Politics: Cleaning House

IT'S THE MIDDLE of the afternoon, and in the conference room at Shapiro’s Abington district office, a parade of constituents calls on him. His slot on the appropriations committee has enabled him to bring back close to $20 million to his district in the two and a half years since he joined the legislature, and has made him an influential player in the state’s budget process; today’s supplicants include two women from a women’s-health-services organization seeking a line item for one of their causes, and the head of a citizens’ group seeking to stop the Barnes Foundation from relocating to Center City. When a few of the visitors take shots at Rendell, Shapiro deftly sidesteps the criticisms, uttering wry variations of “That’s between you and the Governor.” Between audiences, he has a phone conversation with the treasurer of a state that has had some success divesting its pension funds from companies that do business in terror-sponsoring countries. A constituent wonders aloud how Shapiro will be able to forge a particular deal. Shapiro grins and says, “I’m very good at locking people in my office and not letting them out until they decide.”

Still, the work at this level is hardly glamorous: His efforts at revitalizing the district have so far helped yield a coffee shop in an old SEPTA station. He’s working with PennDOT to try to have an aging bridge in the district moved up on the priority list of infrastructure to modernize, and has brought together a coalition of local businessmen and other stakeholders to undertake a thorough study of ways to reawaken the 611 corridor. The day ends with 15 people converging in a conference room for a presentation by the firm commissioned to do the study.

Married to his high-school sweetheart, and prone to talking earnestly about his family (as when he relates how he wept the day before as he sent Sophia off to kindergarten), Shapiro would seem to be the kind of postcard-perfect politician who surely must, in secret, wear nipple clamps and worship Satan. But those who know him say the smart, hardworking, reasonable, non-robotic person you see is who Shapiro is — ambitious without being ruthless, principled without being rigid, “manipulative in a good way,” substantive without being ideological. “If there’s criticism from anywhere, I’d say it’s jealousy and resentment, not left-right,” notes a longtime Harrisburg observer. “The lunatic fringes on both sides of the aisle don’t like to see quality. They just like to complain.”

An observant Conservative Jew, Shapiro manages, in a profession virtually defined by its blur of dinners featuring rubber chicken as the primary entrée, to keep kosher. Even when the legislature is in session, he makes the two-hour drive home many nights so he can wake up with Sophia and her two-year-old brother, Jonah. “That’s something that’s marginal in politics,” says John Saler, a lobbyist with the law firm Stradley Ronon, where Shapiro is of counsel. “There are a lot of chameleons out there. He’s not one of them.” (Mercifully, Shapiro isn’t devoid of human failings: As I rode with him on a drive through the 153rd in his dual-kid-seat-equipped SUV, the proud sponsor of a new bill aimed at “disconnecting distracted drivers” by outlawing handheld cell-phone use while operating a motor vehicle conspicuously thumbed his BlackBerry.)

Shapiro’s interest in trying to do the right thing in a world of gray may help explain his fascination with the post-Apocalypse cult TV series Jericho, created by his brother-in-law. Mystery surrounds the motives of one of the show’s main characters, Robert Hawkins, and Shapiro regularly calls up his sister and brother-in-law after each new episode and demands: “Is Hawkins good or bad?” His brother-in-law responds, “Are you sure you want to know?” Shapiro invariably sighs and admits he doesn’t. When Shapiro was reelected last year, the actor who plays Hawkins taped a congratulatory video.

Shapiro, along with some like-­minded colleagues, has been a blast of oxygen in the smoke-choked back rooms of quid-pro-quo Harrisburg. Still, it is a testament to our lowered expectations for politicians in general, or for those in Pennsylvania in particular, that he has become a star partly by doing things that in a more perfect world would appear standard among politicians — working hard and taking his job seriously, sending long, substantive, text-heavy newsletters to his constituents, holding 30 town meetings in his first two years in office. This puts him in a weirdly circular situation: The very Harrisburg ­mediocrity that has allowed him to make a name for himself will, if he’s successful in his reform efforts, cease to exist.

Not that that would mean the end of Josh Shapiro. No one seriously thinks his ambitions end in the state legislature, though Shapiro is careful not to get ahead of himself, at least out loud. “All you can do is do the best at the position you’re in,” he says, “and be prepared.”                                  

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