Pa. Delegation’s take on the looming shutdown

The federal government is getting close to possibly shutting down for the first time since 1996. If President Obama and Congressional leaders cannot come to an agreement full story

April 7, 2011 at 12:49 pm | Comments (5)

Come out, come out wherever you are…

Where is Chaka Fattah?

Where is my congressman?

For the next week, I plan to do something that has been done so many times before it is becoming repetitive. It is called BASHING.

My first target is my congressman. You know, if you ask the average district resident their congressman, they probably wouldn’t know. However, they might know if you mentioned the name.

Yeah, that is not going to work here.

…

September 29, 2009 at 11:03 pm | Comments (2)

Specter, Fattah and the Senate race

Having run briefly against him in 2008, I couldn’t help pausing at the fact that Congressman Chaka Fattah (D-2) has

June 26, 2009 at 9:02 am | Comments (0)

Weak numbers for Specter, but growing support among leaders

This morning’s Franklin & Marshall poll contained pa href="http://www.pa2010.com/author/lvecsey/" onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://www.pa2010.com']);return TrackClick("http%3A%2F%2Fwww.pa2010.com%2Fauthor%2Flvecsey%2F','pa2010.com+blogger+Laura+Vecsey')" target="_blank">pa2010.com blogger Laura Vecsey writes over at The Patriot-News that the list includes Congressmen Chaka Fattah (D-2) and Tim…

June 25, 2009 at 3:12 pm | Comments (6)

The Times, The Inquirer and Pa. Politics

I’ve never been the kind of Republican to complain about biased newspaper coverage—it sounds like feeling sorry for yourself, and besides, they aren’t going to change. But The Philadelphia Inquirer and The New York Times have really outdone themselves this year. Last Sunday’s Week in Review section (The Times) ran an

April 25, 2009 at 9:13 pm | Comments (0)

Where’s my party?

Well, time moves quickly. Last Spring I was trying desperately to get attention from the local political blogs. Now I’m writing for one.

Some of you may remember me from that race. I had the crazy idea that someone might actually pay attention to a moderate Republican running in the fourth most Democratic district in the country. They didn’t, and I dropped out in the summer. The incumbent, Congressman Chaka Fattah (D-2), didn’t bother campaigning against my replacement.

All of that seems like a long time ago. Now I’m writing a blog whose main question is simple: Is there intelligent life in the Republican Party, and among moderates-to-conservatives generally, in Pennsylvania? Is our state destined to become bluer and bluer, or will it remain the purple state—not quite one way, not quite the other—that it has usually been? Or, to put it in slightly different terms . . . will the GOP’s seemingly all-out effort to make itself irrelevant finally succeed?

As my title suggests, I’m something of a moderate. At Rutgers University, teaching tax and comparative law as I do makes me a wild-eyed conservative. In the national Republican Party, that makes me something of a liberal weirdo. In Cheltenham, Montgomery County, where I live with my wife and two children . . . well, it isn’t entirely clear that the MontCo Republicans have much of an ideology, and as we’ll see, that’s part of the problem.

I’ll be writing about the 2010 races, but also about the political and cultural background in which they transpire. What do the demographic trends in Pennsylvania—its becoming more New Jersey and less Ohio, as The Inquirer put it—mean for our future politics? Can the city of Philadelphia have a serious Republican Party, and can it escape the pay-to-play culture that it always takes about overcoming but never quite does? Will the suburbs continue their red-to-purple tradition, or will the line between the parties move to, say, somewhere between York and Harrisburg?

Over the next 18 months, we’ll find out. Maybe.

April 19, 2009 at 7:00 pm | Comments (0)