Philadelphia has always been a rough and tumble city, its politics bare knuckled and with the ascendancy of African-American office holders in the last 25 years, often racially polarized, as well.
But the five-candidate Democratic mayoral primary race that ended with a convincing victory by Michael Nutter last evening seemed especially rough and tumble.
Flyers were left outside of two Catholic churches charging Nutter, who is black and gave up his City Council seat to run for mayor, with being a compromised political insider who changed his religious beliefs (two decades ago from Catholic to Baptist) because it was politically advantageous. Nutter called his closest rival, Tom Knox, a white millionaire businessman and a churchgoing Catholic, a “low life” and “scumbag” and accused him of being behind the flyers. The racial subtext was not hard to see.
Nutter’s victory in the overwhelmingly Democratic city makes him the mayor apparent, but the campaign histrionics have masked the really big question:
The murder rate is out of control in Philadelphia, one of four citizens live in poverty and city government is bleeding red ink. Can Nutter — or anyone for that matter — turn things around?
The epidemic of homicides seems especially intractable. As I noted in Crime and Punishment: A Tale of Two Cities, Philadelphia has bucked the national big-city trend of declining murder rates. There were more than 400 murders last year, the most in a decade and only about 150 less than New York City, which has a population four times as large. The total is likely to be even worse this year if the present rate of carnage continues.
Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House: