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Washington Post - November 12, 2003

Harvesting Voters

By Harold Meyerson

 If you read the headlines about last week's elections, you'd think the Republicans were on a roll. GOP gubernatorial candidates won the state houses in Kentucky and Mississippi as the South continued to morph into one vast Republican plantation.

But the implications of these races for the 2004 presidential contest were nonexistent. Mississippi and Kentucky are no more in play in next year's election than Austria and Hungary are. These states are George W. Bush's, come what may.

The real action last week was in Pennsylvania, a battleground state if ever there was one. Bush has visited the Keystone State 23 times since becoming president, more than any other state; its 21 electoral votes loom large in the electoral calculations of both parties. And it was the Democrats who had themselves one fine Election Day in Pennsylvania.

In Philadelphia, incumbent Democratic Mayor John Street scored an impressive victory over Republican businessman and perennial candidate Sam Katz, winning 59 percent of the vote.

The cause for Democratic celebration is not Street himself, who seems unlikely to make it into the pantheon of great American mayors. Rather, it is the astonishing voter registration and mobilization campaign waged on Street's behalf by several organizations, chiefly the political operation of local congressman Chaka Fattah. When the voting rolls closed last month, it had registered 86,000 new voters over the preceding three months, virtually all of them from Philadelphia's African American and Latino communities. In a city of 1.49 million residents (according to the 2001 Census Bureau estimate) that's a mind-boggling achievement. I know of no voter registration campaign anywhere in the United States over the past several decades that can claim results this impressive.

The voter registration drive wasn't the only thing that Street had going for him, of course. The discovery of FBI-planted bugs in his City Hall office just as the campaign was entering the home stretch galvanized the city's African American community. In a twinkling, Street was transformed into a persecuted black leader whom John Ashcroft's Justice Department was trying to bring down.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28545-2003Nov11.html