Incumbent Protection Through Chaff

Back in my Navy days, my ship, like nearly all naval craft, was equipped with something called chaff. Chaff, at least the shipboard variant, is basically a rather low-tech rocket (click on the picture for a larger view) stuffed with strips of aluminum, mylar, or some other lightweight material which reflects radar waves. If a radar-guided missile was inbound, these rockets would be launched skyward, where they would explode and fill the air with thousands of little radar reflectors. The idea was to decoy the incoming missile, so that it would head toward the chaff cloud instead of us. The enemy's best chance at success was to have one single big radar return, namely our ship, for the missile to target. Our best chance at survival was to give the missile so many targets to choose from that it would be almost certain to pick the wrong one.

The Pittsburgh Democratic machine seems to be employing a similar strategy to protect the weakest incumbents on City Council. It is giving voters an ever-increasing number of candidates to choose from, and they are almost certain to pick the wrong one.

Yesterday, the Post-Gazette told us that a ninth -- no, that's not a typo -- the ninth Democratic challenger has entered the primary race for the District 9 council seat currently held by Twanda Carlisle. I just read the article, and I already can't remember the new candidate's name. And why should I even bother to refresh my memory? Ms. Carlisle can now retain her seat by getting merely 10.01% of the vote. Given the historically low turnout in her district, she probably already has enough people on her staff and on her various "consultant" contracts alone to swing the 10% she needs. Even if District Attorney Stephen Zappala manages to indict Ms. Carlisle for her impressive string of scandals, she has already purchased enough votes to win.

I've already discussed the District 9 primary in a previous post, and it's worth repeating the conclusion that I made back then:

Unless these people get their shit together, Ms. Carlisle's reelection is all but assured. With the anti-Carlisle vote split across six [now nine] different challengers, she should have no problem at all in securing the Democratic nomination, allowing her to run (most likely unopposed) in the November general election.

Perhaps the good people of District 9 could follow the example set by the citizens of Pittsburgh School Board District 2 in 2003. Back then, the District 2 seat was held by well-reviled Darlene Harris, and Democratic candidates to unseat her were threatening to come of out the woodwork. The primary would have been overwhelmed by challengers. The only way to handle things was to hold a kind of pre-primary to select a single Democrat candidate to go up against Ms. Harris. So in January, a grass-roots group of concerned citizens held a meeting at the local public library, and selected Patrick Dowd to be the only other name on the Democratic primary ballot. It worked. Darlene Harris was booted off the school board.

What I neglected to mention in that earlier post is that that defeat was by no means the end of Darlene Harris. She returned, using her nicotine-fueled old-school-machine-politics muscle to elbow her way into the Democratic nomination (and hence the general election victory) for Interim Mayor Luke "Handcuffs" Raventahl's old seat on City Council. Old political dinosaurs never die, at least not in Pittsburgh; they just get elected to a post where they can do even more damage to our city.

And now the same chaff strategy is beginning to emerge in Ms. Harris's own fight to retain her incumbency on City Council. A second challenger for the Democratic nomination, Robin Rosemary Miller, announced her candidacy today. She joins Canadian immigrant (and recently-naturalized U.S. citizen) Dave Schuilenburg, who was already in the race. I would fervently hope that this primary contest could somehow be capped at just three candidates. But Darlene Harris is such a disaster that there are likely to be plenty of other people who will jump into the race to unseat her. Ironically, these collective efforts will only serve to ensure her reelection.

I realize that all of these candidates are their own people. It is unlikely that any of them realize that they are being used as electoral chaff rockets by the local Democratic machine. All of them have a genuine desire to eliminate the ability of Ms. Carlisle and Ms. Harris to embarrass our city any more than they already have. But regardless of their motivations or qualification, they are filling the air with distractions. They are spreading the anti-incumbent vote far too thin. And they are all but guaranteeing that our disastrous status quo will continue.

Pittsburgh is caught in a very real Catch-22 here. The worst members of our elected bodies logically attract the largest number of people who wish to unseat them. But because we are locked into perpetual one-party rule, these challenges can only occur during the Democratic primary. When primary day finally arrives, incumbents are almost always the endorsed candidate of the party's machine, and giving voters a multitude of non-endorsed options can only serve help the incumbent further. Our very real desire to rid our city of the worst only leads to us never getting the best.