Matt's Excellent Keystone Adventure

What Do We Really Know About George Washington?

Well, here's something you don't see much in California: an 18th century house with an Obama sign in front of it. (That's because all the 18th century houses are historical sites. In Philly they're a dime a dozen, maybe literally with a few more months of housing collapse). I was out to the 'burbs today for the first time, and I also saw my first McCain sign here, somewhere in that fuzzy zone near the Philadelphia line. This was taken from my drive along the Germantown Pike, one of the oldest routes in the country, and one the Revolutionary Army (featuring William Ayers, and probably Barack Obama at the age of negative 184 years) took. They don't bother with "George Washington Slept Here" signs because he slept basically in all the houses along the road at one point or another (at least that's what all the homeowners believe). It does make one pause and ponder the "birthplace of democracy" aspect of this corner of the state - this is where Valley Forge is, this is where the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were argued out (in a disputatious political process, not, as some might have you believe, handed down on tablets from God) and signed. Center City Philly doesn't give me that thrill of the sense of being present at the creation as much as Germantown and the outlying areas where there are still many old buildings, where you do get a slight sense of what the country once was.

I also passed a couple of very cool very old cemetaries and was tempted to put up a couple of pictures of them and a crack about McCain's base, but good taste got the better of me for some reason.

It is a BIG day in Philly tomorrow - Barack is indeed coming to town, with four different events, and I'm going to miss them all as I'm driving canvassers around and then doing a special event in the afternoon. I may not be able to do live blogging but I'll certainly fill in the blanks here tomorrow. Palin is in town, too, and traffic is probably going to be wretched (the first puck drop was tonight at the Flyers' game, but nobody was paying attention outside of the arena, as the Phils-Dodgers game was still on. (I had occasion to drive by the ballpark in mid-game tonight on a campaign errand, always nifty but especially in the playoffs.) Stay tuned for tomorrow's big doings...!

 

Help, I'm Having a Flashback, A Dirty, Dirty Flashback

Ah, Delaware County and its Republican Committee, Republican Council, Republican judges, and Republican rules. Now is maybe the time to briefly relate the tale of the 1984 election. That year of course Mondale was facing off against Reagan, and had his keister utterly kicked. He won only Minnesota and DC, and the many hundreds of hours I spent on the campaign that fall were utterly wasted as we fell a couple of percentage points short of carrying PA. We also had a hot local congressional race that year, incumbent Congressman-Methodist minister Bob Edgar (who ran and lost for the Senate in 1986) vs. Curt Weldon (odious 10-term Congressman finally put out to pasture by Joe Sestak in 2006.)

Edgar had been swept into office in the class of 1974, and was so utterly reasonable that he continued to get re-elected during the intervening years by the predominently Republican -- VERY Republican -- towns of Delaware County. This infuriated the local machine, which was known as being very powerful and quite corrupt on all levels. There were a variety of tactics employed to oust Edgar in '84 and put in Weldon, including (drum roll) voter disenfranchisement. The same tactics being used in Virginia and Montana this year, in fact: disqualifying student voters (on election day) on the grounds that they weren't registered at their "correct" address, if they had changed dorm rooms -- dorm rooms, not just dorms -- since they registered. This ended up disqualifying several hundred voters at Swarthmore College, and the only recourse was to request an emergency hearing at the county courthouse in Media. We had something on the order of 2 cars to take people there, at the same time we were supposed to be taking voters to the polls. I wasn't a part of any of the hearings but I heard horror stories second-hand about the judge obviously being in the tank. And of course once the polls closed, your chance at getting a hearing faded to nothing, since it was then a moot point. Of the several hundred disqualified voters, only 5 or 6 got to cast ballots.

Did it work? Nearly so. Edgar won, by only a few hundred votes, with I'm sure other dirty votes from other parts of the CD going to Weldon. The damage may have been done, though, as Weldon won office easily in '86 when Edgar ran for Senate. (I have hard memories about all this, but I will say one side effect of the '84 election was I met my wife, but that's a different story.)

In any event, I spotted this report by the Philadelphia Inquirer -- shot in front of the very courthouse where we had the emergency hearings, in Media, in 1984 -- and I shuddered with flashbacks. Note the interviews with voters...the more things change...