“Philadelphia, for example, has not had a Republican mayor since the Truman administration. It did enjoy the services of Mayor Frank Rizzo, a Democrat who endorsed Nixon in exchange for federal handouts and who governed in the progressive style: He converted a private utility into a public one and promptly turned it into a patronage machine, he was close with the labor unions and raised the city’s wage tax to fund spending on transportation and infrastructure projects, worked for economic benefits for the elderly, etc. He was a classic welfare-statist Democrat — and a man who, as police commissioner, famously promised to “make Attila the Hun look like a fag.””
I post this quote from the article I posted above. For my money guys like him were the worst of the worst hacks. He and his contemporaries through there union and public sector cronyism is what started the slide into destruction. He might not have finished the job, but he was key in starting it.
Boy do I miss Irv Homer.
I left Philly 25 years ago.
I agree; there is almost no Democrat worth electing, in a just world. However, it’s an unjust world, and we have choices like McCain or Romney vs Obama. So, fwiw, Philadelphia enjoyed a relatively American style of corruption under Rizzo, versus the commie socialist homosexual corruption that came after Rizzo.