Sorry, we’re fresh out of Caseys. Will you take a raincheck? April 27 2009
The current debate surrounding Arlen Specter’s soon-to-be-former seat in the U.S. Senate is centered on Pat Toomey’s challenge to Specter in the primary. The Smerconish-esque argument goes that PA will never elect a hard-right conservative like Pat Toomey. Those who tend to agree with Smerconish either don’t know Pat Toomey, or are sheep who let their presumptions of what the “mob” is doing dictate their political choices. As I explained to a co-worker recently, Pat Toomey is a fiscal conservative and a strong candidate for the Republicans. Besides, who are the Dems going to run? They are all out of Caseys.
Dan Hirshorn of PA2010 has word of a potential senate candidate for the Dems: former Philadelphia Deputy Mayor Joe Torsella.
Torsella doesn’t have that statewide name recognition that Bob Casey did, so he may have to run an actual campaign (and posess an actual personality) to get elected in Pennsylvania. Torsella will have plenty of money to do that; his donor list reads like a who’s who of Philly limosine liberals and Rendell cronies:
Gov. Ed Rendell is on the list. So is Susan Rice, the Ambassador to the United Nations. Ditto Rhonda Cohen, the wife of Comcast executive and political bigwig David Cohen. Big-money names from Philly like Ken Jarin, Arthur Makadon and Peter Buttenweiser all make appearances. Restaurateur Stephen Starr is thrown in for good measure.
All gave money to Democrat Joe Torsella’s nascent Senate campaign.
Torsella has never held elected office, losing in his only attempt at a Congressional seat in 2004. But his career—from Philadelphia Deputy Mayor to National Constitution Center CEO—has yielded a well-documented list of political connections.
A detailed look at his recent campaign finance report provides the first glimpse of how Torsella hopes to parlay those connections into a political campaign. In the course of about six weeks, Torsella hit up dozens of contributors across the country and across professions. He reached out to donors from Beverly Hills and Seattle to Chicago and Miami. He hit up executives in a wide variety of industries, from energy pharmaceuticals to legal and financial services.
But more revealingly, he tapped deep into the well of Rendell allies and confidantes that have come to know him. And he got more than a few donors to max out early, giving the federal limit of $2,400 apiece for the primary and general elections. With little time between his declaration of candidacy and the end of the first-quarter reporting period, the push allowed him to report a haul of almost $600,000.
Does Pennsylvania have the stomach for another Philadelphia politician on a statewide basis? Especially one so closely assosciated to the Guv?
Party insiders have said Torsella wouldn’t be running without the assumed support of the Governor. And while he wouldn’t address that question directly, the names on his 144-page April quarterly report make clear Rendell’s friends are behind Torsella. His new Finance Director Michelle Singer has done the same job for Rendell. After taking the maximum allowed amount from many of them to pile up impressive numbers early, his next challenge will be to expand that on that fundraising base.
He also got significant support from Neil Oxman, a political adviser to Rendell since before his days as Mayor, and Doc Sweitzer, with whom Oxman founded The Campaign Group. But Oxman and Sweitzer stand to make that money back and then some—The Campaign Group has been retained to the Torsella campaign’s media strategy.
If the Democratic candidate for Senate can deliver Philadelphia, is his seat a forgone conclusion? We all remember voting irregularities within the city limits during elections of significant consequence (memories of 100% turnout in certain voting districts announced on live TV post election — as if this was something to brag about and not an outright admission of voter fraud — leap immediately to mind) and this is a problem Republicans cannot take lightly.
We should not let Philadelphia dictate the direction of the state. Again.
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