Re-Formers

Who Are These Strange Beings Who Want to Save City Hall?

by Doron Taussig

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Published: Mar 14, 2007

(CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

The press conference was held the day before Valentine's Day on the fourth floor of City Hall, just a few feet from the security check for the rarefied chambers of City Council. This location was not coincidental. The Rev. Jesse Brown, who organized the event, intended to send the city's leaders a very specific message about outsiders and their current proximity to the inside.

Two weeks prior, City Councilman Jim Kenney introduced a bill to revise Philadelphia's young campaign-finance laws. He was responding to a poll that showed millionaire Tom Knox's self-financed mayoral campaign skyrocketing after he ran a series of early television ads no other candidate could afford. His bill proposed to eliminate limits on contributions to mayoral campaigns when a candidate has given his own campaign $2 million or more — limits City Council had set in 2003 after a public outcry for reform. This would have helped the other Democratic candidates close the money gap but also, presumably, increase the influence of big-money donors.

Both a majority of council and the mayor appeared to support the bill, which, in this town, usually means it's a done deal. But these are strange days in Philadelphia politics.

Shortly after introducing his legislation, Kenney found himself sitting in front of a computer, defending it to angry bloggers. Three mayoral candidates, Michael Nutter, Dwight Evans and Knox spoke out against the proposal. And then there was this press conference.

As a meaningful (though not Milton-esque) crowd of media coalesced, 14 challengers for City Council seats materialized. Arranging themselves into an awkward line, they took turns offering sound bytes.

The Rev. Brown, an at-large candidate, led off with a fiery indictment of the bill as an "abuse of the trust of the people."

Damon Roberts, a South Philadelphia attorney who will be Anna Verna's first challenger in 16 years, twice declared that his district wants "democracy, not Fumocracy."

Anti-casino activist Caryn Hunt said, "The people of Philadelphia are sick of pay-to-play."

Haile Johnston, a community activist mounting a challenge to Darrell Clarke in the 5th, looked a little starstruck, but called Kenney's measure "bait-and-switch reform."

A more polished Marc Stier, a Temple professor running at-large, made an abridged case for public financing of elections.

THE OUTSIDERS: Progressive leaders including Caryn Hunt, Marc Stier, the Rev. Jesse Brown, Damon Roberts, Vern Anastasio and Haile Johnston. Michael T. Regan (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

And Vern Anastasio got in a shot at his opponent, South Philadelphia incumbent Frank DiCicco, by claiming to hail from "the most ethically challenged district in the city of Philadelphia."

If you strung together excerpts from all the candidates, you could probably fashion a single, predictable challenger's campaign speech. But it wasn't just one challenger; it was 14. And numbers matter. If Roberts holds a press conference in his district, chances are that Inquirer City Hall Bureau Chief Marcia Gelbart doesn't show up. But if he and 13 others storm City Council, she'll be there, along with the Daily News and WHYY. The candidates become more than the sum of their parts: They're the embodiment of a general dissatisfaction.

The power of this display was not lost on the incumbents. As the challengers spoke, council aides popped out of their offices to steal looks at them. Kenney himself swung by, muttering, "If I wake up on May 16 and [Knox] is mayor, I want my conscience clear."

The councilman had argued vehemently for his bill, saying it didn't change any of the city's new pay-to-play provisions. But a couple of days later, he withdrew it, citing public pressure. His ally, mayoral candidate Bob Brady, told the Inquirer that he had advised Kenney to do so. "I don't want good councilpeople to go down because of this," Brady said.

It has been evident for some time now that something is happening in Philadelphia. Melodramatically, you could say it's a movement; more conservatively, it's the birth of a new constituency. The participants call themselves "progressives" or, sometimes, "reformers." Suffice it to say that they're a new group of players in city politics, and that they're not pleased with the way things have been going.

Recently, these folks — we'll go with the more popular "progressives" — have been getting onto the political radar more and more, by being courted for support by mayoral candidates who show up at their functions, or by making the Democratic Party flinch, as with the Kenney bill.

This May's primary election will represent the most meaningful challenge City Council has experienced in years, and though not all of the challengers could fairly be called "progressives," many are appealing to a growing sentiment that something needs to change.

Perhaps, then, it's a good time to ask some questions about the people who want to fix the city: Where did they come from? What are they about? And could they really transform politics in Philadelphia?

It's tough to pinpoint when all this started, but modern Philadelphia progressivism probably has its firmest roots in the 2004 presidential campaign, and in the formation of two distinct organizations.

The first was Philly for Dean, a group of mostly younger people that included a lot of transplants to the area — OK, fine, the yuppies and hipsters who have been moving into Center City and surrounding neighborhoods since the Rendell years.

The other was the local arm of the national organization MoveOn, and was largely, though not exclusively, composed of older, more rooted folks — OK, fine, former hippies and Mount Airy liberals — dedicated to the defeat of George W. Bush.

Neither group was initially focused on local politics and, in a way, the story of their engagement, like the story of trying to change Philadelphia, is a story of coming to grips with failure.

The founder of Philly for Dean was a cheerful woman named Anne Dicker, a Midwestern child of conservative parents who spent a chunk of her 20s working in corporate America. The 2004 campaign was her first serious foray into politics, as it was for many Deaniacs, and she liked it. After Dean "crashed and burned horribly," she and her compatriots decided to learn "how to do retail politics" — to build a movement from the ground up. They recast themselves as Philly for Change; Dicker explains her personal transformation by saying she started reading the Daily News in addition to The New York Times.

As for MoveOn, the day after Bush's re-election, more than 100 volunteers gathered in Center City to debrief. They noticed that they, too, had some lingering energy. People who'd been out of politics for a long time had been brought back in by the Bush regime. Among them was Gloria Gilman, an attorney who keeps a satirical "The World According to Ronald Reagan" map on her office wall (the Middle East is labeled "Our Oil"). She explains the phenomenon this way: "If you're an addict, you have to hit bottom [before you act]. Maybe with Bush, we've hit bottom."

Several of those present decided to meet again and do something with the citywide network they'd developed. Pretty soon, someone hatched a plan to build a group that was structured like the city's ward system, but geared its efforts toward pushing for policy changes. Neighborhood Networks was born.

Around the city, there were other, independent signs that something was astir. The blog Young Philly Politics, founded by University of Pennsylvania law student Daniel Urevick-Ackelsberg, was becoming a hub for online conversations about local politics. Initially used as a sort of virtual think tank by up-and-coming activists such as Ray Murphy and Ben Waxman, it began to receive cameos from the likes of Councilman Wilson Goode Jr., Councilman Kenney, and even U.S. Rep. Bob Brady ("I tried to write earlier, but I think I hit a wrong key and deleted myself, daaaaaa").

There was some new, ballsy electoral involvement, too.

In 2005, a former prosecutor named Seth Williams challenged District Attorney and Democratic Party institution Lynne Abraham. Abraham had money and infrastructure, but Williams ran promising reforms such as community-based prosecution, and became a darling of the Internet — a sort of local Dean. He lost, but performed surprisingly well; perhaps more importantly, he set a precedent for outsider runs. In spring 2006, both the 33-year-old Dicker and a 25-year-old named Tony Payton Jr. ran for state House seats against party-backed candidates. Dicker made a strong showing; Payton actually won.

Most of these endeavors involved people who were either young or new to the city, and could perhaps be attributed simply to demographic change and the inevitable influx of new people into politics. But there were two other pieces of political circumstance that made progressivism more than just the passage of time.

The first was casinos. The political ideology of local progressives is a complicated issue, but it certainly leans left, and, for the most part, toward greater public participation in decision-making. Casinos, meanwhile, are big, corporate entities, presently in suspicious partnership with the government, moving into residential communities that had not been asked for their input. They were, to progressives, a complete anathema. They were also immensely useful.

Opposition to gaming brought new people into politics; helped forge alliances; and provided a tangible cause to rally around. Indeed, it was the driving force behind Dicker's campaign, which brought her and campaign manager Hannah Miller, now two of the progressives' more prominent figures, into the political forefront.

The other development was the city government's apparent inability not to embarrass itself. As city officials (Corey Kemp, Rick Mariano) were sent to jail, and indictments of local figures (Vince Fumo, Milton Street) were handed up, newcomers decided that, as Anastasio says, "things are as bad as we thought they were."

This prompted progressives to focus their efforts on the local Democratic Party, and last spring, numerous members of Neighborhood Networks and Philly for Change ran for committee and ward seats. (This caused then-ward leader Carol Campbell to beseech her supporters to "battle the bloggers on their own turf.") They made modest gains: Neighborhood Networks estimates it took about 50 committee seats and control of a couple of wards.

The upshot was that aspiring politicians with existing bases of power — people like Anastasio and 7th District council candidate Maria Quinones Sanchez, both of whom have run before — began linking themselves to the progressives rather than trying to ingratiate themselves with the party. They could sense the momentum of an outsiders' movement. They also, presumably, agreed with progressives on the issues — although that's a little harder to say.

"Progressive" is a promiscuous political label. Originally used to describe a political party from the early 20th century, it often now refers to leftist politics that are somehow less compromised, and less compromising, than modern liberalism. But the meaning changes with the context.

Philadelphia progressives generally define their ideology with some form of Stier's campaign slogan "Politics is Broken in Philadelphia." The words "hope" and "change" are sometimes thrown in for good measure; the gist of this spiel is that Philly's leaders are corrupt and contented, and that reformers offer something new in this old dog of a city.

That stuff is fine, as far as it goes. But it doesn't really go very far. After all, what challenger or dissident in the history of American politics hasn't paraded around as an agent of change or hope? In 2000, we had a presidential election between a man who'd been vice president for eight years and a man who was the son of a recent president, and both ran under a reform banner. The words "hope" and "change" have been drained of meaning by repeated usage and corruption. And so we should ask: Change from what? Hope for what? And by what means?

To their credit, when I asked progressives for a more specific explanation of what they wanted to change about Philadelphia, their faces didn't go blank. Clearly, most had thought about it. A lot. And they had answers. But those answers seemed to fall into two categories.

The first category regards the process of governance, from rules of elections like campaign finance, gerrymandering and the paying off of ward leaders by judicial candidates, to corrupting influences like pay-to-play, nepotism and weak zoning laws. Progressives generally seek rule changes that would make it harder for those in power to exploit their positions.

"We have a typical machine," says Stier, a political philosopher by training. "It works by giving people, businesses, neighbors, things in exchange for political support."

For instance, he says, you can't just call L&I about a nuisance business. "You need to know the real number" — a councilperson's, or a ward leader's. "All the dysfunctional agencies in Philadelphia aren't fixed because they're functional for the politicians."

This might be called a "good-government" critique, and its underlying assumption is that the central problem facing Philadelphia is the efficiency of its government.

The second category has more to do with what government attempts than how it works. Since 2004, progressive groups have lobbied for a raise in the minimum wage and dedicated funding for SEPTA, and made noise about poverty, educational-funding inequities and affordable housing. These might be called "social justice" concerns, and they begin with the premise that Philadelphia's priority should be to become more aggressive from a redistributive standpoint.

"We need to work first to bring more Philadelphians to the table by lifting as many people out of poverty and into high-wage paying jobs as we can," says Ray Murphy, the political organizer behind Philadelphians Against Santorum.

During the past couple of years, a division has emerged between these two philosophies.

Those emphasizing good government have noticed that a social-justice emphasis is not all that distinguishable, ideologically, from the platform of a Democratic politician like Councilwoman Jannie Blackwell. Consequently, they worry that a social-justice-driven reform movement would never fix the institutional pratfalls that brought us, say, Milton Street's airport contract.

The extreme version of this model might be Philadelphia Forward's Brett Mandel, who says, "Young Republicans have more in common with progressives than liberals within the Democratic machine." Philadelphia will change, he says, when people stop saying, "I will trust the Democratic machine before I trust anyone who's a Republican."

Social-justice reformers, meanwhile, worry that the good-government types are naives who think unfixed potholes are the biggest problem the city faces.

"Process is about privilege," says Murphy, who enjoys throwing bombs in this debate. "A lot of folks who call themselves 'reformers' or 'progressives' agree to [social justice] goals in theory, but when the rubber hits the road, I doubt that many of them, who, I might add, are almost all white and/or middle class, don't want to acknowledge, let alone give up, any of the privileges they have."

Good government, this thinking goes, can get confused with less government, and thus with tax cuts and reductions in services. Many of these progressives are deeply skeptical of the idea that Philadelphia needs tax cuts to attract new people and grow. One Neighborhood Networks member pointed out to me that the ethics watchdog Committee of Seventy has endorsed tax cuts, and wondered what that had to do with ethics.

The split has manifested most clearly, perhaps, in the movement's participation in the mayor's race. Progressives don't necessarily want to pigeonhole themselves into any camp; activist Ben Waxman observes that they "don't win anything by getting behind a particular candidate." But they are already behind candidates — just different ones.

The good-government folks, it seems, lean toward Michael Nutter and his recent emphasis on ethics reform. The social-justice elements prefer Chaka Fattah's campaign themes of opportunity and equality (Murphy now actually works for Fattah's campaign). It's a fight that's been had on Young Philly Politics countless times.

The odd thing is that, with the exception of tax cuts, there isn't really an inherent contradiction between the two philosophies. For many progressives, the divide is internal, even nonexistent; most believe in both. Stier, for instance, says, "You need good government to do social justice effectively."

But for many there's a question of priorities, and so it's hard to identify a clear progressive policy platform. The closest we can come, maybe, is to say they want to reallocate government resources to the benefit of the poor, and to change the rules of governance to the detriment of the powerful — in no clear order. And, of course, that they want to remove from office those politicians who would stand in their way.

Vince Fumo's bunker at 12th and Tasker streets is in the basement of what looks like an average row house. To gain entry, you pass two receptionists — one on the standard-looking first floor, the other at the bottom of a flight of stairs behind a pane of glass.

You enter a room with red carpeting, where walls are lined with editorial cartoons about the Vince of Darkness, and mounted animals — grouses, fish — that Fumo has killed. Shortly after launching her state House race, Dicker was called here. She made the downward journey flanked by several allies, and came upon Fumo, seated behind a large CEO-style desk, pale as ever, wearing a big ruby ring.

"This is the part where my life gets surreal," Dicker remembers thinking. "Am I gonna have to kiss that?"

Fumo gave a brief speech to the group. They were just like he was, he said: eager, ambitious. But they had to learn to wait their turn. He instructed Dicker to drop out of the race.

"I just said, respectfully, 'I'm running,'" Dicker recalls. But she was thinking, "My God. We've got to destroy these people."

Fumo's entreaty was typical of the Democratic Party's response to the progressives, if more obnoxious. The party seems to regard "progressive" as a synonym for "young" — just crazy kids with their blogs — and wants to bring these newcomers into the system, where they'll take their rightful place at the bottom. Leaders seem particularly confused by the argument that the party is a tool of the powerful, and often defend themselves as democratic, in the small "d" sense of the word. Committeepeople and ward leaders are unpaid public servants, they say, chosen by their neighbors. "This is a democracy," Kenney wrote once on Young Philly Politics. "If all of the progressive folks in this city were committed to real change, then they would unify their efforts and take over our party."

In some cases, lately, there's been a bit of a detente between progressives and the old guard. Kenney and ward leader Lou Agre are both treated respectfully on the blog. And progressives have admiration for the party's Get Out the Vote operation. They often say that they want to change the party, not overthrow it.

"I came up with a new tagline for myself," notes Murphy. "I want to be a transformer, not a reformer."

But the transformation that progressives have in mind is drastic. As a model, they sometimes point to Philly's iconic political mutation, the 1950s-era switch from a Republican political machine to a Democratic one. More often, they mention the late '70s and early '80s, when the Northwest Alliance and Fattah's West Philly machine came into prominence, and black voters finally seized power commensurate with their numbers.

It's an interesting comparison. In a way, it's apt — that, too, was a political plate shift sparked by demographics, and motivated by a deep dissatisfaction with the status quo. But it's also somewhat ironic, because it highlights an important question about progressives: Are they widespread and diverse enough to register real change?

Interviewing progressives, I noticed an odd trend. On a couple of occasions, someone gave me glowing quotes about hope and change in Philadelphia, and then went off the record to say something like, "Look, I hope this is really happening. It might just be 30 white liberals in Center City."

Murphy worries we're witnessing a battle between the old, white ethnic machine, and newer, white yuppies. When it's all said and done, he thinks, we'll still have an electorate divided by race.

It's true that the combined e-mail lists of Neighborhood Networks and Philly for Change have fewer than 3,000 names, and that attendees at progressive functions are primarily white. The party, despite courting them for their support, expresses doubt that the progressives have gotten their message to the workaday, row-house voter.

"I don't know if it's reached the level of the average person yet," Kenney says about the desire for reform.

Optimistic progressives see a couple of mitigating factors. The first is simply that the movement hasn't peaked yet. "The Republicans," says Gilman, referring to the national GOP, "took 30 years to blossom." Anastasio adds, "We'll be lucky if we make any inroads on council this year."

The second is that they think they have some as-yet unacknowledged allies in issue-based nonprofits that can't get involved in politics, but will be pushing a similar agenda.

But what progressives bank on most is the hope that, even if the rest of the city hasn't heard of their candidates or taken up membership with their organizations, it feels the same way they do: tired and fed up, and just a little bit sickened. Hannah Miller, for instance, sees significance in the fact that someone like Haile Johnston was never involved with Neighborhood Networks or Philly for Change; he just decided to run for council after being frustrated with his representative. She imagines a city full of people like him.

The Norman Rockwell, civics-class, West Wing rendering of politics is of a noble pursuit, filled with big ideas and hard moral questions, usually regarding the balance between personal ambition and the greater good. In truth, politics, like any industry, consists of a series of logistical tasks, performed by professionals who want to go home and watch The Daily Show at the end of the day like the rest of us.

Sure, some people get involved for benevolent reasons. But this February, the primary task for those who wished to hold elected office in Philadelphia wasn't saving the city. It was collecting signatures.

Technically, a district-council candidate needs 750 signatures to get on the ballot, and an at-large candidate needs 1,000. Realistically, they need far more, because their opponents will scour their nominating petitions looking for things like old addresses, which make a signature invalid. Since it takes about an hour to collect 15 signatures, progressive candidates spent a lot of time last month pitching their ideas to the citizenry. I figured this would be a good opportunity to tag along, and see if their message of change was resonating.

The first candidate I accompanied was Johnston, the North Philadelphia community activist challenging Darrell Clarke. Johnston and his wife, Tatiana, moved into their big house in Strawberry Mansion four years ago, and subsequently started a nonprofit, the East Park Revitalization Alliance, to beautify their neighborhood.

On several occasions, he says, he found city services wanting: He tells the story of an abandoned house down the block from him that had become a den of drugs and prostitution. He and his neighbors placed several calls to their councilman's office, asking for a "clean and seal," but nothing was done, and they ended up doing it themselves. He claims he'd never imagined running for public office, but fell victim to an old activist's cliche: "I can't complain unless I decide to do something about it."

On the day I joined Johnston, his campaign had three members: Johnston, his wife and their campaign manager/housemate Matt Goldfein. They began knocking on doors at the 2200 block of Sergeant Street. Johnston, who is naturally friendly and articulate, was just getting the hang of his pitch: a quick introduction, a little biography and a modest invocation of the great need for change.

As the canvassers made their way from a rundown block where it seemed no one spent unnecessary time outdoors, to a lively street where neighbors chatted on porches, a flaw in my plan became quickly apparent: Most people weren't really reacting to Johnston at all. Or, more accurately, they responded with passivity, either politely offering their signature or curtly declining to do so. There were some exceptions. People asked questions, and a couple recognized Johnston from his work planting trees. But the most common sentiment, it seemed, was to treat his presence like an item on a to-do list.

There was, however, a consistency among the people who responded passionately to the mention of politics. When Johnston approached two older women climbing into a long, beat-up sedan, one popped back up to say:

"The last one who came out was Jewell ... Jewell Williams. We signed for him. Ask me, have I seen him again?"

Johnston did not ask. The woman went on.

"We sign for you, you'll disappear."

The candidate tried to sway her.

"I live in Strawberry Mansion," he said.

"That's what he said, too," she interrupted.

They went back and forth. Finally, he told her, "Vote for me, you'll see me again."

"It'll be the first time I got any representation," she replied. "And I'm 80 years old."

There were others like her: They were tired of the status quo, just like the progressives said — but they weren't tired of their particular representatives. They were tired of politicians. People in North Philly, it seems, have been promised a lot of things over the years, and many haven't been delivered. For someone running as an agent of change, it's something to work with. But it's a tall task.

There's a different challenge in South Philadelphia, where Anastasio is running a more established operation that is generally considered one of the progressives' better hopes to capture a seat. A South Philly native and lawyer, Anastasio is one of those folks who has long had political ambitions. In 2003, he ran against DiCicco with the support of union leader John Dougherty, a piece of biography that sometimes hinders his ability to portray himself as a reformer. After being kicked off the ballot, he says, he "wandered the wilderness" until he found Dicker, Stier and the rest of the progressives. He says he felt that he'd "found a home."

On a cold Friday, I joined Anastasio walking the streets of Bella Vista. There were still plenty of quick dismissals, but people seemed a little more open: A bunch knew the candidate, and supported him, or complained about schools and liked what he had to say. (In the same neighborhood, anti-casino activist Caryn Hunt would get a positive response to her thoughts on gaming.) Others said things like, "I can't sign, I got my boss" — a reference to a ward leader who, presumably, supports DiCicco. Outside the South Street Whole Foods, one guy actually asked Anastasio whom he was "associated with."

"Who are you associated with?" the candidate responded.

"Vince Fumo," the guy said. "He's done a lot of favors for me."

Anastasio shook his head. Fumo had been indicted just the week before. "How many people would admit that today?" But in South Philly, they still do.

There was little talk of Fumo at the Allens Lane train station in Mount Airy. Marc Stier, who's running at-large but has done community work in this, his neighborhood, seemed to know every other person there. Commuters asked him questions about transportation and crime, and one asked whether he was running against "Irv" (Ackelsberg, another progressive candidate, who's running for Donna Reed-Miller's district seat). Sam Katz swung by and offered a prediction about the mayor's race: Fattah will win.

"I don't think anyone else can," he said. "Theoretically, you can make a case for how Knox can win, but it would require the utter and complete stupidity of the Democratic Party." The crowd around him laughed.

Here, it seemed, were the people progressives were talking about when they said Philadelphians were excited about change. But it seemed to confirm the fears of those who worried that the movement was too middle class, and too white, to go anywhere.

I saw something else, though, out walking with Damon Roberts. The man challenging Council President Verna collected his signatures in Point Breeze, where the walls are plastered with the incumbent's "Experience Counts" fliers, and the streets are strewn with garbage.

Born in Guyana, Roberts spent the latter part of his childhood in Brooklyn and, after law school, came to Philadelphia, where he's worked in city government. He's the kind of guy who doesn't mind (and probably enjoys) walking into a crowded room and being the loudest talker there, which is what happened at the New Dimension Unisex Salon on Point Breeze Avenue.

Out on the street, the neighborhood had looked deserted and dead. Inside the shop this Saturday morning, it was lively and bustling. At least four chairs were filled with customers, and a considerable group filled the waiting room. Roberts came in and, voice booming, started shaking hands and asking for signatures. Then an interesting thing happened.

People didn't ignore the politician, or ask whom he was with, or against. They asked him, instead, for help: with finding a job, a lawyer to deal with child support issues or an old criminal record. Several offered to work for his campaign if he could help. Roberts found himself taking down numbers and handing out cards.

This scene, it seemed to me, was a double-edged sword for progressives. On the one hand, it presented the clearest convergence of the progressive platform with the lives of Philadelphians: the immediate need for something better and a repudiation of the status quo.

But it also raised the question of how progressives will reconcile their vision to the realities of politics. To be clear, there was nothing wrong with what Roberts, or the barbershop patrons, were doing — it was just constituent service. But it was, in microcosm, how politics has come to work. To get elected, you need people. To get people, you need to do favors. And once you're doing people favors, you have patrons. Where does that lead? Whom would progressives, if elected, give political jobs to, and would they still want to fix city agencies that worked for them? It all begs the question: In 20 years, are some kids going to come along, wanting to kick out the Anastasios and Stiers of the world?

"Once you get people in office, life gets more complicated," concedes Gilman, of Neighborhood Networks. Her solution, she says, is to keep working outside the system, as a pressure group: "The acquisition and holding of power are not central to us the way it is to a political party. We have a platform. ... If Marc [a co-founder of Neighborhood Networks] wins, that doesn't mean that we're the insiders. They're the insiders."

At this point, that's probably a fair answer. But Gilman is right that it will be complicated. Because, whether it's good government or social justice, what progressives will be taking on is a very old, very ingrained understanding of what politics is about. Consider, for instance, this exchange. After spending five minutes with a Muslim man who needed help finding an attorney, Roberts took the guy's hand, and asked him:

"You gonna help me get elected?"

The man smiled.

"You help me, I'll help you. That's how that go, right?"

(doron@citypaper.net)