Which bureau of progressivism did you submit it too? Sometimes, that matters. The process seems arbitrary, but to the progressives, it makes a lot of sense.

i actually did not know this site had come to consensus on this:

I thought that is a lot of what this site and progressives have been condemning ... elimination of voting along racial lines and just going for the best person.

Realistically the only way queer people, people of color, women and others will chose a candidate for elected office without regard to their identity group is if all women, people of color, queers, etc. are given as much privilege as white people, straight people and men,

Individual underrepresented folks may vote for someone outside their identity group, or may not have any other option, but "elimination of voting along racial lines" presupposes an end to racism and an end to privilege that I do not think has come yet.

If white challengers want to win against black incumbments, than they need to figure out how to build credibility in commuities of color. Irv Ackelsberg was probably the best man for this job in this past election--more so than any other white candiate I can think of---and he came up short. Why? Because, as the Charles points out in the post these comments are ebing made in reference to, the "progressive" movement--the people who make phone calls, tell their friends who to vote for, knock on doors etc.--is almost entirely white.

The ward system, meanwhile, is not, which is why Green and Greenlee could make it on to Council.

I am not advocating anything more than thought. I support the right of everyone to run to office. I am not calling anybody any names. I am not attacking anybody. I explicitly say that any given white candidate may be better than any given black candidate.

I am just aware that the reform slate did very poorly in black neighborhoods, and that black citizens are a higher and higher percentage of the Democratic Party as time goes on. A winning strategy has to include carrying black neighborhoods.

Bob Brady showed great ability to carry black neighborhoods for Congress, but could not do that this year. Many, many white candidates have carried black neighborhoods in the past, including both my father and myself. So it is not something that is impossible to do, or rarely done.

What is new is the number of black incumbents with white challengers this year. Greg Paulmier was first white candidate for the Democratic nomination for the 8th District seat, when he first ran in 1999, since David Cohen (and two others) in 1967. No white candidate there had previously challenged a black incumbent. This year, two other black incumbents had white challengers for the first time, as did Sheriff Green. No reform slate of which I am aware supported both incumbent black council people at large.

No one said that electing white candidates to replace black incumbents was a goal. No one organized a PAC for all white challengers to black incumbents. No one said there should be fewer blacks in public office. And many of the people working for white challengers to black incumbents supported Michael Nutter for Mayor.

What I am doing is respectfully suggesting that people place themselves in other people's shoes and look at election results. I am also suggesting that people recognize that repeated events are looked at differently from random events. It is one thing to assert that a single black incumbent should be replaced by a white challenger; it is another thing to assert that five black incumbents should be replaced by white challengers; it would be still another thing to assert that all black incumbents should be replaced by white challengers.

The blogosphere is more about individual action than collective action. Any collective action here is premised on individuals making individual decisions. But the strength of this site and phillyblog--openness to political opinions far greater than that of any newspaper--creates an appearance of concerted action when there is not any or not much when various people are making similar arguments with similar effects in different races.

I would add that another motivator for "the 2004 generation" was the sense that the Democrats had either abandoned their role as an opposition party or were fighting the Bush administration so anemically and tentatively as to make little or no difference. The Democrats are pretty feisty in 2007, but in 2002 and 2003, almost everyone seemed pretty acquiescent.

Dean came along as an unlikely small-state moderate turned fire-breathing war critic and promised to represent "the Democratic wing of the Democratic party." That got a lot of people fired up, too, tapping into some long-held reservations about the national and local parties, and contributed to the progressive blogosphere's tendency to breathe as much fire onto Democrats as Republicans, functioning as a whip from the progressive left.

Part of the problem though is that while I bet most YPP people and Philly "progressives" are nearly totally sympatico when it comes to progressive issues in national politics, the same demarcations and common interests barely hold up at all when it comes to local politics.

So you have a large group of people with a tremendous amount of energy and a fair amount of optimism, new platforms to say what they think and to interact with one another or elected officials, access to a lot of information, a whole lot of irreverence for (and in some cases ignorance of) most political traditions and the status quo, but little to no common presuppositions about what local government should look like, beyond some general shared sense of governmental reform, economic development, public safety, and social justice.

Oh, and we have a lot of education, but not a lot of money -- so unless a whole lot of us agree and donate a little bit of money and a whole lot of time, we can't really materially help anyone get elected. Sorry about that.

It is a strange, new political interest group -- more like the media (and maybe the churches) in that our influence is mostly verbal, simultaneously high profile and subterranean. Obviously, some of us will work to identify progressive candidates and help them get elected. But ultimately, I think progressives will have arrived in Philly when political leaders ask themselves, "What will those damn bloggers say about this?" -- and try to figure what we want or what we want to hear in the same way that they try to anticipate the needs and reaction of the labor unions, the churches, the FOP, the newspapers. And often, just as with those groups, what exactly it is that "we" want will be something of a mystery.

I think the basic answer to your questions is that progressives and reformers need to do more issue based organizing that will develop coalitions with communities that are currently not aligned with us. We're clearly not strong enough to win elections on our own. I used to think that political campaigns could be a useful form of organizing, but as Ray pointed out, that only reaches the 20% of people who actually vote. Issue based organizng can happen all the time and engage a much larger group of people than electoral politics.

It's also easier to build coalitions around issues than candidates.

This is very different from the strategy that I have been advocating for a long time, but the election results made me reconsider a lot of my ideas about how we can make effective change. Right now, electoral politics isn't the primary thing we need to do.

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Check out my blog!

Voting makes a limited difference. When I began studying political science in 1966 at the University of Pennsylvania, I read a book by Robert Dahl--an eminent political scientist as a young man who became even greater as time went on--which had an introductory illustrative anecdote about the imprecise nature of political power.

In a small town somewhere, the richest man in town had no interest in politics. His brother was interested in politics, but had no money or position of political leadership. His driver was a Democratic committeeman. Dahl argued that the driver was the most powerful person politically among the three of them.

Then the richest man town died. He left a lot of money to his brother. His newly empowered brother was now more powerful than the richest man's driver, Dahl concluded.

The longer I served in the legislature, the less confidence I had in Dahl's scenario. It was harder and harder for me to believe that the richest man in town had no real power. If his driver heard of anything harmful to the richest man, he would be likely to discuss it with him. If his driver was asked to help with a fundraiser, he would certainly be expected to ask his employer to do him a favor and buy some tickets. And certainly, none of the politicians in town would want the richest man to spend money to try to defeat them, or to take any business he had out of town.

It more and more seemed to me that having a lot of wealth automatically carried a great deal of power, because one's interests tended to be taken into account by decision-makers to the extent that they were known. If the richest man in town had no interest in politics, it seemed to me that meant that the policies that the town was following were favorable to him and he saw no need to exert himself.

Social movements and elected officials friendly to social movements can create space for meaningful change to help ordinary citizens, but shrewd politicians have felt the need to make sure that the interests of the inherently powerful were taken into account.

The Medicare system, long opposed by the American Medical Association, was passed with provisions guaranteed to raise the incomes of doctors. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 carefully exempted key interests--country clubs, dining clubs, verterans and fraternal groups. OSHA legislation did more for worker safety than any other, but contained killer provisions making the adding of new dangerous chemicals to be protected against a nightmarishly complex and long-term process. And the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has been informally renamed the No Labor Rights Board because of the difficulties of organizing unions under it.

Participation in political campaigns makes a difference, but it does not do everything. You have to figure out who your friends and enemies are to participate effectively, and many people cannot do that. And people who support a winning candidate are well advised to continue to talk with that person after the election, because many efforts will be made by vested interests to co-opt him or her if he or she appears to be at all effective.

Anger has to be directed, and not just free-floating. The Republicans for generations have created targets for people to vent their anger at: Communists in the 1930's, labor unions in the 1940's, Communists again in the 1950's after labor-bashing created a backlash for the 1948 elections, civil rights activists, hippies, and criminals in the 1960's, peace demonstrators and "big government" in the 1970's, labor unions, pro choicers and the Soviet Union in the 1980's, corruption and entrenched bureaurcrats and Democrats in the 1990's, and terrorists in the 21st Century. Our constituents in significant numbers get trapped into Republican frames of reference and can be persuaded to hate whomever the enemy of the year is under many circumstances, and not think clearly about who is in the enemy category and who is not.

Political campaigns get people involved, and increase knowledge about politics and government. People who work in Democratic campaigns are more likely to evangelize for the Democratic Party to their friends and family members. For many people, politics is a matter of demonstrating solidarity with those they love, work with, or admire.

Political campaigns are about concepts more than details. Nutter won a victory for change--a victory illustrated with his signature issues of business tax cuts, smoking bans, ethics enforcement, and establishment of a stop and frisk policy in dangerous neighborhoods. What all this means in detail is something that will have to be worked out, and those who are concerned about the rather conservative elements of this platform should thoroughly study the many issues of implementation involved and try to influence the process of implementation.

The most enduring phrase I remember from my law school years was Professor Ron Dworkin's reference to the "continuing conversation we call democracy." Democracy IS a continuing conversation. The blogosphere has enormously increased its scope, and the number of people who can participate, and the information available for participants.

Powerful people are always going to pull a lot of strings in any system that can be devised, but the electoral process is a tool available to average people. I would not recommend that anyone participate ONLY in the electoral process, but nor would I recommend that anyone leave the electoral process. It's an opportunity to have a say, an opportunity most people in the world do not have, but participation in politics is certainly no substitute for having wealth or great economic power.

You Rock Ray!

And how about Bill Rieger? White guy, who represented a "majority minority" district. He barely showed up, didnt even have an office in the district, stuffed a piece of paper in his voting thing. And he was continually backed.

Dwight was a former Ward leader

I'm not sure about your question. Do you think I'm avoiding saying something?

It is hard to express everything I'm trying to get at in writing, unless I write a stupidly long post - but here goes.

Part of the whole problem in addressing these issues is language. The term "progressives" is wholly inadequate - because there are obviously minorities and working class folks who hold "progressive" views on many issues. However, as inadequate as it is, when I use the term "progressives," I generally mean white, middle/upper-middle class, reform-minded, leftists (or perhaps also liberals).

Anyway,

I see a number of people who self-identify as "progressives" who are politically active, white, and middle/upper middle-class. I see relatively few members of so-called progressive groups who don't share those attributes - more specifically who aren't white. I think that's pretty odd considering that the City is pretty evenly balanced racially, and given that the City has a lot of working class Democrats.

For the most part, from what I've seen, most of those "progressives" are not involved with the Party ward system. In fact, they are specifically looking for an alternative to the ward system. They tend to vote, but they don't generally feel that the political system in the City meets their needs or those of other communities.

I see that the vast majority of minorities and poor in the City are politically disaffected. They tend not to vote. They also tend not to feel that the existing political system serves their needs. Yes, the ward system that exists is diverse - incorporating working class and minorities - but polls tell us that the diversity doesn't mean that people outside the ward system feel the ward system is effective. I would be willing to bet that the majority of minorities and poor (and perhaps middle and upper class whites) in this City do not know a whole lot about the ward system or how it's designed to represent their interests.

To me, that says that the ward system has clearly failed to do its job. I don't think that all people involved in the ward system are corrupt. I'm sure that most of them are nice folks, who are legitimately concerned about their City. However, the system as a whole has failed. It has no working mechanism for improving itself; that is why Party officials remained Party officials despite the decades long existence of pay-to-play, poor delivery of City services, decisions being made that were disproportionately influenced by specific constituencies, etc., etc., etc.

This situation constantly confuses me. And more than that, I think it's very counterproductive. "Progressives" have a lot of resources: money, energy, time, connections to the business class and academic institutions. They tend to be highly educated (which, while I disagree very much with those posters on YPP who have repeatedly said that education = intelligence or higher qualification for political office, I do consider education to be a resource).

"Progressives" have resources that they could bring to bear on important political issues. But for the most part, they don't really have much direct political influence because their numbers are relatively small.

There are a lot of blacks and minorities in Philly who share many issue-based political objectives with progressives, and they could theoretically benefit from the resources that progressives have.

But a split remains. We have seen evidence of that split in how the recent elections developed (white, "progressive" candidates running against African American "system" candidates, and also in the results of the voting - e.g., DRM being reelected). It just doesn't make sense.

In my own immediate community, I see a lot of politically active "progressives"(mostly white/middle-upper middle class people who have specifically decided to live in community because they value diversity), and minorities and poorer folks split right along racial lines on many issues, even when race/class factors would seemingly be completely irrelevant.

I have seen relatively little progress made by "progressives" in gaining greater diversity in their cohort - despite their recognition that the lack of diversity is a problem both in terms of their authenticity and in terms of their political power. Mostly, I feel, this is because many of those "progressives" have limited life experiences where they've had close contact with minorities and people of other classes. I feel the split endures also because many minorities and working class folks are inherently distrustful of white middle/upper middle-class folks (for a variety of reasons, among which unfamiliarity and a driving desire to not cede political power to anyone else are probably the most significant). Simply put, people are uncomfortable with each other because of a long history of a lack of in-depth contact.

So, my interest is, and has been for a long time, how can these counterproductive divisions be overcome. Mostly, I think they can be overcome through increased contact. Yes, the Dem Party in Philly is a point of contact between whites and blacks; but from what I've seen, it is not a contact point between "progressives" and blacks and/or working class people. And even if I'm wrong about that, my interest is in seeing there be a different point of contact between "progressives" and those other groups, because I think that the Philly Dem Party is a failed system, and when you have folks who are involved in that system who consistently refuse to own up to the Party's failures, and who jealously hold on to power, I think it is not a useful vehicle for bringing about significant change in the City.