In addition to an explosion of new hotels—15 of them in the last five years—Rendell's hands-on promotional efforts produced the groundbreaking for a new performing-arts center, a Disney Quest entertainment center, the Republican Convention, and probably, courtesy of money from Harrisburg rather than the city treasury, two new sports stadiums. Today, Center City contains 40 percent of the city's jobs, a fact that sometimes provokes grumbling from the neighborhoods that Rendell is really only the mayor "from Pine to Vine," the two streets that mark the boundaries of downtown.
Rendell's personalized deal-making, though, has an old-fashioned, big-city-mayor quality that has blinded him to the opportunities that the new biotech and finance firms blossoming in nearby Chester and Montgomery Counties present, even though many of these firms along booming suburban Route had their start at the city's universities and medical schools.
Instead, the mayor has sought to revive—expensively—the antiquated but historic Philadelphia Naval Yard. Worse still, Kvaerner, faced with low-cost competition from other countries, has now withdrawn from the shipbuilding business, as if to mock the city's superannuated approach to job creation. N owhere are the limitations of Ed Rendell's public-subsidy, deal-making approach to job creation clearer than in his agenda for impoverished North Philadelphia.
Rendell had once described the area as a "tumble-down, emptied-out, garbage-strewn sprawl. With their collapsed houses, abandoned lots, and daytime drug zombies, areas like Kensington, ten minutes north of Center City, compare unfavorably to the South Bronx of the s. This is the district of City Council president John Street, a man who often casts himself in the familiar Philadelphia role of defender of the neighborhood against Center City interests.
This sort of charge must have made Rendell wince, for he had often worn his compassion for the inner-city poor on his sleeve. More than any other big-city mayor, he continuously opposed welfare reform because of the "fiscal and human catastrophe" that he warned would ensue once thousands of former recipients looked for work in his job-hungry city—despite the mounting evidence that seemed to contradict him in his own streets. He displayed some of the same moral urgency when he set out to get federal money for an em-powerment zone in North Philadelphia, aimed at bringing jobs to those same welfare recipients.
Author Bissinger, who makes Rendell's testimony before the Senate Finance Committee hearing on empowerment zones the emotional high point of his book, describes him as speaking of the city's plight and its economic decline "with passion that reached just a notch below outrage,.
Instead, says Bissinger, he was "seeking a way, at minimal public expense, of bringing an obliterated portion of the American landscape back to life. It was quite a performance, but its outcome casts doubt on its sincerity. In a series of searing articles in the Daily News , investigative reporter Paul Davies described how both Street and Rendell looked the other way as the empowerment zone degenerated into a useless patronage operation.
It appears that Rendell's administration rested on an alliance that was at once a stroke of political genius and a devil's bargain.
Street delivered the City Council for Rendell's agenda of relative fiscal restraint and downtown development, while Rendell gave Street a free hand in North Philly and the promise of support when the councilman ran for mayor, as he is now doing.
Their cooperation has cooled racial passions, but at the cost of the continuing collapse of North Philadelphia. Now, five years and many millions of dollars after the mayor's dramatic performance before the Senate, the empowerment zone has produced numerous jobs and contracts for John Street's allies, several large holes in the ground where the Billie Holiday Entertainment Complex was supposed to be, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid bills.
And the response from Philadelphians? Davies's stories have produced a collective "What did you expect? R endell's crime policies have been feckless and outdated, too, though this time some Philadelphians refused to be satisfied. The Philadelphia police needed reforming, for sure. The department, notes Temple professor and former New York cop James Fyfe, "has never been accused of professionalism.
Thanks to a residency requirement, the Fraternal Order of Police FOP , which includes commanding officers, patrolmen, and retirees, is a powerful voting block in Philly as well as a big campaign contributor. Judges, D. Rendell played by the old political rules. Trumpeting "statistics" proving that Philadelphia was the safest big city in America—even though as a former D. Meanwhile, bowing to pressure from both the FOP and black ministers, who, now that they had a white mayor, were determined to have an African-American police chief, he gave the job to the ineffectual Richard Neal, a department lifer.
The mayor's "crime policy," explains Inquirer columnist David Boldt, "reflects a tacit deal with black leaders," which made Neal the figurehead, while Rendell and his indispensable aide, David Cohen, ran the force on a business-as-usual basis. R endell, the FOP, and John Street might passively have let crime ravage North Philadelphia through the mayor's second and final term, had it not been for a North Philadelphia state legislator named Dwight Evans.
Evans, who understood the lessons of successful police reform elsewhere, couldn't stomach the toll that crime was taking on North Philadelphia—or Rendell's stubborn provincialism. But in a bravura performance, Rendell continued to insist it was all a perception problem and stole the show back with a handout "proving" that crime had dropped 17 percent in Philly.
A few days later, the Inquirer showed that, even using Philadelphia's phony statistics, which systematically downgraded those crimes that were allowed to be reported, the numbers had gone up 9 percent. It was only under continued pressure from the African-American Evans and the so-called Gang of Five—a biracial, bipartisan group of state legislators from Philly—that Rendell finally took action.
The FOP has fought Timoney—only the third top cop ever brought in from outside the ranks—tooth and nail. Since the Philadelphia police commissioner can appoint and dismiss only his two top deputies—the rest have both union and civil-service protection—it's been a lonely battle.
When Timoney tried to bring in Penn cartographers to help reproduce New York's successful Compstat crime-mapping system in Philly, the FOP filed a grievance that those had to be union jobs. Even so, the formidable Timoney, who holds two masters degrees and likes to quote Yeats and Joyce, has mobilized popular support for his reforms through virtually nonstop meetings with community and church groups.
He has brought hope to neighborhoods that city government had long abandoned. When he launched Operation Sunrise, a full-throttle assault on gun and drug dealing in the "badlands," residents stood on their porches and applauded as police cars and sanitation trucks paraded into Kensington to start the operation, the Inquirer reports. Police morale especially for those cops who had been chafing under the old regime and public confidence in the force have been rising as crime and complaints against the police have dropped.
Murders fell from in to in , and looks to be even better, with homicides as of August 16, compared with in same period last year. Rendell seems of two minds about the policing success forced on him. Though he's been publicly supportive of Timoney, he clings to his old illusions that crime can't fall as a result of better policing but only as a result of an improvement in its supposed "root causes": poverty and racism.
Even after Timoney had begun to reduce Philly's crime, Rendell told the Washington Post that a growing economy and the decline of crack use were "as responsible as anything for the decline in homicides.
O n education, Rendell has shown more interest in reform than earlier Philadelphia mayors, but even here, because he is ultimately wedded to an obsolete orthodoxy—and because he has been unwavering in supporting a prickly superintendent who has offended everyone—his efforts haven't borne fruit. When he took office, the Philadelphia District—over 75 percent black and Hispanic—looked like any other failed big-city system, with only a quarter of the elementary-school children reading at grade level and high-school seniors scoring more than points under the national average on their SATs.
For every high-school kids, there were six incidents of crime during the school year, and 25 students suspended. A cumbrously bureaucratic Board of Education oversaw everything from hiring the superintendent to the toilet-paper contracts, often enough granted to board members' relatives.
The mighty Philadelphia Federation of Teachers had, among other perks, one of the shortest schooldays in the nation, so short it didn't meet the state requirement for minimum hours of schooling.
So bad was the situation that Philadelphia's ordinarily passive business community began to get involved. When Rendell named David W.
Hornbeck superintendent in , he must have thought he was truly living up to his reputation as America's Mayor. Unlike past in-house appointees, Hornbeck had won a national reputation as a visionary reformer as Secretary of Education in Maryland and the architect of statewide reform in Kentucky.
In fact, he claims a sort of ownership of Biden, saying he was the first to suggest him as running mate for Barack Obama in Ed Rendell will talk, over three long conversations on three days at his house, about all kinds of things. Ed is 76 years old, and the physical plant seems to be falling apart. His life is different. But Ed Rendell still has his finger on our national conversation. Not that Ed Rendell needs any prodding. But nobody wanted to talk money problems then; that Democratic primary was all about the MOVE bombing.
Ed lost. And Ed himself was lost. After two terms as DA, he came up short in primaries for governor and then against Goode — Rendell was unfocused, a standard liberal Democrat.
It seems strange now, but he lacked passion. Ed considered a run for attorney general. It was a low point. Ed had gone into private practice, repping asbestos companies.
Cohen suggested another run for mayor. Ed and Cohen would spend two and a half years going to various cities, talking to mayors to get ideas. So what changed him? Almost everyone who runs, and great athletes, should experience defeat. He said we were one of five people who actually read it. Not so, says Ed. In fact, most of the ideas were generated by him. He sold his bargaining position every chance he got to a public well aware the city was financially destitute. They broke his ribs, and nobody made an arrest.
I just went nuts. I felt it inside me. I wanted to say to each of those commanders: How can you fucking sleep at night? Trouble loomed for months. Yet there was something else wrong, maybe even worse: a cancer gnawing at the city, deep and growing. There was no denying the force of his cheerleading — the Ed of jumping into city pools and showing up, it seemed, at every new Wawa opening, and talking up his city every chance he got.
As if Ed, in cheerleading for Philadelphia, was just being Ed. Which does him an injustice: The public was invited to take part in a cleanup of City Hall one Saturday the first month Ed was mayor, and he found himself on his hands and knees, scrubbing away next to a woman who had driven with her young family from Altoona. From Altoona! She had grown up in South Philly and talked about her childhood in the neighborhood, how much it had meant to her, and here she was, with her kids, putting in a day of scrubbing City Hall and then driving back home to Altoona.
Katz, who has known Ed for 45 years, ran for mayor himself three times. And I think he fairly reversed that. When I do ask him about his father, for example, to tell me what it was like to lose him so early …. He served two terms, leaving in to run for Pennsylvania Governor. He was defeated in the Democratic primary for Governor by Robert P. Casey, Sr. Rendell was prevented by term limits from seeking re-election in , although he had already announced during his re-election campaign in , that it would be the last one of his career.
If he changed his mind, Governors in Pennsylvania are restricted to serving two consecutive terms, meaning that Rendell would have had to wait until to run again for the top office. Rendell said that he was "not really" interested in running for either President or Vice President in Nevertheless, he drew considerable attention. His service as district attorney and mayor demonstrated a law enforcement focus that could be a positive campaign asset, as could his military service.
Both Giuliani and Rendell have previously been dubbed "America's Mayor. In early , Rendell made statements that seemed to support President George W. Bush's Social Security privatization proposal. Rendell addressed this issue in later speeches, saying that he opposes social security privatization, and that his previous comments were meant to show admiration for President Bush for taking on a politically risky subject.
Nevertheless, Rendell's initial statements cost him support among Democrats who were against Social Security privatization. Rendell won re-election on November 7, Rendell was a potential candidate to serve as Senator John Kerry 's running mate in the Presidential campaign. Rendell's popularity, particularly in the suburban ring of counties around Philadelphia, was a key to Kerry's victory in Pennsylvania, one of the most hotly contested "swing states" in the presidential election.
Rendell was first elected Governor of Pennsylvania in November The following table shows a list of notable endorsements made by this individual or organization. The list includes presidential, congressional, gubernatorial, state legislative, and other notable candidates. If you are aware of endorsements that should be included, please email us.
Rendell was a superdelegate to the Democratic National Convention from Pennsylvania. Rendell supported Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. Superdelegates in were automatic delegates to the Democratic National Convention, meaning that, unlike regular delegates, they were not elected to this position.
Also unlike regular delegates, they were not required to pledge their support to any presidential candidate, and they were not bound by the results of their state's presidential primary election or caucus. In , superdelegates included members of the Democratic National Committee, Democratic members of Congress, Democratic governors, and distinguished party leaders, including former presidents and vice presidents.
All superdelegates were free to support any presidential candidate of their choosing at the Democratic National Convention. Pennsylvania had delegates at the Democratic National Convention.
Of this total, were pledged delegates. National party rules stipulated how Democratic delegates in all states were allocated. Pledged delegates were allocated to a candidate in proportion to the votes he or she received in a state's primary or caucus.
A candidate was eligible to receive a share of the state's pledged delegates if he or she won at least 15 percent of the votes cast in the primary or caucus. There were three types of pledged Democratic delegates: congressional district delegates, at-large delegates, and party leaders and elected officials PLEOs.
Congressional district delegates were allocated proportionally based on the primary or caucus results in a given district. Before serving as mayor, he was elected district attorney of Philadelphia for two terms from through Rendell now serves as a consultant or board member for several green and alternative energy firms, including Own Energy, Element Partners, and Ocean Thermal Energy. He has also remained heavily involved in the campaign for government efficiency by working with entities such as Government Sourcing Solutions, Public Financial Management and Greenhill Advisors.
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