Who Really Runs This Town?: The Lopez Legacy

John Baer/Daily news
Persona: If Molly Ivins were a guy. And covered Harrisburg.
Signature move: A cocktail of amusement and incredulity, usually prompted by the jaw-dropping chutzpah and rank idiocy of the folks the Commonwealth’s voters have elected to govern. In June, Baer offered an eyewitness account of the infamous flag kerfluffle of ’05, in which Rep. John Myers called fellow Democrat Thomas Yewcic a “cracker” on the House floor.
Lopez level: Finding stories in Harrisburg that inspire fear and loathing is about as hard as finding Skynyrd fans at the Alabama state fair, but Baer, a former staffer for Bill Scranton, does have Lopezian levels of clout in the incestuous world of political nerds. His colleagues marvel at his encyclopedic knowledge of state government, and he’s read by the political class. After Baer spent years cheering Rendell, for example, Democratic insiders were flummoxed by several recent pieces highly critical of the governor.  
Rating: Three Lopez faces

Tom Ferrick Jr./Inquirer
Persona: Gruff, streetwise, world-weary cynic, i.e., the default persona for every columnist since the invention of dirt.
Signature move: The short, punchy sentence, usually at the end of a paragraph. Kinda. Like. This.
Lopez level: Doesn’t have Lopez’s flair for the theatrical, but commands respect for both his vast storehouse of knowledge of Philly’s political history and his reporting. He’ll sometimes surprise insiders by not being as tough on someone as he could. Still, Ferrick is the most likely metro columnist to get City Hall a-flutter, as when he called Councilwoman Donna Reed Miller “dumber than a stick” after Council voted down an ethics bill in March.
Rating: Three and a half Lopez faces

John Grogan/Inquirer
Persona: Guilty white liberal.
Signature move: Efficiency. Often squeezes two, three or 12 columns out of a single topic. Has roughly the same relationship with legislative pay raises as Claude Monet had with Rouen Cathedral. Also responsible for the “Kindness Chronicles,” a series of columns he wrote earlier this year taking on the highly controversial topic of people being nice.
Lopez level: Could be considered the anti-Lopez; he’s the columnist most likely to induce eye-rolling among fellow scribes. Too often content to pick off low-hanging fruit, such as chastising State Rep. Daylin Leach for the unforgivable sin of trying to be funny. Defending Leach and his online rants? Now that would be earning a paycheck.
Rating: One-half Lopez face

Chris Satullo
Persona: Would-be academic
Signature move:  “________ is going to hell in a handbasket.”
Lopez level: Satullo, the Inquirer’s editorial page editor, is a good writer and a smart guy, but his columns — much like the Inquirer editorial page itself — is considered hopelessly idealistic, a bastion of unrealistic ivory-tower thinking; pious is the word you hear most often when officials describe Satullo’s editorial voice. In April, for example, when he wrote a column asking why people weren’t more angry about the city’s endemic corruption, his only prescriptions to end pay-to-play were to publicly finance elections (good luck), to end nepotism (ditto), and to pay public officials better (yeah, like that will fly).
Rating: Two Lopez faces