, whose name had been whispered and repeated the most, was currently running for governor in the Democratic primary. Because he was black, no one gave him a ghost of a chance in a statewide election (it had once reportedly been uttered by political huckster James Carville that between the poles of Philadelphia to the east and Pittsburgh to the west lay Alabama). But Evans’s showing in the primary would be an interesting barometer of his potential strength in a mayoral election, where the dynamics of race were very different and where blacks in past elections had constituted a majority of registered Democrats in the city.
From a practical standpoint, the poll was depressing proof of what demographers and other social scientists feared most about the city: its unabated evolution into a two-tiered place with a narrow crust of wealthy residents feeding off the downtown renaissance and an enormous swath of blacks and working-class whites struggling vainly to survive, a schism so strong that the pollsters had highlighted the following passage in italics:
Examining just the overall numbers about the improved confidence of the city ignores real concerns among black and less educated white voters about the direction of the city. The enthusiastic feelings about the improved Philadelphia are driven mainly by the optimism of better educated and upscale white voters.
But in the euphoria of the moment for Ed Rendell, stemming from The Washington Post piece and the approval ratings and the creamy Russian dressing in ample supply in its plastic cups and the safe c
ompany of a brilliant man who had put loyalty to him above loyalty to a wife and children, that schism didn’t even seem to register, except perhaps as a potential political problem.
As the Metroliner pulled into Washington’s Union Station right around 2:00 P.M., America’s mayor was still soaring and would continue to soar. At least for another hour.
Rendell and Cohen crammed themselves into the backseat of a taxi and were on their way to HUD headquarters to see Cisneros when they pulled out their cellular phones simultaneously to check in for messages. Cohen’s phone was sleek and black and was easily removed from his breast pocket. The mayor’s was gray and clunky and held together by a rubber band, and it wobbled as it was brought forth from his brown valise.
“Hi, Annie,” said the mayor.
“Hi, Yvonne,” said Cohen.
The mayor was given a brief rundown of who had called. So was Cohen. In the cab, neither man had any idea of the code-red crisis that was exploding 140 miles away in their own city. The Daily News had gotten hold of a profile of the mayor that would shortly appear in Philadelphia Magazine, and by all accounts it was a heart stopper, not because the reporter had taken potshots but because of what the mayor had said to the reporter—stuff about spiky metal bras and what the reporter might be like in bed and how the mayor and Clinton were alike in just a whole lot of ways beyond being Democrats and married to lawyers.
The writer of the Philadelphia Magazine article, Lisa DePaulo, had previously produced stories with sexual twists to them. In 1991, she had done a story for the magazine about the Republican mayoral candidate Sam Katz, much of which dealt with accusations of sexual harassment. It was merciless, and Cohen not only remembered it vividly but also had kept it in his office as if never to forget it. He had warned the mayor of the repercussions of letting DePaulo spend the day with him on a trip to New York, describing her as “treacherous,” and a “bitch.” But the mayor hadn’t listened. So Cohen had gotten Tom Leonard to go with the mayor and DePaulo as a chaperone. But that clearly hadn’t done much good.
A Prayer for the City Page 37