Harrisburg's dilemma
The image above would be classic anti-Semitic propaganda, if only Harrisburg Mayor Stephen Reed, the puppetmaster with the demonic face, were Jewish.
He isn't, but his opponents mailed this to voters in Pennsylvania's capital city last week. Reed had been pushing hard to defeat two foes on City Council, Gloria Martin Roberts and Susan Brown Wilson. They won, but Reed increased his bloc on Council to three out of seven with the victory of Brad Koplinski, a white guy.
The politics of Harrisburg are increasingly racial. Some blacks, like Roberts and Wilson, are frustrated-- to the point of running offensive ads like this--that the city has had a white mayor for so long. This has been going on for at least 10 or more years. When Reed ran against a black woman a couple of elections ago, you even heard "it's our turn," as if white kids were hogging the playground equipment.
But Harrisburg isn't South Africa or Zimbabwe. Whites, Asians, and other non-blacks are in the minority, yes, but it's a sizeable minority. In the 2000 census here, there were 26,841 blacks, 15,527 whites, and 4,766 other non-blacks, probably mainly Hispanics.
Reed has stayed in power since 1982 because, by and large, he is a good and progressive mayor. I'll get to his problems later. Most whites, with some notable exceptions like businessman Jason Smith and former Patriot-News reporter Wendi Taylor, support him and turn out to vote for him in large numbers. Many of them are frankly scared to death of the idea of someone like black councilwoman Linda Thompson becoming mayor. They don't want Harrisburg, in which they have invested their lives, becoming Zimbabwe-on-the-Susquehanna.
The anti-Reed blacks have been unable to field a mayoral candidate with the ability to move beyond racial identity politics to pull away enough white votes to defeat Reed. They obviously can't even get all the votes of Harrisburg blacks. In the end, they just don't put up credible candidates. Even white voters disturbed with Reed ask themselves, if not Reed, who?
Reed is on the ropes of late because of the Harrisburg incinerator financial crisis, a nearly intractable problem. I suspect it will be dealt with, and the city will move on, painfully. Does anyone really think Linda Thompson would have dealt with it more competently than Reed? The mayor is also criticized for trying to turn his own interest in the American West into a city museum here. But I look at the photographs in the Patriot-News of some of the artifacts going up for auction soon at council's demand and regret that I'll never be able to see them in a museum as good as Reed's Civil War museum.
Reed tries things, he does things, and some things work out while others don't. He is not a mayor who throws up his hands and moans about his situation, or works only to keep taxes low. Harrisburg is better off for having had Reed as mayor since 1982 by almost any fair calculation.
Again the question: if not Reed, who?