Reposted from Young Philly Politics
Just a quick note about two styles of politics.A few days ago, Mayor Nutter and Congressman Brady announced that the Dad Vail was staying in Philadelphia.
If you read between the lines of the article, it is pretty easy to figure out the Congressman Brady did the heavy lifting on this one. Yet Congressman Brady went out of his way to put the Mayor forward and defend him against the charge that his administration was partly responsible for the initial decision to leave the city.
A day or so before, Mayor Nutter put out a press release about the US Conference of Mayor’s honoring the city for its mortgage foreclosure program.
You can read that press release over, under, sideways and down and you still won’t find any mention of John Dodds of the Philadelphia Unemployment Project or Lance Haver, the City’s Director of Consumer Affairs, who did most of the initial work in devising and pushing the program. Indeed, at about the same time that the Mayor’s release went out, John Dodds was in Washington, DC at a meeting with the Obama administration, which wants to learn from the Philadelphia experience.
This is not to say that the Nutter administration does not deserve credit for supporting the program. It does. But some other folks not mentioned in the press release, do as well.
And here’s the question I’d raise about these two styles of politics: Do politicans who focus on accomplishing good things increase their political capital to do so by giving credit or taking it. I’ll let you draw whatever conclusion you like about that.
I’ll just say, for the record, that John and Lance are friends of mine who taught me everything I know about political organizing I didn’t learn from John Meyerson, Tom Cronin, Pat Eiding, and Eileen Connelly. They don’t know I’m writing this.