The Nutter in question was, of course, former Councilman Michael Nutter, who in June resigned his seat representing the Fourth District to run for mayor. "Campbell" referred to Carol Ann Campbell — the ward leader, power broker, political heiress, concert pianist, private detective, activist, benefactor, convicted criminal, unsuccessful City Council candidate, unsuccessful state House candidate and self-proclaimed champion of "little people" from West Philadelphia, who had recently declared her intention to run for the seat.

Now, technically, the election to fill Nutter's seat won't take place until November, so the headline was a bit presumptuous. But the issue here isn't the Record; after all, the headline is almost certainly correct. It isn't even really with the process of special elections, which, despite its flaws, will provide currently unrepresented districts with representation in a timely manner.

Campbell

The headline was troubling because, after all Philadelphia's talk of reform — after an FBI probe decided a mayoral election, a corruption investigation reached into the higher echelons of government and a sitting councilman was sentenced to six-and-a-half years in prison for accepting bribes — after all that, and with a chance to bring new blood onto Council, Philadelphia appears poised to accept more of the same: the offerings of a 50-year-old machine that does patronage well, policy poorly, corrupts easily and has lost sight of any alternative vision of what government might be.

The personification of that machine is Carol Campbell.

Having a second-tier name, however, does not make Campbell a second-tier player. Officially, she is Secretary of the Democratic City Committee and chair of an alliance of black ward leaders. Unofficially, she is the right-hand woman to party chair and U.S. Rep. Bob Brady (and some say the chain of command runs the other way).

She is also one of the most feared individuals in Philadelphia politics. To report on Campbell is to navigate a maze of dodged interviews and off-the-record conversations, many of which include references to the subject's physique (Campbell is a large woman who has at times been confined to a wheelchair), and adjectives like "vindictive."

"She uses her phone like a weapon," says one party insider.

Campbell knows a lot of people in city government, and isn't afraid to call in favors. It is this insider influence that has placed Campbell in a position to assume a Council seat.

The special elections were called because three City Council seats were vacated: one by Nutter's resignation, one by the death of David Cohen and one by the conviction of Rick Mariano.

In a special election, the political parties forego primaries, and locally elected party officials, called ward leaders, select the nominees. The rationale for this process is that it fills empty seats quickly; the downside is that, because Philadelphians vote so reliably Democratic, it enables the Democratic ward leaders to essentially hand-pick Council members — and, some say, because of the advantages of incumbency, to install those members for a very long time.

In making those choices, ward leaders adhere to a fairly predictable set of values, which, depending on your level of cynicism, could be described as "respect for a history of public service" or as "simple nepotism." Often, they pick from among their own ranks: Many ward leaders consider Council a natural step up. It's a hell of a promotion. Ward leaders are unpaid and perform constituent service; Council members make $102,000, influence the city's budget, and introduce and vote on legislation.

When the special elections were announced, two ward leaders in Campbell's district — Lou Agre and Ralph Wynder — expressed interest in filling Nutter's seat. But once Campbell's name was in the mix, both announced they would support her.

"She has the greatest seniority and longest history," Wynder explains. "I would think that she's earned the right to have this election."

And indeed, by the time the party met this past Monday to vote on its nominees, little was in doubt. At about 6 p.m., crowds of Democratic leaders, some famous, some nameless and chomping on cigars, crowded into a baking oven of a meeting hall. For five minutes, they listened to Senate candidate Bob Casey, and at 6:17, they emerged with their nominees: Campbell, Bill Greenlee and Danny Savage (see sidebar.) All three lead wards, and two of the three are the children of ward leaders (only Greenlee is not, and his uncle was a state representative.)

After the meeting, Campbell held forth from a table at the front end of the hall, which had been specially set up for her. With talk radio host Mary Mason seated behind her, nodding and patting her on the back, Campbell argued that media coverage questioning her record, while leaving Greenlee and Savage alone, was racist.

"It's fine when you see two Caucasian men ascend to the seats through the process, but the one African-American woman is not right," Campbell said.

Sitting there, talking politics and demeaning her enemies, Campbell was the very picture of a person in her element. For her, the election had been a triumph — a confirmation of her power. And yet this might have been the only way Carol Campbell ever could have gotten elected.

Carol Campbell worked in her father's machine, and after the Dean died, in 1987, she took over his ward.

On two occasions, she tried to parlay this position into an electoral office. In 1990, she ran for state representative against Louise Bishop. The candidates were widely regarded as proxies for two more powerful politicians — Campbell, for Bob Brady, and Bishop, for Bill Gray — and the Bishop campaign made an issue of Campbell's poor health. Campbell lost. Then, in 1999, she ran for an at-large Council seat in a crowded field. She got the party endorsement, but lost badly to fellow newcomers W. Wilson Goode, Jr. and Blondell Reynolds-Brown. She did not even own her backyard, in West Philly.

Campbell doesn't have a large base of voters supporting her. What she has is the ward system.

The Philadelphia political map is split into 66 wards, which are further partitioned into thousands of sections called "divisions." Divisions are just a few blocks in area, and may elect two committeepeople from each party. Committeepeople have very little power, and few voters pay attention to their selection. They do, however, get to elect ward leaders from their ranks. So if you're a ward leader, you want to make sure your committeepeople support you.

On Labor Day, I visited one of Campbell's committeepeople at a block party on the 1400 block of Hobart Street. Mary Drake had implored me to come out to the party to see the "positive side" of her neighborhood. By that, she meant that a number of successful women who had grown up there and moved away would be coming back to visit.

As barbecues exhaled meaty smoke and crowds of neighbors swarmed in and out of one another's homes, Drake, an older woman with a background in social work, sat on her porch and told me how Carol Campbell took care of people. When Drake founded the Neighborhood Youth Achievement Program, her ward leader helped her to secure grant funding; when she needed the abandoned building next to its headquarters torn down, Campbell was able to bring the matter to the attention of the appropriate people. She also got Drake's son a job with the city, and, Drake said, had helped other committeepeople's children to find work, too.

"She's very good at helping people get jobs," she said. "What little bit we have left, I think Ms. Campbell will be able to help us hold on."

A few days later and a few blocks away, I sat in the dusty, cluttered living room of James Arthur Grant, an 87-year-old retired machinist and widower, who had been a committeeman in Philadelphia on and off for 60 years. He had served under Campbell's father, and liked him. He says Edgar did a good job of giving money out to committee members for poll work on Election Day.

But of Carol Campbell, he says, "She's a dictator." He likes to tell the story of the time she handed him a paper to sign — he says it was a ballot to elect her as ward leader — and when he dared ask what it was for, she said, "Just sign it, Jimmy."

He shakes his head. Campbell, he says, only held ward meetings before elections; he felt they should have been held more often for true constituent service to take place. And she didn't like being questioned: When Grant inquired about her distribution of street money, he says, he was told, "You don't have nothing to do with that."

Eventually, he stopped getting phone calls about the times and locations of committee meetings, and in 2002, he lost his bid for re-election.

As he sits on his couch, old anger rising inside him, Grant thinks about taking on Campbell for control of the ward. "If I had the phone numbers of all the committeepeople, I'd talk to them individually," he says. He even points out an old bullhorn, and threatens to take it out on Election Day.

But after a while, he begins to look sleepy.

"What can I do?" he asks. "She's just the boss. ... If she becomes a councilperson, she'll run the city."

Technically, ward leaders are unpaid. But come election time, judicial candidates queue up to hand them money. Philadelphia elects its judges; this is an asinine system, since the candidates are virtually unknown, and moreover, aren't supposed to have campaign platforms. In such a situation, party support is a huge boon, and the Democrats have learned to take full advantage of this: The party charges a large sum (now $35,000) for its endorsement, and ward leaders charge hopefuls additional thousands. Ostensibly, the money is for get-out-the-vote work, but it's hard to keep track of.

So, in other words, people pay to become judges.

One of the people they pay the most is Carol Campbell. In 1994, Campbell was elected the chair of the United African-American Ward Leaders, which meant she could offer access to more wards than just her own. She became a go-to person for candidates, and they would hand her large checks for her support. But there were flaws in her approach.

First, in 1997, Campbell feuded with state Sen. Vince Fumo when he claimed he had paid her $18,000 to back two candidates whom she abandoned. Campbell denied the charge, and, in a quote that one pol calls "basic Campbell," suggested that the money Fumo was upset about was insignificant.

"Let me tell you something," she told the Daily News. "That little $18,000 wouldn't keep me in pantyhose, so don't go there. I didn't get a nickel of that money."

Then, in 2001, the state's attorney general investigated judicial elections, and charged Campbell (and several others) with illegal collection and spending of campaign money, and failure to file campaign expense reports. He described the problem thusly: "Money just disappeared."

Arguing that she was too ill to travel to Harrisburg for pretrial processing, Campbell was processed in Bob Brady's ward office, with Sylvester Johnson — then the Deputy Police Commissioner and, a few months later, the Commissioner — personally presiding. She was ultimately found guilty of failing to file the reports, fined $1,250 and sentenced to a year of probation.

Despite the considerate treatment from the law, Campbell knew she had to change her ways. What she did next was truly innovative. Instead of accepting checks in her capacity as ward leader, Campbell set up "consulting" firms that charged candidates for the same services — this time, outside the jurisdiction of campaign finance laws. As the Inquirer has reported, Campbell-led firms, including The Visionary Group and Genesis IV, took in $216,000 from candidates in the May 2003 primaries. In May 2005, they made another $200,000.

One judicial candidate who has given money to Campbell is Sharon Losier, who went into the election process with little knowledge of how the system worked. She says she enlisted the help of a consultant nicknamed "Ducky" who told her where to spend her money. The money she paid Campbell bought her several meetings with the ward leader, during which Campbell advised Losier and several other candidates about what churches to visit, etc. It was "understood that she [had] a dual role as ward leader."

Losier says she figured Campell's committeepeople would be pushing her, but really, "I don't know what [the money] is supposed to buy. It's not like I went to the store and picked something up."

She spent about a quarter of a million dollars in her quest to become a judge, money she had saved from years in litigation. But she drew a poor ballot position and lost.

According to Campbell spokesman Ken Snyder, Campbell believes that the judicial election system is imperfect, but is a more effective way of putting minority candidates on the bench than appointment (she would support merit-based selection, he says, if there were a proven way to ensure the appointments would be demographically balanced.)

As for her consulting, Snyder says his client is "giving [candidates] advice ... things that a typical campaign consultant would do."

Strangely, though, Campbell's advisees are by no means shoo-ins. Just as when she ran herself, Campbell's candidates don't perform that well with actual voters. People pay her, explains political consultant Maurice Floyd (who has consulted for judicial candidates himself), because "most folks who run for judge have no concept of the inside game ... they're scared." They'll pay anyone who claims to be able to help them, and Campbell has her hand out.

As for Campbell's ward committee, they are strangers to this process. Says one committeewoman who asked to remain anonymous, "The money that the newspapers report, we have never seen. You can work all day you never get more than $100."

She says Campbell has never mentioned her conviction.

"Of course not. If you didn't read the papers then you would never know that it happened."

Campbell's political fights have been about pretty much everything but policy. Usually, they are obscure battles between political insiders, but Campbell manages to make them vastly entertaining with the quotes she feeds the local press. Consider:

• In 1989, she battled Chaka Fattah, who challenged her for her ward seat after having previously challenged her father. Campbell said of the future Congressman, "I find Chaka's ways deplorable and despicable. ... He reminds me of a jackal, who preys on the sick, the weak, and the helpless."


• She has feuded repeatedly with the West Philly political establishment headed by Councilwoman Jannie Blackwell. In 2005, she was quoted in the Daily News saying, "Jannie is obsessed with me. ... She is not a person I converse with. Where she is, I don't want to be, and where I am, she can't be."


• City Commissioner Marge Tartaglione once charged at Campbell in a party meeting, reportedly angry that Campbell had accused her of revealing campaign finance violations. Campbell said that she wasn't frightened — "not by the likes of her."


• Earlier this year, when Bob Brady had a falling out with union leader and Democratic party treasurer John Dougherty, Dougherty told the Daily News that the fight was about him "not kissing Carol Campbell's butt." Campbell responded: "I was disappointed to see that, because I thought John had a Christian heart."


• During the aforementioned scuffle with Fumo, a female ward leader affiliated with the state Senator sent Campbell an accusatory letter. "It's pitiful to see him hiding behind this woman," Campbell said of Fumo. "If he's a man, why is he hiding behind this woman? ... I'm going to deal with this legally because I've had it. It isn't over until the fat lady sings and I haven't sung yet."

Early on in her career, Campbell even fought, briefly, with Brady, but by the time the Party chair considered running for Congress, the two were famous friends. She was one of his earliest and most outspoken supporters, and has boasted of being responsible for his ascent.

Many suspect Brady is so loyal to Campbell because he's a white man representing a majority-black district, and she gives him credibility with black ward leaders. Campbell has, on several occasions, argued that black candidates should fill certain offices — particularly, though not exclusively, when she or an African-American she supported was vying for said office. Of Brady she has simply said, "Bob Brady is more sensitive to African-Americans than some African-Americans" (she has also supported District Attorney Lynne Abraham in races when numerous black leaders have opposed her).

There are other theories about the alliance. One ward leader speculated, half-jokingly, that Campbell "has pictures of [Brady]." Others think they share a loyalty based simply on years of being on the same side in fights.

Whatever its source, the partnership has helped Campbell to establish herself as a sort of elder stateswoman of the party. At City Committee cocktail parties, insiders say, she takes a seat at the only reserved table, and people come up to her to pay homage.

"She's the matriarch," says Lou Agre.

People do the matriarch favors. In 2003, Councilman Nutter, who would later establish himself as a reformer, came under scrutiny when he placed calls to the sheriff's office, seeking to have a no-bid, $80,000 consulting contract with Campbell's Visionary Group executed (the contract was to help streamline the operations of the office; Campbell was decidedly unqualified for the job). She's also the second-most frequent recipient of tickets to the mayor's stadium boxes, behind Dougherty, according to the Daily News.

More interesting than the favors, though, is the particular perspective that Campbell's experience and tenure have given her on machine politics: namely, that she believes in them.

"She's old-school," says Snyder. "She makes no apologies for her way of getting things done ... on balance, she's helped, over the years, thousands of people."

When, this past May, a slate of young people, many of them former Howard Dean supporters, tried to get involved in local politics by running for committee seats, Campbell told the Public Record that the party should "battle bloggers on their own turf." She saw it as essential not to bring new Democrats into the fold (many committee seats go unfilled), but to protect what she calls "the last big [political] machine in the country."

To Campbell, this is how government is supposed to work.

"I would just continue to do what I have done all my life," she said, "which is work to improve the quality of life for the little people."

As examples of policies she would promote, she offered lowering the minimum age at which children must start attending school (it is currently eight), lobbying for a state tax for businesses that hire low-income youth on weekends and summers, and offering a stipend to families who would inhabit and repair abandoned houses.

I told her these were interesting ideas, and that I'd like to meet to hear more about them, as well as about how she got involved in politics.

"I don't want to talk about that," she said. "I was born in it. It's not about me, it's about the people. I don't have an ego problem. ... It's about the people, the little people."

Then she told me that she was going out of town, but would find time to meet before this story went to press. I called several more times. Ultimately, I was referred to a spokesman. I had never asked her why she wanted to sit on Council.

There are several available schools of thought on the question. There is, of course, the "public service" theory. According to Snyder, Campbell has dedicated much of her time to raising money for college tuition funds. "She wants to put her life philosophy to work," he says, "which is that people most in need are most in need of a voice."

There's the money theory — that Council is a sweet gig with a free car, free gas, free parking just about anywhere, plus a pension. And there's the Brady's Master Plan theory: that the chairman is trying to put friends in high places to assist his eventual run for mayor.

I think the answer lies deeper in the heart of Philadelphia politics. It's been strange to listen to people talk about the special elections as though voters have no say in them. The Democrats are only choosing their own nominees, after all. In November, voters will have a chance to accept or reject those nominees (assuming either Republicans or others join the race), and in the May primaries, they'll have the option to do so again.

Some groups of reformers, such as Neighborhood Networks and Philly for Change, are promising to run their own slate of candidates in the May primaries. And other, slightly more outsider types will enter the race, too. In Campbell's district, Ballard-Spahr lawyer Matthew McClure and Curtis Jones Jr., head of the Philadelphia Commercial Development Corporation, have already expressed their interest. It remains to be seen how worthy these candidates will be, and how serious their challenges. But if Philadelphians continue to vote for Democrats regardless of their quality — to, essentially, reward bad behavior — then it seems likely that the Democrats will behave badly.

This, I think, gets to the heart of why someone like Carol Campbell, who appears so at home behind the scenes and has a slim record of policy work, would pursue a Council seat. It's the reason that many people seek power, and it has less to do with Carol Campbell than it does with the political condition of her city.

Why does Carol Campbell want to be a councilwoman?

Because she can.

(doron@citypaper.net)