The opening chapter of “All the King’s Men”—Robert Penn Warren’s masterful 1946 novel about the governorship of Willie Stark, a fictional Southern politician—is a study in American campaigning.
The narrator, a reporter-cum-campaign-aide, describes the arrival of Stark, whom he calls “the Boss,” in a roadside town. The Boss strolls casually into a drugstore, orders a few sodas, and makes small talk under a blow-up photo of himself, until a large crowd has gathered in the square outside.
“Speech, Willie, speech!” they start crying.
“My God,” Stark says, “I didn’t come here to make a speech. I came here to go out and see my pappy.” Then he walks steadily into the crowd and makes a speech.
The transition is so sly—one instant he’s talking about his father’s smoked sausage, the next about the statesmen who want him out of office—it’s impossible to divine Stark’s intentions. Had he planned it all along, or was he merely seizing a political opportunity?
In Harrisburg this week, there was a series of similar spectacles, though they were a good deal less artful and much more transparently orchestrated.
First, on Monday afternoon, Dan Miller announced he’d be relinquishing the Republican nomination for mayor, in a press conference in the garden of his 2nd Street home. His aide, Chuck Ardo, hinted that the timing was a matter of making the most of good weather, but the stagecraft behind the event was apparent. (Miller’s conference was “to disclose his decision about remaining a candidate for mayor by accepting the Republican nomination,” the press release elusively stated.)
At that conference, Miller also implied he was retiring from Harrisburg politics in general. TheBurg took the occasion to publish two columns surveying his career, including his safeguarding of the flow of the city’s money, and analyzing what might have led to his loss in May’s Democratic primary.
Then, on Thursday afternoon, some peculiar news broke. Two separate lawsuits, filed at the Court of Common Pleas, had challenged the legitimacy of two of the remaining contenders for the fall race.
One was filed by Scott Caulfield, an attorney at a firm called Capital Principles, representing a pair of petitioners: Autumn Cooper, a registered Democrat, and Joseph Lahr, area leader for the city of the Dauphin County Republican Committee. It challenged the nomination of Nate Curtis, a 26-year-old Afghanistan veteran, on the grounds that he does not meet a residency requirement and that he failed to designate a something called a Committee to Fill Vacancies, as mandated in the election code.
The second was filed by Baker Kensinger, an attorney at Goldberg Katzman, representing the petitioner Donald Lee Coles, Sr., also a registered Democrat. It raised the same “Committee to Fill Vacancies” objection, this time with the intent of removing Independent candidate Nevin Mindlin from the ballot.
For those who read about the petitions—first reported by Emily Previti at the Patriot-News—it was hard not to speculate about their true source. None of the petitioners could be reached for comment. (Caulfield, who returned a call Friday afternoon, said he could not speak about his clients’ motivations. But he did say the suit “has nothing to do with Mr. Curtis or his political ideology” and “everything to do with rule of law.”)
One of the petitioners, Autumn Cooper, had filed similar complaints in 2011, when she tried to remove candidates from the school board ballot. In that case, however, she was a contender for a school board seat; it’s not clear what stake she has in the mayoral race. That a Republican leader had signed on in the attempt to remove Curtis, and that a private citizen with no known political connections had tried to scratch Mindlin from the ballot on a technicality, began to look suspicious.
A few people cried foul. They accused Eric Papenfuse, the winner of May’s primary, of trying to clear the field of contenders before November. After all, if the challenges succeed, the only other competition for the mayor’s office will be Lewis Butts, who garnered a mere 64 votes in the primary and is running a write-in campaign. The suggestion was that Papenfuse, the deep funding of whose campaign is well known, had orchestrated the petitions. (Papenfuse denies any involvement.)
Then, on Friday, the cries became louder—and were now in the mouths of the candidates themselves. Nate Curtis, anticipating a court summons over the suit, arranged to accept the courier service at the counter of the Midtown Scholar, Papenfuse’s 3rd Street bookstore. “I go off to war, I come back from Afghanistan, I just want to help my city, and this is the thanks I get?” he said, in a video made available by Roxbury News.
Mindlin did not accuse Papenfuse himself, but did point the finger at Papenfuse supporters. “I’m going to continue to fight this,” he said. “Frankly, I see it as a typical move of Eric’s cronies. He’s the only one who stands to gain from this. And what it does is disenfranchise the voters of Harrisburg and take the focus away from the issues.”
And Miller, reversing his Monday announcement, revealed he would be visiting the County Administration Building to submit his $25 filing fee, thereby sealing his acceptance of the Republican nomination. A press gaggle dutifully formed at 3 p.m., and Miller, after posing for photos with his cash in hand, slid his payment over the counter.
He said afterwards that the petitions came as a “huge surprise.” “This is definitely the Papenfuse campaign,” he added. “It’s a civic responsibility for me to get on the ballot. Let’s have a choice.”
In short, it was a day of carefully arranged displays. But it was hard to tell which hands were doing the arranging, and with what in mind. Whoever is ultimately behind the petitions, they have no useful place here. To the extent they have cast suspicions on Papenfuse’s candidacy—accurate or not—they are likely to do him more harm than good. If they lead to Mindlin’s removal from the race, then voters will have lost an opportunity to hear his broad and informed civic vision. They have brought Miller back on the ballot, but at the cost of any appearance of a stable campaign.
Since the primary season began last spring, the political environment has been increasingly dominated by petty spectacle, with the focus on process and money rather than on issues. This reflects a national trend, of course, and perhaps it was always inevitable. Robert Penn Warren knew in 1946 how to portray the sly manipulation of local politics, the ingenious way of adapting voters’ minds to categories of enemy and friend. Whatever the outcome of the petitions next week, the race will be uglier for it.
