The Last Hurrah

A piece still causing buzz among the pols is the story done by my colleague, Angela Couloumbis, wherein Ed Rendell pronounces this campaign his last one.
"This is my 14th election - enough is enough," the governor told Couloumbis while campaigning in Lancaster the other week. Here is a transcript of their exchange.
Most pols thought it was a crock and that Rendell will be tempted to run a 15th time, maybe for President or Vice President.
But I take Rendell at his word. Read the story and you'll see that he thinks President is out of the question. (He would have had to have started campaigning months ago if he was interested.) As to Vice President, he confesses, it is not a job he wants. Besides, he adds, he's not exactly on the "A" list of any of the potential presidentials, nor does he expect to be. Rendell's reputation in Washington as a shoot-from-the-lip candidate assures that.
I don't think Rendell is without ambition. He simply realizes the reality of the situation.

The piece served a second purpose. It allowed Rendell to state that if re-elected as governor he will serve his entire four-year term. This clearly is designed to quell Knollophobia in political circles -- the nagging fear that Rendell will depart for Washington in mid-term and that Catherine Baker Knoll will become governor of Pennsylvania.

Rendell will be 66 in 2010, the last year of his second term if he is re-elected. He is among the state's most enduring political figures, with a career of public service spanning five decades, beginning when he joined the District Attorney's office in 1968, just out of Villanova Law School. He was 24 at the time. The guy who hired him was DA Arlen Specter. Later, Rendell went on to head the office's high-profile homicide unit.

Smart politicians know how to seize an opportunity and Rendell did that in his maiden election in 1977, when he opposed incumbent DA F. Emmett Fitzpatrick in the Democratic primary. Fitz had ousted Specter four years earlier in an upset. Rendell departed the office shortly thereafter.
This was in the midst of the Rizzo era of Philly politics. Fitzpatrick had the backing of the mayor and the party apparatus. Rendell ran an outsider's campaign -- as he's done often ever since. He was anathema to the party regulars. He was seen as representing the anti-Rizzo liberals. But he beat the machine. It had more to do with the incumbent than with the challenger. Fitzpatrick, a well-known defense attorney, had champagne tastes in an office with a beer budget. He got himself a Lincoln towncar as his official city vehicle. He loved to travel to conventions in lovely locations. And he was caught, by my former colleague Mike Leary, expensing a safari jacket he picked up on one of those trips. (He listed it as a "meal" at Aquascutum.) Rendell cleaned his clock, winning with 67% of the vote.

If that was a highlight of Rendell's career, two low points came in 1986, when he lost the Democratic primary for governor to Bob Casey Sr. and in 1987, when he lost the Democratic primary for mayor to incumbent Wilson Goode. "I may never seek office again," Rendell said after losing to Goode. Four years later, he was back running for mayor.

Rendell has had years where he was in private practice, but that was just where he hung his hat while waiting for the next election to come along. He was and is and always will be a politician -- and a good one at that. Like Al Smith, he's a Happy Warrior, who loves the game. He's popular because of his performance and his regular-guy persona. But I think the trait that seals the deal with most voters is his optimism.

I've posted a a list of Rendell's contested elections -- and their results -- on my Letters Blog.