I agree with your post about this mayoral race being an unprecedentedly interesting "five pony"one, however I believe that it also demonstrates how dangerous a one-party town can become. What I mean by that is that the Republican party has become so irrelevant in this town that the Democratic primary is effectively the mayoral election. Unless one of the Democrats (or Sam Katz) splits off after the primary and runs as an Independent then the current Republican candidate stands to lose the November election by something like a 70-30 margin (approximately the margin the Republican candidate that ran against Rendell for his second term lost by). The Republicans have effectively become the "Washington Generals" (the team that would lose nightly to the Harlem Globetrotters) or effectively the alternate candidate against an Idi Ami or other third world dictator. The result of this is disastrous. Using Tony's math that 21% of the Democratic primary voters could elect the Democratic mayoral candidate (the amount of primary voters is substantially less than the general election). Further dilute this amount by the fact that Democrats are about 70% of the City's population and the result is that a candidate with a large machine could easily buy or steal this election. Restating this math is that the mayoral winner could have won over less than 10% of the City's eligible voters and become the mayor. No matter what anyone thinks of the national Republican party, our nation works best when it has two parties that offer different approaches to the same problem. A strong argument could be made that our City has gone backwards and has lagged substantially behind the other major cities for about forty years primarily because we have operated in a one-party system. Guy Laren
************************************** See what's free at http://www.aol.com.
