So the guy who was recruited to run against Jim Gerlach last year, who got the DCCC’s blessing and was recruited by Bob Brady and was reported in this blog I think, wrote a very long and exceedingly interesting article on why he dropped out. This guy could realistically have been elected next week if he’d stayed in, but he wasn’t willing to become and remain a completely different kind of person in order to be in Congress. His story about what he liked about campaigning and also about what he wasn’t able to do is pretty amazing. There aren’t many first-hand accounts like this from people who really could have won.
Seeing as how a lot of the younger people here have explicitly talked about wanting to run for Congress, and since we’re the kind of people who knew that Larry Platt was running the day PolitickerPA scooped it, and knew he’d dropped out the day he told Van Hollen, it’s a good read for this community I think.
As a teaser, here’s the section where Rep Bob Brady approaches Platt for the first time:
After the speech, Congressman Bob Brady sidled up to me. Brady is the last of the big-city bosses. Head of the Democratic Party in Philadelphia, Brady was a carpenter who rose to power in the carpenters’ union. He’s six feet, 250 pounds, with the square jaw of a street tough, and he makes no bones about believing in the smoke-filled backroom deal. In the magazine, we’d railed against Brady’s antiquated, old-school views; we’d championed reform and transparency.
Still, I couldn’t help but love the guy. In politics the rogues are always more interesting than the goo-goos-the good-government types. Brady’s word was his bond, and he couldn’t help but be honest about his crass manipulations. “I’ve never done anything illegal in this job,” he confided to me once, years ago. “But you do do things that are wrong.”
It was in that conversation that I shared with him my nascent, almost flip desire to maybe “run for something someday.” Maybe something like Congress. Now here it was, a couple of years after that conversation, and Brady hadn’t forgotten.
He approached me with a self-conscious grin. “I know you kick the shit out of me in your magazine,” he said. “But you should think about running for Congress in the Sixth.”
“I live in the Sixth,” I said. “I grew up in the Sixth.”
Brady’s eyes widened. “Would you take a call about it?” he asked.
And the link to GQ (the whole blog is good, by the way).
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for this article. it was a great read (though of course i wish Platt would’ve run… maybe if he was willing from the beginning to show some more resistance, it wouldn’t have been an all or nothing proposition…)