By The River

I'm glad the Patriot-News has finally taken note of the panic among city residents, white, Asian, Hispanic and black, at the prospect of Linda Thompson becoming mayor of Harrisburg after capturing the votes of about 12 percent of the electorate.

I am reprovingly accused by the editorial writers, neither of whom live in Harrisburg, of having "cast the election nearly entirely in racial terms" and having used the phrase "Zimbabwe on the Susquehanna." The first is simplistically wrong, the second is true. My approach has been to treat city blacks as just another interest group vying for power, not as a privileged class immune from criticism for observable behavior. Zimbabwe on the Susquehanna refers to the regrettable example of Zimbabwe in Africa, where the few remaining whites, who ran the country in colonial days, are persecuted by the black nationalist tyrant Robert Mugabe. The country has become an economic and human rights hellhole as a result, with blacks harmed far more than whites.

Linda Thompson, instead of reaching out to reassure white voters in the wake of her victory in the Democratic primary, has made Mugabe-like promises to fire the white superintendent of schools, Dr. Gerald Kohn, and replace him with an "urban," i.e., black superintendent. During the campaign, she spoke of the need to have blacks run the city police department. This and her observable behavior as city council president during the televised meetings has led many white residents of Harrisburg to conclude that Thompson will make life worse and hurt their property values. In my own Shipoke neighborhood, where 83 people voted for Stephen Reed, 13 for Thompson and 7 for Les Ford, the talk has been of organizing the neighborhood to mow the parks and haul trash to the incinerator if those city services fall apart under a Thompson administration.

The Patriot-News may have decided it has no dog in this fight. Two years ago, the newspaper seriously considered moving its editorial and business offices out of the city to sites in either Susquehanna or Silver Spring Twp. When the economy and newspaper advertising tanked, that move was put on hold. Like the two editorial writers, most of the editorial staff and all the upper managers live in the suburbs already. It is easy to dismiss the well-grounded fears of Harrisburg residents when you live in Mechanicsburg or Susquehanna Twp.

As someone who does own a home in the city and who has an interest in seeing the progress of the Reed years continue, I would issue these reporting challenges to the Patriot-News:

--Start looking into the persistent rumors that Thompson's campaign violated state election law by offering free lunches to blacks in Allison Hill and Uptown who agreed to vote for her.

--Commit the staff and resources to doing a full-blown, in-depth investigation of Thompson's life and career. Pull the IRS Form 990s on Loveship, her non-profit, and see where its money comes from and where it goes. Talk to people who knew her over the years, friend and foe. Do a criminal record check in Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia. There may be nothing there, but if there is, voters deserve to know. In other words, do your job. Just like you did in freeing Thompson's brother, Steven Crawford, from prison for murder. Is that why she wants to remove whites from the police management ranks, as revenge for her brother's unjust arrest?

I rarely quote George W. Bush, but I would urge the Patriot-News to recall his statement condemning, "the soft bigotry of low expectations." Treat Thompson just as you would a controversial white candidate. No worse, no better, just what is appropriate. Just do your job as a newspaper.

Posted by David at 09:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I flew from Harrisburg to San Francisco, California, today, the first time I have made this trip in several years. I marveled, as I always do, at what I see of America from 40,000 feet when the weather is good and there are no clouds.

I love the different terrain that passes by underneath, from the farms and forests of the East, to the rivers of the Midwest and the lines drawn by man in the 19th century to delineate this huge territory. Perfect squares sometimes that are visible, like the Nazca lines in Peru, only from the air. Unknown towns pass by, and I long for the ability to touch the window and have the name appear, as if it had been tagged in a photo on Facebook.

Moving west, the roads grow fewer in number and begin to wind crazily around natural landforms. Then comes Nevada and its vast arrid deserts marked by deep canyons and arroyos that appear from the sky to never have been trod by man. For miles and miles there is no sign of human habitation and no water or vegetation, either.

The Sierras were fogged in as we crossed into California, a pity, because on one past trip I saw Half Dome in Yosemite National Park far below. The fog gave way to the farms of the Central Valley and finally, approaching San Francisco, to those vast red and yellow blotches, hemmed in by barriers, that no one has ever been able to explain to me.

Finally we were down and there was the sign: Mayor Gavin Newsome welcomes you to San Francisco. I found my sister, got our rental car, and drove us to Half Moon Bay. We are here for our cousin Barb's wedding, but in the meanwhile have some sightseeing to do.

Posted by David at 10:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I flew from Harrisburg to San Francisco, California, today, the first time I have made this trip in several years. I marveled, as I always do, at what I see of America from 40,000 feet when the weather is good and there are no clouds.

I love the different terrain that passes by underneath, from the farms and forests of the East, to the rivers of the Midwest and the lines drawn by man in the 19th century to delineate this huge territory. Perfect squares sometimes that are visible, like the Nazca lines in Peru, only from the air. Unknown towns pass by, and I long for the ability to touch the window and have the name appear, as if it had been tagged in a photo on Facebook.

Moving west, the roads grow fewer in number and begin to wind crazily around natural landforms. Then comes Nevada and its vast arrid deserts marked by deep canyons and arroyos that appear from the sky to never have been trod by man. For miles and miles there is no sign of human habitation and no water or vegetation, either.

The Sierras were fogged in as we crossed into California, a pity, because on one past trip I saw Half Dome in Yosemite National Park far below. The fog gave way to the farms of the Central Valley and finally, approaching San Francisco, to those vast red and yellow blotches, hemmed in by barriers, that no one has ever been able to explain to me.

Finally we were down and there was the sign: Mayor Gavin Newsome welcomes you to San Francisco. I found my sister, got our rental car, and drove us to Half Moon Bay. We are here for our cousin Barb's wedding, but in the meanwhile have some sightseeing to do.

Posted by David at 10:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Patriot-News today quotes Randy King, a consultant and former aide to Mayor Stephen R. Reed of Harrisburg, as saying his former boss is seriously considering a write-in campaign. King makes the astute observation that only 25 percent of Harrisburg's 28,000 registered voters cast ballots in the primary election, and that the general election remains "wide open."

I've made the same point several times. I don't deny the difficulty of a write-in campaign, but I hope Reed goes for it. Perhaps there is a deal with Mindlin to drop out of the Republican side of the race? Stranger things have happened in politics.

Posted by David at 06:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sometimes you can't tell the difference between real news stories and stories in "The Onion," the weekly satirical newspaper.

"Perfectly preserved 300-year-old broom found in monk latrine." No shit. It's a real story.

Posted by David at 10:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm heading out to California on Friday for the marriage of my cousin Barb up in the mountains above Half Moon Bay. This is a "normal" marriage to a guy, but among the guests will be my sister Gretchen and her lesbian partner Patty, who I'll be meeting for the first time. They were among the 18,000 gays and lesbians in California who managed to get married in the Golden State before the hateful Proposition 8 shut the door. The California Supreme Court upheld Prop. 8 today, but did not invalidate any of the marriages performed before Prop. 8 passed, stoked by Mormon money and contributions from rightwing conservatives around the country. That included $450,000 from Elsa Prince, mother of Blackwater mercenary CEO Erik Prince from our hometown of Holland, Michigan.

California will probably overturn Prop 8 in another referendum in a year or two. The trend is definitely against so-called "defense of marriage" laws aimed at gays and lesbians. The issue is dying out, slowly. President Obama even had someone people involved in progressive politics have told me is a "quiet lesbian," Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, on his shortlist for the Supreme Court nomination. She didn't get it, but Obama was clearly ready to take on the gay bashers should her sexual orientation become an issue. It's all rather silly, really. In another 50 years folks will wonder what all the fuss was about.

Posted by David at 03:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you haven't had an opportunity to hear Linda Thompson's victory speech after the results came in last week from the Democratic primary in Harrisburg, you can listen to it here. She is consumed with anger and arrogance, dissing Mayor Steve Reed, whom she defeated in the primary, Reed's city council candidates, including Patty Kim, and Les Ford, the other black candidate in the mayoral primary. She claims to have seen Ford, for whom she had nothing but contempt, sleeping in Reservoir Park on Election Day.

So instead of trying to build bridges with the people she will need to work with if she wins in the general election in November, Thompson was busy burning them. She has people scared, and the stories about her are flying. Some--they can't be described or even hinted at here without solid documentary proof--are so bad that it is hard to see how her candidacy could continue if they proved true. Scurrilous stories are the mother's milk of American politics, and sometimes they are totally false. But other times they aren't.

Posted by David at 08:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

White panic in Harrisburg over the prospect of "Mayor Linda Thompson" may have reached a fever pitch this morning with word that Reed did not get enough Republican write-in votes to capture the Republican nomination for mayor. He could still attempt to mount a write-in campaign, and I would be there with my pencil, but he faces steep odds against success. Under state law, he can't run as an independent. I don't know if he could run under the Green Party banner; probably not.

Nevin Mindlin, a former Democrat from a United Steelworkers Union family, is now the best hope for stopping Thompson from getting control of the city and its $60 million budget. I'm sure they're doing high-fives at Rhoads & Sinon, the city law firm that financed her campaign. Mindlin will need Reed's support and, just as important, the support of Reed's financial backers to have a hope of defeating Thompson. As I've pointed out before, Thompson won in a primary from which Republicans and independents were excluded. That won't be true in the general election.

The other possibility is that something turns up in Thompson's past that forces her to withdraw from the ticket. She remains largely unexplored territory for good investigative journalism. Did you know, for example, that she is the sister of Steven Crawford, who was convicted of murder and spent 20 years in prison before being freed in response to a Patriot-News investigation that raised serious questions about his guilt? The split between her and Reed is said to stem from the financial benefits she derived from the lawsuit her brother filed and won against the city while she was on city council.

There are also rumors about enticements--free lunches--offered to black voters in Allison Hill to get them to turn out to vote for her. If true, this was illegal and ought to be investigated by District Attorney Marsico, although prosecutors in Pennsylvania are extremely reluctant to pursue these sorts of cases. I don't think anyone has ever been removed from office for even blatant, serious campaign violations.

I'm sure Reed is having sleepless nights wondering why he didn't do this or didn't do that. He should have campaigned harder and made Thompson the issue. But we still owe him a debt of gratitude for having turned Harrisburg around.

Posted by David at 01:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Mayor Stephen R. Reed's loss to City Council President Linda Thompson in the Democratic primary was topic number one when I encountered neighbors on the street yesterday. People are in a state of shock, and waiting to see if Reed had enough write-in and absentee ballots to win the Republican nomination. The word is that many of the city's business and other leaders are urging Reed to fight on if he does.

If he chooses to run, and I hope he does, Reed will be in a much better position to win in November. Republicans (save those who wrote him in) and independents, of which there are many in the city, were barred from voting in the Democratic primary. In November, the entire city of Harrisburg can decide whether Thompson, of whom "nutjob" is one of the nicer comments posted in online chat forums, should lead the city and its $60 million budget in place of Reed.

Reed, who is white, owes a fall campaign to the many people, white and black, who have devoted their careers to working for him and who can expect to be axed if Thompson, who is black, becomes mayor. This was a racial campaign, and Thompson is already on record vowing to replace Dr. Gerald Kohn, the white superintendent of the Harrisburg School District, with an "urban superintendent," i.e., black. You can be sure she will end mayoral control of the schools and return control to the same crowd that ran it into the ground in the first place. Similarly, white police managers like Chief of Police Charles Kellar can expect to be axed given Thompson's public statements about wanting to have more black police captains and other managers.

I heard criticism of Reed among my neighbors for not running an active enough campaign, of resting on his laurels and assuming he would win again as he had so many times before since 1982. I think that's a valid complaint. Perhaps he was tired, especially of having to deal with the hostility of Thompson and her supporters in City Council week after week after week. But again, he owes it to his many supporters to wage a fierce campaign in the fall if he gets that Republican nomination.

Posted by David at 06:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Mayor Stephen R. Reed, in office since 1982, lost the race for renomination on the Democratic Party decisively last night to City Council President Linda Thompson. The vote totals were 3,546 for Thompson, 2,511 for Reed, and 403 for Les Ford. Reed may still get the Republican nomination depending on whether all or nearly all of the 435 write-in votes on the Republican side were for him. Nevin Mindlin, the Republican candidate, received 422 votes. Absentee votes could be crucial here. More on this in a minute.

In stark terms, this was a white vs. black election, Reed, of course, being the white. Some black voters in the city have chafed for years at their inability to translate their slight majority in the city into electoral control. Reed faced a black woman in a past election who told her supporters it was "our turn." White voters were in shock last night. While some of the "I'm going to move" sentiments heard will fade with time, they reflect a real fear that the city will decline precipitously under Thompson given her televised performances as city council president. One person joked to me that anyone who voted for Thompson must not have cable television.

Why did Thompson win? She out-hustled Reed in getting her black supporters to the polls, while at the same time drawing a few white protest votes even in my own Shipoke neighborhood. We don't know how ugly and how racial her appeal was behind closed doors, but I heard from a white poll worker that one black voter and Thompson supporter proclaimed on arrival that Reed "didn't hire blacks," which is, on the face of it, ludicrous. Thompson was smart enough not to make blatant racial appeals that would have scared white voters, but the code words were all there. Another interesting question: did Reed's presumed gayness also become an issue for blacks?

Why did Reed lose the Democratic nomination so decisively? Turn-out killed him. Only 7,333 total votes were cast in a city of about 47,000 population. Reed's campaign organization may have bred over-confidence when it released the results of a poll in late April showing Reed well ahead of Thompson, but with a sizeable undecided vote. There was a follow-up poll--I know, because I participated in it--but those results were not released, to the best of my knowledge. Another factor in Reed's loss was the poor performance of the other black candidate, Les Ford, who had been expected to split the black vote with Thompson. Instead, he drew an embarassingly small vote, less than the Republican Mindlin. Reed's own issues, with the incinerator and the Museum of the American West, of course hurt him as well.

Assuming Reed wins the Republican nomination, will he accept it and run in the fall? I suspect the answer is yes. Will this anger some people? Yes. Is it unfair or unsporting? No, or no more so than only allowing a handful of registered Democrats to determine the city's future in the primary. The general election, which is open to all registered voters, is the only legitimate and fair forum for deciding Harrisburg's future. If he runs, Reed will have to take off the gloves and let the public know who Linda Thompson really is

Harrisburg must not become Zimbabwe on the Susquehanna, and white voters must not delude themselves that Thompson won't really be all that bad.. Remember back to 2000 when some of you consoled yourselves that George W. Bush couldn't be that bad a President.

Posted by David at 05:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

You've heard of golden parachutes? How about "golden coffins"?

Golden coffins are huge payments by corporations to the estates of top executives should they happen to die. The practice was brought to light recently by Amalgamated Bank, which has objected to payments that will be made to XTO Energy chairman Bob Simpson on his death. How much will the perhaps not-so-grieving heirs receive? About $144 million, including a $120 million "death bonus."

Amalgamated Bank owns some 165,000 shares of XTO, the Texas-based (of course) independent oil and gas exploration firm. They have filed a shareholder resolution objecting to the "golden coffin" payments. XTO, in opposing the resolution, terms the payments "the ultimate form of long-term incentives." Amagamated calls it "pay for no pulse."

I'm sure George W. Bush had something to do with this, if we only look hard enough. Memo to Obama: give Texas back to Mexico and half of America's problems will be solved.

Posted by David at 01:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Mayor Stephen R. Reed of Harrisburg is nobody's idea of perfect. Yet I feel comfortable with him as mayor and hope he wins the Democratic nomination tomorrow.

What I value about Reed is his experience in running the city, but more than that, his grand vision for how it can become a better place to live. Where too many mayors are willing to play only timid defense, looking merely to cut expenses and try to keep their town's head above water, Reed plays offense and seeks to build, to add to Harrisburg. The National Civil War Museum, which has been commended in the New York Times, is a good example. The collections are first-rate and so is the visiting experience. Eventually it will be a major tourist destination among the Civil War set. Ah, but what about the "Wild West Museum" critics ask? That may have been overreaching on Reed's part, but when I saw the list of artifacts that Linda Thompson and her allies on City Council forced him to dump on the market at a loss, I was sorry I would never see them in a top-knotch professional museum.

Another example of his vision is Restaurant Row downtown. While some may protest that individual entrepreneurs built those eating establishments and bars, the construction of the city parking garage on Second Street in the late 1990s gave patrons a convenient place to park and was critical to the downtown resurgence. Reed encouraged Restaurant Row and was reasonable on the noise issue. When I first moved to Harrisburg in 1987, the idea that the city would ever have downtown nightlife beyond a couple of isolated bars was laughable. No more.

And of course, living in the Shipoke neighborhood along the Susquehanna, I want Reed to be in charge of flood warning and recovery. If a flood threatens, we know the city will distribute accurate information on a timely basis. We pay several hundred dollars less annually in flood insurance (when a policy tops $1,000 a year, this is meaningful) because the city takes steps encouraged by the National Flood Insurance Program to mitigate risk. We know Reed will devote the full weight of city resources to helping us recover if there is a flood, as he did in 1996 and 2004.

Reed's major failing has been the Harrisburg Incinerator mess, a major financial catastrophe for the city and ratepayers. This problem is a mixture of contractor incompetence and and throwing good money after bad. It seems as immune to easy solution as the Vietnam War was in the 1960s, and will probably go on at least as long. I'd rather have Reed trying to fix the incinerator than Linda Thompson.

So Reed has my vote, and I suspect he will win again, though perhaps not by as big a margin as in the past. Every Reed supporter needs to vote tomorrow.

Posted by David at 05:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So it's been what, two months since I last wrote something? Blame the demands of the graduate course in documentary filmmaking I'm taking at George Washington University and some ambivalence about continuing By the River. I finally decided there was just too much I want to write about to let it slip away. The film course is coming to what appears to be a disappointing end. More on that later.

The primary election is Tuesday, and for residents of my neighborhood the big question, the ONLY question really is whether Mayor Stephen R. Reed is re-elected to another term. Reed signs dot the neighborhood, and while support is not universal or wholehearted, few look forward to a Mayor Linda Thompson or Mayor Les Ford, the two black candidates.

Thompson, president of city council, who was exposed Friday as a school tax delinquent on the building occupied by her Loveship non-profit, is the most feared candidate. If she gets elected, we can look forward to Zimbabwe on the Susquehanna. Ford, who advocated closing the nationally-renowned Civil War Museum and selling off the artifacts, seems a decent enough fellow but his comments on the museum were irresponsible pandering. He's backed off somewhat now, saying no new museums. There is a fourth candidate, Nevin Mindlin, the Republican, whose only function seems to be to make it harder for Reed to get the Republican nomination on write-ins.

Reed should be okay. A poll released about a week ago showed him with a comfortable lead, albeit with a large enough percentage of undecideds to swing the election to Thompson if she got nearly all of them. That isn't likely to happen unless she can get Obama-level turn-out among her black supporters and maybe not even then. The poll found that Reed supporters are far more likely to go out and vote than Thompson supporters. An interesting question not addressed by the poll is how Harrisburg's growing Asian community will vote. Reed has paid attention to them. Thompson hasn't. If they come out to vote for Councilwoman Patty Kim they'll likely vote for Reed, too.

Another issue is campaign finance. Thompson and Ford simply don't have the resources to overturn a longtime incumbent. I could be surprised Tuesday, but I suspect Reed will win the Democratic nomination and go on to another, and probably final term as Harrisburg's mayor. Reed isn't perfect, but if there's another flood, I want him in charge, not Thompson.

Posted by David at 06:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)