Politics: Poor Al

ONCE UPON A time, there was a mayor in Philadelphia who was crude and insensitive. He frequently used the N-word, and when a reporter asked him why he was giving all the city jobs to his friends, he responded, “You don’t expect me to give them to my enemies, do you?” Once, when he was being hounded by the press about a complex corruption issue, he volunteered to take a polygraph test to finally put the matter to rest. He failed it.

He was a Democrat. He got reelected.

Then there was a mayor whose judgment was so bad that he thought it would be a good idea to drop an incendiary device on a house full of civilians. After the whole city block burned down, they counted 11 dead people, five of them children.

He was a Democrat. He got reelected.

Then there was a mayor whose administration was so rife with corruption that the FBI was bugging his office, in an investigation that eventually netted several multi-year jail terms for his close associates. When news of the bugging device became common knowledge, his poll numbers inexplicably shot up, and he got reelected.

I think you know what party he belonged to.

After 14 consecutive butt-whuppings, the Republican Party in Philadelphia seems to have had enough. It was just eight years ago that Sam Katz led the Republicans to within 9,000 votes of City Hall, four years since he was ahead in the polls just a few weeks before Election Day. But with this upcoming mayoral election, it’s as if the cumulative effect of so much losing has taken its toll. Limping along with a virtually unfunded and little-known candidate named Al Taubenberger, in a city where only one in four voters calls himself a Republican, the party is poised to take beating number 15 with barely a whimper.

And that could be bad news for everybody.


“AL TAUBENBERGER’S a great guy,” Sam Katz tells me. “Al’s a great guy,” agrees Zack Stalberg, head of the watchdog group Committee of Seventy. “It’s impossible not to like Al Taubenberger,” says Republican City Committee deputy director Al Schmidt. And there you have it: The best the Republicans can do is field a pleasant candidate.

Not true, claims State Rep John Perzel, from Northeast Philly. “Al Taubenberger is a viable candidate. Everybody thought Sam Katz was a joke at first. No one had heard of him at this point in his campaign.” While that may be largely true, by May of his campaign Sam Katz had $4 million to tell them who he was. Taubenberger was stuck with about $20,000.

Though they are right — Al Taubenberger, 54 years old, is a nice guy, and he, in turn, is fond of his opponent. “Michael Nutter is a great guy,” says Al Taubenberger. “I sat down with him, and we agreed to run a clean campaign.” The unspoken truth hangs heavy in the air, because this campaign is going to be as dirty as Michael Nutter needs it to be, which, so far, is not very. In fact, the result is such a foregone conclusion that Taubenberger and Nutter got up onstage together at Stu Bykofsky’s 17th Annual Candidates Comedy Night, a charity showcase at Finnegan’s Wake in mid-August, and the running joke was what bosom pals the two candidates are.