Politics: Anne of a Thousand Dreams

But high ideals are a little like her openness about her sexuality: Expressing them won’t necessarily win you votes. A grand plan for change might even backfire, especially if Dicker has to muck up her ideals with the nasty game of hardball politics. And she has already had some problems on that score.


IT WAS IN the wake of the American invasion of Iraq that Dicker — so ideologically far left that she hates George W. Bush in a way that seems oddly personal — decided she could no longer sit idly by. At a meeting at the Standard Tap in Northern Liberties, she and a group of like-minded progressives formed Philly For Dean, part of the rabid movement of grassroots, viral campaigning that would propel the antiwar, über-liberal Howard Dean to temporary front-runner status in the 2004 presidential race, and that would educate Dicker in how to campaign on the cheap, door to door. It was the beginning of her transformation, as her friend and fellow activist Hannah Miller describes it, into “one of the best organizers in the city, a person for whom greater political aspirations would become inevitable.”

Philly For Dean became Philly For Change, another grassroots group Dicker co-founded to search out, nurture and support progressive candidates. When news broke in February 2006 that then-State Representative Marie Lederer was retiring, progressives around the city began calling Dicker, urging her to run. It took her one day to say yes. A virtual unknown outside progressive circles, she knocked on thousands of doors, focusing especially on the changing neighborhoods along the Delaware, essentially running on a power-to-the-people platform, with a decided anti-casino bent. She ultimately earned the attention of the Democratic Party machine — and one Vince Fumo, who summoned her to his South Philly office one day to unsuccessfully demand that she leave the race. Outspent 20 to one by her two competitors, with no party or union backing, no television commercials and very little media coverage, Dicker, in a sense, won — won, that is, by barely losing. She defeated the Fumo-supported candidate, finishing just 300 votes behind the winner, and seemed to have secured her place atop the city’s new progressive wing.

It was her next endeavor, co-founding the grassroots group Casino-Free Philadelphia, that got her citywide notice — and that would ultimately lead some in the reform movement to desert her. The group was, at first, an extraordinary success, rallying thousands of disparate Philadelphians from South Philly to Center City to Fishtown against the legislation, written by none other than Senator Vince Fumo, that cleared the way for slot parlors to be approved for two residential sites on the riverfront. Dicker struck a particularly vituperative tone, attacking Fumo while calling the casinos “parasites” with no practical benefits to the city (desperate though it is for revenue), initially advocating for the legislation to be overturned and casinos barred.

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