The Maybe Mayor

IT'S A QUESTION, IN SHORT, of what kind of mayor Bob Brady would be.

When I pressed Brady about the major issues confronting the city, he was, once again, light on substance. Perhaps, given that I talked to him before he announced his candidacy, he hadn't thought the problems through. On the issue of the slot parlors on the river: He's for the casinos, but also for the people of the neighborhoods, who are largely in opposition. On the issue of more jobs: He's for them, but offers no ideas about how more can be created. When we get to the most pressing issue of all — the gun violence in this city that is claiming, on average, more than one life a day — Brady at first offered nothing but more empty bubbles: More cops are needed, and there are too many guns on the streets.

But then he reminded me that late last fall, he organized two summits here on the murder epidemic, bringing together a large group of people from across the city to offer up reasons for why it's happening and ways it might be stopped. Participants included Mayor Street, District Attorney Lynne Abraham, the U.S. Attorney, the police commissioner, several city judges, leaders of the black clergy, and leaders from the statehouse.

"And guess what?" Brady said. "At the end of the first meeting, they were extremely comfortable. And they kept dialoguing — who's gonna do this, do that, the what, the where. And the second meeting, they responded back to what they already talked about. We're waiting to find out where we're at with the legislature to try to put some laws on the books to get some things done." And then Brady told me this: that for most of the participants — all important players in Philadelphia's well-being — it was not only the first time they'd ever been in a room together, but the first time they'd met. I wondered how that was possible.

"What the hell do I know?" he said. "It's stoopid. And I'm gonna make sure that never happens again."

Still, many political observers argue that to be effective, Brady must, like Richard Nixon when he went to China, repackage himself: "The central question," Sam Katz says, "is whether he's going to be Bob Brady, the political boss, who's going to be that kind of mayor. Or whether he's going to try to be different."

But maybe Bob Brady's actually right for the job just the way he is. Certainly he carries baggage from a long legacy as godfather of The Machine. But he also carries with him important connections from Philly to Harrisburg to D.C. and back again, and an unusual willingness to admit that he might not know the answers, but that he'll bring people together who can find them. In a practical way, he could, for example, like the ultra-anti-communist Nixon visiting China, use his chops as a dyed-in-the-wool union guy to force unions to make some concessions and thereby make doing business with the city more palatable and less costly. Isn't that, in its own way, a sort of policy?

Because position papers and laws alone won't solve a lot of our problems. Like the murder epidemic, which Brady believes we have to see — and treat — at its roots: the desperation and emptiness many living in poverty assume are an intractable reality. "Hope, hope, hope," he said. "Gotta give people hope. Hey — maybe me running around being a guy who was unemployed at one time, maybe that says, It could happen to me. Maybe it could happen to you. To me, that's what hope is."

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