Bill Clinton’s Favorite Politician

Lisa DePaulo discovered this in January 1994, two years into Rendell’s first term as mayor. A writer for Philadelphia magazine at the time, she was profiling Rendell when the talk turned to Clinton. “I probably shouldn’t say this,” Rendell told her, “because it might not be taken right. I don’t want to sound conceited, but Clinton and I are very much alike.” How so? “We’re both gregarious and fun, we both love sports, we both have a genuine affection for politics and government and substance. We’re both married to successful women lawyers, we both have one kid the same age, we’re both lawyers and former prosecutors. We both have big hearts, we both love junk food and have problems with our weight.” Rendell broke it off there, laughing: “You can,” he told DePaulo, “draw some other conclusions.”

It’s not hard to guess what those “other conclusions” might be. For over the course of the day, Rendell, who’s said he wants to die the way Nelson Rockefeller did (in bed with a woman not his wife), acted like a royal cad. When DePaulo tripped a metal detector, Rendell urged her to “take it off, Lis. Take everything off!” and joked that she “must have a spiked metal bra on or something.” Later, he declared Clinton’s use of state troopers to procure women “absolutely irrelevant and meaningless,” and advanced the dubious theory that the world’s greatest leaders have all been philanderers, and the worst leaders faithful husbands. He also crudely described to DePaulo how he thought she’d perform in bed, and told her she should find his appraisal “flattering.”

When DePaulo’s article was published, the Philadelphia media, which had till then managed to avoid reporting on Rendell’s well-known boorishness and interest in women, had a field day. Monikers like “Sex Ed” and “Fresh Prince of the City” were bandied about. The city’s two daily papers, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News, published a combined 14 articles, and local television gave it heavy coverage. The veracity of the reporting was never in question (an Inquirer article on the episode was headlined “Rendell ‘Bombshell’ Surprised Few”). Indeed, a number of women later told DePaulo their own first-person tales of Rendell’s bawdy behavior. And while Rendell eventually apologized to DePaulo, he told me recently he’d made only one mistake: “I should have said right at the beginning, everything is off the record.”

Soon after DePaulo’s piece, a similar account of Rendell’s ribaldry was published in the Daily News. According to the article, in December 1992 Rendell approached Rosita Youngblood, a local Democratic activist, at a party and started rubbing her shoulders. When she rebuffed his attempt at a hug, he tried some Christmasy banter: “Rosita, that red dress you’ve got on . . . Do you have any green panties with it?” Youngblood told the Daily News she had written two letters seeking an apology: “It was really gross and I was really upset.” (She finally got the apology as the Daily News article was going to press.) Rendell’s chief of staff didn’t dispute the story, claiming only that the mayor had said “underwear,” not “panties.”

Does it come as a surprise that Slick Willie’s favorite mayor is a man nicknamed Fast Eddie?

Rendell’s antics in Philadelphia have rarely received national coverage. But he’ll be under closer scrutiny now as the Democrats’ general chairman, and his hi-jinks could become a real embarrassment for a party still trying to lay to rest memories of Clinton’s capers. Thus the concern over Rendell’s inauspicious start.

Shortly before his formal election by the members of the Democratic National Committee on September 25, Rendell horrified campaign-finance reformers by declaring, “I want to move away from the past, where big donors were taken for granted.” And last month he told the Washington Post’s David Broder that if Al Gore is the Democrats’ nominee for president, Bill Bradley would make a “great” running mate. But if not Bradley, said Rendell, “I don’t know where else Al would find somebody who would really help.” Leading Democrats, particularly Hispanics sympathetic to the veep chances of energy secretary Bill Richardson, were irate.

If Rendell manages to keep his candor in check, there is still his temper to worry about. According to Buzz Bissinger’s A Prayer for the City, an insider’s account of Rendell’s first term, in May 1994 Inquirer reporter Amy Rosenberg was walking with Rendell and questioning him about housing issues when he suddenly grew agitated. While continuing to walk, he put her in a headlock and angrily responded to her questions, with his face inches from hers. He freed Rosenberg after a few seconds and later apologized. But she was shaken up enough to consider reporting Rendell to the police. There was a similar incident a few months later. Upon encountering a photographer from the Inquirer at a book party, he barked a derogatory remark at her. When she barked back, according to Bissinger, Rendell “lunged at her and grabbed her arm with such force that his hold caused the beginnings of a black-and-blue mark. He slightly tore her Japanese jacket and started dragging her along with him.” Said the photographer, “It was so scary. He attached me.”

Nor are these explosions directed only at the press. In May 1996, Rendell met with a group of high school students in his office to discuss school reform. When 16-year-old Sarah Shapiro challenged some of his statements, Rendell began yelling at her and refused to let her speak, causing her to flee the room in tears. Rendell conceded nothing to reporters, saying Shapiro “gave infinitely better than she got” and that “if there are any apologies to be made, it certainly shouldn’t be from me.” Not surprisingly, he views his outbursts as a virtue: “Show me someone without a temper, and I’ll show you someone who doesn’t care very much about things.”

Why, given all this, was Ed Rendell made chairman of the Democratic party? Well, he has a superb record as a fund-raiser, having raised $ 6 million for the 1996 Clinton-Gore reelection effort, and he’s a commanding speaker. He also has another Clintonian trait that will serve him well: He’s shameless. When Rendell was courting the support of City Council president John Street in 1992, he went to a Street fund-raiser and belted out a rendition of “You Are So Beautiful.” When he was finished, he kissed Street on the cheek.

But when Democrats explain why Rendell was selected, his talents as a fund-raiser and a salesman aren’t usually what gets mentioned. Instead, they give you what’s become known as the Philadelphia Story. As Bill Clinton succinctly put it: “There’s not a better mayor in America than Ed Rendell.”

A powerful mythology has developed around Rendell’s record as mayor, stemming from his success in pulling the city out of bankruptcy and off life support in 1992. National political reporters began parachuting in to write him up as a New Democrat capable of governing a big city. The Washington Post, to cite a typical example, in 1994 called him a “can-do executive and impresario, capable of creating a sense of possibility where there was none.” Rendell’s own bio trumpets how he’s led Philadelphia through a “remarkable renaissance.” Al Gore has dubbed him “America’s mayor.”

But now, at the close of Rendell’s eight years as mayor, his tenure doesn’t look so impressive. Yes, there’s a budget surplus. Yes, the city’s bonds no longer receive a junk rating from Standard & Poor’s. And yes, white-collar professionals no longer profess embarrassment about living in Philadelphia.

Peel back the onion, though, and there’s minimal evidence Rendell has tackled the city’s underlying problems. Taxes are still among the highest in the country; crime is still rampant; the public schools are disastrous. Philadelphia has suffered a net loss of 150,000 people in the last 10 years, more than any other American city (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston all grew during the ’90s). “Much of the last decade’s new urban thinking that has put the bloom back on cities from coast to coast has yet to reach the City of Brotherly Love,” write Fred Siegel and Kay S. Hymowitz in a recent article about Rendell for the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal. A comprehensive survey of Philadelphia released in September by the Pew Charitable Trusts nicely captures current informed thinking about the city: “One cannot talk with many leaders in Philadelphia without being struck by a deep malaise of spirit.”

Prior to his 1991 election, Rendell appeared to be just another in a long line of characters who clambered up the city’s notoriously greasy pole but never lived up to expectations. He was elected district attorney in 1977 when he was just 33, and was easily reelected four years later, but his tenure was tainted by the discovery he’d had 26 parking tickets improperly dismissed (this, after he had forced the resignation of one of his top deputies for doing something similar). The issue haunted him in 1986, when he ran for governor and lost in the Democratic primary. A year later, after having promised black political leaders he wouldn’t run for mayor, he jumped into the race against a black incumbent, Wilson Goode, and got slaughtered.

Rendell spent the next few years at a Philadelphia law firm boning up on local issues in preparation for one final run at City Hall. He likes recounting how he’d try to meet with local officials when he was on business travel, and how these conversations were critical in making him a more informed candidate when he ran again in 1991. That may be true, but there’s another episode from this period that was more valuable on election day.

In December 1989, Rendell attended an Eagles-Cowboys football game that later became known as the Snow Bowl because the famously raucous Philadelphia Eagles fans never stopped bombarding the field with snowballs. Rendell, it was learned, had bet a drunken fan $ 20 that he couldn’t throw a snowball that would reach the field (they were both sitting in the upper deck). When the fan succeeded and almost hit a referee, Rendell promptly relinquished his $ 20.

The only problem: A witness recognized Rendell and called Steve Lopez, at the time an influential Philadelphia Inquirer columnist. When Lopez called Rendell, the former district attorney denied making the bet and told Lopez he could even call the person who was sitting with him at the game, a Philadelphia lawyer named Cliff Haines. Rendell called Lopez back an hour later and admitted he had in fact made the bet, but that his intent was to stop the hurler from throwing more snowballs. Shortly thereafter, his friend Haines called the columnist, not knowing Rendell had just come clean, and repeated the lie. Lopez wrote two lighthearted pieces about the incident and quoted Rendell saying he had only one regret: making Haines look bad.

The columns actually helped Rendell, gaining him some notoriety and building up his image as a regular guy. Even so, he wasn’t expected to win the mayoral election. Indeed, it’s highly unlikely he would have survived the Democratic primary had two black candidates not split the black vote. And he was the underdog in the general election until former mayor Frank Rizzo, who was going to run as a Republican, died a few months before the election.

When Rendell took office in January 1992, Philadelphia had been in a slump for most of 25 years. As manufacturing jobs were lost, the city steadily shed its middle-class residents as well, leaving behind a (mostly) white upper class and a (mostly) black lower class. Wilson Goode, Rendell’s immediate predecessor, will forever be remembered as the mayor who in May 1985 ordered city police to drop a bomb on a group of black radicals holed up in a West Philadelphia row house, killing 11 people and destroying 61 homes in the process. It was easy to look accomplished following Goode, who had also refused to tackle the city’s countless economic problems. When City & State magazine studied the fiscal condition of America’s 50 biggest cities in 1991, Philadelphia ranked 50th.

Rendell quickly and dramatically announced that he would head off the financial calamity facing Philadelphia. “Our situation is worse than we thought it could ever be,” he said in his inaugural speech. “Projected deficits in the years ahead number in the hundreds of millions of dollars. And the shame of it is that those deficits do not even begin to tell us the costs of their consequences. These costs — the costs of unsafe streets, of dirty neighborhoods, of struggling schools, of shut-down health clinics and recreation centers — these costs are simply incalculable.”

Rendell took a number of steps shortly after his inaugural to demonstrate Philadelphia was on the threshold of a new era. But the moment many would remember, thanks to the presence of a few news photographers, came on a Saturday morning in March 1992. That’s when the mayor got on his hands and knees and scrubbed the tiles in a City Hall ladies’ restroom as part of a volunteer clean-up effort, thus helping to deliver on his campaign promise to return City Hall to its original splendor.

Gestures like this laid the foundation for what came next: Rendell’s effort to impose long-overdue discipline on the city budget, which was slated to be $ 250 million in the red. The only realistic way of doing this was to modify the extremely generous contracts under which city workers labored. And to Rendell’s credit, he took on the unions and won.

The agreement reached in October 1992, nine months after he’d taken office, contained no wage increases for two years and only incremental increases in the two years after that. Privatization of city services, once taboo, was suddenly an option available to the mayor. City workers, who had been entitled to as many as 47 paid days off each year, were bargained down to 39 (Flag Day was one of the scotched holidays). The overall savings were projected to be $ 374 million over four years, and the deal was instrumental in bringing Philadelphia’s budget back into balance. Rendell was, justifiably, thrilled when a Wall Street Journal editorial featured him under the headline “Profiles in Real Courage.” He had it framed and hung it on the wall of his City Hall office. “I love being popular,” he told a Wall Street audience. “And right now I am extraordinarily popular.”

That he was, and had his term ended then, Rendell would be remembered as an unqualified success. Not only had he returned Philadelphia to solvency, but he had shown that a city on life support just might be able to recover.

But it was not to be. Over the past seven years, Rendell has operated on cruise control, never again making the kind of effort he devoted to pushing through the reforms in 1992. He’s occasionally compared himself to a doctor who upon being elected found a patient suffering from both a gunshot wound and cancer. The gunshot wound, he said, required immediate attention, while the cancer was more of a long-term problem. It’s a clever analogy. Rendell told me he deserves an A+ for his treatment of the gun wound, and a B or B- for the cancer treatment. In fact, though, the cancer has metastasized, and the gunshot wound turns out to have been treated with little more than a Band-Aid.

Consider Rendell’s strategy for revitalizing Philadelphia. It’s primarily rested on making the city a tourist destination, which he believes will also draw in businesses. “If you do a city right, not only will you attract tourists and conventioneers, but you also develop a strong motivation for corporations to locate there because that’s where their workers want to be.” He’s had some success in this regard, as a number of new hotels are being built downtown, and the Republican party is holding its national convention there next year. But his effort to bring riverboat gambling to the city flopped, and his push to get a new sports stadium constructed went belly-up last week.

The strategy is destined to fail in any case. Countless studies have shown travel and tourism yield narrow benefits and are unlikely to promote long-term economic growth. Moreover, Rendell refused to make changes that might have promoted growth (and his successor, John Street, looks likely to follow his example). Consider Philadelphia’s tax burden. A study completed last year by Vertex, a consulting firm, found that for a hypothetical business with $ 15 million in annual revenues, the combined business taxes would be higher in Philadelphia than in any of the other 26 major American cities it analyzed. This is partly a function of the city’s business privilege tax (yes, that’s what it’s called), a levy on every establishment, profitable or not.

Even more punitive is the wage tax, which hits every person who works within the city limits. When Rendell took office, this tax was 4.96 percent. Today, it’s still 4.61 percent (no other city in Pennsylvania has a wage tax above 1 percent). The University of Pennsylvania’s Robert Inman concluded that in 1997, a Philadelphia-based business with $ 323,000 in profits would have saved $ 11,600 by moving to the suburbs. According to the Pew study, the wage tax is responsible for the flight of nearly half of the 250,000 jobs that have left the city over the past decades (there’s been a net loss of between 65,000 and 100,000 jobs just in the ’90s). Yet Rendell, who in the beginning of his first term emphasized tax reduction, now says the city’s $ 206 million budget surplus should go toward pay increases for city workers, not tax relief.

The record is similar on crime. Rendell talked at great length about making the city a safer place. Bissinger’s account in A Prayer for the City shows the mayor was masterful at consoling people whose family members had been murdered. Yet he never made any attempt to institute the kind of reforms that have dramatically reduced the crime rate in New York. When a bipartisan group of state legislators suggested in 1997 that more officers should be placed on the street, Rendell derided the idea as “ludicrous.” When the legislators, known as the Gang of Five, kept beating the drums for more cops, Rendell began publicizing a 17 percent drop in the city’s violent-crime rate.

This was deeply disingenuous, as Rendell surely knew what later investigations would reveal: The police department’s unorthodox method of collecting crime statistics heavily undercounted violent crime (it was so bad the FBI stopped accepting Philadelphia’s crime count, and the U.S. Justice Department was called in to investigate). It was only under enormous pressure that Rendell agreed to replace the commissioner who had overseen this bogus reporting and install a reformer.

There are a number of other areas where Rendell achieved next to nothing. Even though surveys show the poor performance of Philadelphia’s public schools has driven many city residents to move to the suburbs, he never made reform a priority. Bissinger writes that, “cowed by politics, [Rendell] had never brought to the schools anywhere near the intensity that he had given to the union negotiations, or the budget, or economic development.” Indeed, Rendell says the single biggest disappointment of his mayoral tenure is not getting more funding for education from the state legislature — a highly revealing response, given that few education reformers believe what Philadelphia’s schools lack is money.

When it came to privatizing city services, Rendell did have some real achievements in his first few years in office. But in May 1994 the Competitive Contracting Committee received a memo from David Cohen, Rendell’s chief of staff, informing them that privatization was no longer a priority. And it wasn’t. Three-fourths of the privatization undertaken by Rendell was finished, or underway, by the end of 1994. And in a 1996 deal with labor, he agreed to a moratorium on contracting out city services.

This dismal record notwithstanding, polls show Rendell has remained incredibly popular in a city where politicians are almost universally loathed and distrusted (he’s “the only politician in the history of Philly who gets cheered at sports games,” according to a recent issue of Philadelphia magazine). Why? One explanation is that he is an extremely likable, affable guy — “a frat boy in a suit,” as an Inquirer editorial once put it — who has kept up a frenetic pace of public appearances as mayor. The running joke among local journalists is that he’ll attend the opening of an envelope.

Rendell has also remained popular because he still looks good when compared with his predecessors. (In 1997, a group of academics rated Goode and Rizzo two of the five worst mayors in America since 1960.) Perhaps most important, Rendell has spent his entire eight years as mayor tirelessly touting Philadelphia’s virtues not only to its citizens but to the world (his bio accurately describes him as “Philadelphia’s No. 1 Cheerleader”). This is appreciated in a city afflicted with a “we’re-not-Washington-or-New York” identity crisis, and which had become a national laughingstock in the 1980s. “There’s a willingness of Philadelphians to always believe the worst,” a community activist recently told the Inquirer. “So when you hear somebody who is really optimistic, it takes your breath away.”

Rendell has, however, been careful to temper his short-term optimism about Philadelphia with an overarching pessimism. He’s often said that no matter how much he achieved, it wouldn’t be enough to bring the city back to its former glory. At a recent Senate hearing on financing stadiums, Rendell — who was there to plead for government money — observed that “with mass communications, changes in technology, changes in the type of work that’s done in America today, there is no rationale for cities.” This is a clever bit of spin, conveniently relieving him of blame for Philadelphia’s continued decline. It is, however, deeply flawed, ignoring the recent experience of New York, Milwaukee, and Indianapolis, cities that are thriving under reformist mayors who made a clean break with the failed policies of the past.

Given that Rendell’s new post will be entirely political, his policy failures as mayor will hardly matter. Indeed, his most valuable trait during his short stay in Washington — he’s expected to return to Philadelphia after the election to run for governor in 2002 — will be not his policy wonkery but his supreme self-confidence. In a town, and a party, full of inflated egos, he’ll feel right at home with folks like Joe Biden, Charles Schumer, and yes, Bill Clinton. An Inquirer reporter asked Rendell last month if he could recall any instances as mayor when he’d made a leadership mistake. Here’s the reporter’s account of how Rendell answered: “‘Hmmm.’ He says nothing for 20 seconds, then, ‘Um,’ followed by another 30 seconds of silence. ‘In terms of big, overriding leadership issues, no,’ the mayor says finally. ‘I can’t think of any big ones.'”