Politics: Cleaning House

LAST DECEMBER 31st, Josh Shapiro and his wife, Lori, tired from a late flight back from L.A. the night before, were being, the young legislator recalls, “a lame married couple. We were going to get Chinese food and watch the ball drop.” After collecting their New Year’s takeout, the couple was driving through an Abington intersection when Shapiro remembered a moment a few years before, when he had been standing on that very corner alongside campaign volunteers, waving SHAPIRO ’04 placards. One passing motorist who gave a thumbs-up was driving a car with a state legislator’s license plate. When Shapiro got back to his campaign headquarters, he had looked it up. It belonged to Dennis O’Brien, a veteran Republican rep.

Remembering O’Brien, Shapiro considered the daunting political puzzle he and his fellow Democrats were now facing in Harrisburg. And something in his brain clicked.

Two days later, the Harrisburg legislature had an unprecedented new configuration, with a Republican Speaker — Denny O’Brien — handpicked by the Democratic majority. John Perzel, the GOP machine boss who had become a metaphor for ­business-as-usual politics in the state capitol, and was highly regarded for his strategic acumen, had been checkmated by an eager-beaver second-term Montgomery County state rep from the other side of the aisle. “You had a kid from an affluent family from Abington, with a great educational background — in high school, college and law school — against a guy with a limited education, a street fighter,” a longtime Harrisburg observer says about the square-off. “And Perzel’s got to sit back in his den one day and say, ‘Jesus, that little fucker did a great job.’”

NEWS FLASH: Harrisburg is a hidebound, partisan swamp. It was here that elected officials thought voting themselves a hefty pay raise (up to 34 percent) under cover of night (at 2 a.m.), hours after taking a machete to Medicaid for the old and infirm, and then going on vacation for two months, would be a good idea. It is here that comb-overed titan of probity Mark Cohen remains a state rep despite notoriously expensing to taxpayers, in a single year, $28,000 in books for his own reading pleasure, including AOL for Dummies, a biography of Mark Twain, and The Little Book of Stress. And it is Harrisburg that incubated the walking 139-count indictment known as Senator Vince Fumo. Seniority, in this place, is earned as predictably and mechanically as civil-service promotions. Against this tawdry backdrop, the emergence of a gutsy, savvy sophomore lawmaker who could make Big Things happen by forging a political compromise without compromising his own ideals was, sadly when you think about it, something bordering on radical. O’Brien quickly named Shapiro to the invented position of deputy speaker, and appointed him co-chair of the new, bipartisan Speaker’s Commission on Reform. Harrisburg isn’t a place given to phenoms and rising stars, but those are the kinds of words people use to describe Shapiro. “He’s someone clearly capable of running for Congress,” says Neil Oxman, who served as Shapiro’s media consultant when he first ran for state office in 2004. “And I certainly think he could run statewide. He’s in it for the right reasons.”

On an Indian-summer September morning back in his district northeast of Philadelphia, Shapiro drives his black Jeep Laredo toward an assisted-living facility where he’s due to speak. As he drives, he talks about an old warehouse, on Route 611, that developers and civic leaders have been at odds over; yesterday, Shapiro brought the conflicting parties together to work through their differences. “At 11, I stood up to leave, to speak at a memorial service for a fallen police officer,” Shapiro says, “and everyone else stood up. I said, ‘Where are you going? When I come back, let’s hammer out an answer.’ And in the end, we shook hands, and we had a deal. So it was a great meeting, and hopefully an example of what we can do with 611.”

For a guy who engineered a coup, Shapiro doesn’t look especially Machiavellian. With his clean shave, glossy hair, rimless glasses and crisp shirts, he seems both older and younger than his 34 years. Older in his intensity and seriousness of purpose. Younger physically: Oxman likes to needle Shapiro about his baby-faced appearance in his campaign literature, chiding him to lose “the bar mitzvah photo.”