Home › Blogs › Soren Dayton's blog ›

PA-GOV: Fumo's corruption creates opportunities for GOP

Submitted by Soren Dayton on Mon, 07/27/2009 - 01:57
in

In March, I wrote about the GOP opportunities that follow from the conviction of South Philly machine Democratic State Senator Vincent Fumo. The recent news of Democratic corruption out of New Jersey (mayors, rabbis, and body-parts, oh my!) and the emerging consensus that this fundamentally damages Jon Corzine's already difficult re-election, when combined with outrage at farcically light sentencing creates real opportunities for Republicans.

Let's go over the facts and see how much this helps Pennsylvania Republicans in 2010:

1. Pat Meehan, one of the Republican candidates for Governor got the initial indictments against Fumo. Tom Corbett, the other one, has his own story to tell about indicting Fumo and his operation. If Chris Christie ends up winning in New Jersey, there will be a ready-made media narrative comparing New Jersey to Pennsylvania.

2. That narrative will be a little emphasized because southern New Jersey is almost entirely in the Philadelphia media market. It will be non-national political news relevant to both parts of the the Philly media market.

3. Corruption is the sort of thing that suppresses Democrat-leaning independent turnout in formerly Republican suburbs in Bucks and Montgomery countes, and, to a lesser extent, in Chester and Delaware counties. And the South Philly turnout operation that Fumo was so effective at selling is probably somewhat reduced in effectiveness. Democrats can't win statewide without huge margins out of southeast Pennsylvania. You couldn't build a better script for reducing those margins.

Grab the popcorn. This will be fun to watch.

0
Your rating: None

Comments

Check the recent Q poll

Submitted by Ironman on Mon, 07/27/2009 - 07:22.

Corzine is getting his doors blown off south of the Trenton/New Brunswick corridor

This WILL be fun

Submitted by Earmarks on Thu, 07/30/2009 - 18:23.

You're right - this whole Cammarano and the Four Rabbis thing WILL be fun to watch.  Of course, it's maudlin to say that both sides of the political aisles have a history of corruption, but nonetheless true - Republicans have been just as guilty as Democrats of being on the take and not exactly living up to worthiness of the public trust.  (Tom DeLay, Duke Cunningham, Ted Stevens - and then you have moral indictments against a fair cross section of the "family values" crowd - Mark Sanford, the guy from Nevada whose name escapes me at the moment, and Larry "Wide Stance" Craig.)

It's things like this that usually push independents from party to party.  That has a huge hand in why McCain lost this last election.  Granted, Obama ran probably the best campaign in living memory, problematic it might have been at times (Pastor Wright, for instance) but the track record of George Bush pushed a lot of people that might normally vote Republican or be more inclined to do so into the Democratic fold, and if they can't come up with a better candidate than Palin or Bobby "I don't like actual science being taught in science classes" Jindal, then it's going to be a continuing trend.  Perhaps the best tool that the GOP has is one that they aren't going to use, which is Ron Paul.  Huckabee wasn't too bad, but it isn't likely he's getting back on a ballot, and possibly not Romney either.   But don't get me wrong- Democrats have their share of skeletons in the closet:

Let us remember that our President is from Chicago - that's the city that gave us Mayor Daley (and the 1968 Convention) 1 and 2 - although I understand 2 isn't nearly as bad, also the state produced two governors in a row to be arrested and indicted by a Federal grand jury, one of which is in prison, and the other appears to be heading there. (And to have the worst hair in the history of mankind - it had to be said.)  I'm also not sure how the four rabbi's fit into this picture, since most religions tend to puch honest, fair dealings, and generally staying inside the law, but who knows?  (Ted Haggard certainly didn't live up to that idea, to say nothing of the Catholics'....shenanigans.) 

In any case...this ought to be fun.