Josh Wander (REP) - 5,012 votes (11.46%)So, yea, when the P-G calls it a landslide, I can't think they're far off.
William Peduto (DEM) - 36,856 votes (84.30%)
Lester F. Ludwig (IND) - 1,514 votes (3.46%)
WRITE-IN - 340 votes ( .78%)
Tuesday night, the 49-year-old Democrat brushed aside token opposition to become Pittsburgh's chief executive, officially capturing the mayoral post he first sought nearly a decade ago. In January, the veteran councilman will move to the opposite end of the fifth-floor hallway of the City-County Building, to the grand corner office about to be vacated by his longtime rival, Mayor Luke Ravenstahl.Then there's this from Mike Wereschagin and Bob Bauder of the Trib:
As expected, Mr. Peduto was able to declare victory against Republican Josh Wander and Les Ludwig, an independent, shortly after the polls closed.
The results also brought victories to city council candidates expected to be reliable allies of the new administration. Dan Gilman, Mr. Peduto's longtime aide, will succeed him in the East End District Mr. Peduto had represented since 2001. Councilwoman Natalia Rudiak won re-election to her South Hills district. In a special election to fill the seat recently vacated by Patrick Dowd, Deb Gross won in a crowded field abetted by a turnout operation quarterbacked by the Peduto campaign team.
Peduto won 84 percent of the vote on Tuesday with 96.8 percent of precincts reporting, walloping two challengers who barely put up a fight. His 35,000 votes topped the 28,600 Mayor Luke Ravenstahl won in the last mayor's race, in 2009.And:
“We are the next great American city. It's about building from within, rebuilding the neighborhoods that built this community,” Peduto said after appearing on stage twirling a push broom at the Greater Pittsburgh Coliseum in Homewood, the neighborhood where his grandmother settled nearly 100 years ago.Congratulations, Mr. Mayor-elect!
“The heart, the strength, the power of the entire region will come from within the city's borders,” said Peduto, a data-crunching, hockey-playing East End progressive from a traditional Italian-American family.
Pittsburgh city councilman Bill Peduto, the Democratic nominee to become the city’s next mayor, this week released a new television ad targeting the use of public funds to expand Heinz Field, the home of the NFL’s Pittsburgh Steelers. The Steelers want the city council’s Stadium and Exhibition Authority to pick up most of the $40 million tab for adding 3,000 seats to the decade-old stadium, but the authority has resisted, arguing that the expansion doesn’t meet the terms of the team’s lease with the city.So, who's Thinkprogress? Here's how it describes itself:
In the folksy 30-second ad touting Steeler staples, Peduto outlines it not as a battle between a team and the city, but a question of whether the money should go to the stadium or toward youth programs.
“I’m Bill Peduto, and I’ll cheer with Sax Man for the Steelers,” Peduto says in the ad. “But instead of more money for stadiums, it should go to youth programs. I’ll answer to Coach Jeff and Earl the street sweeper, not the downtown insiders. Some things should never change. But who your mayor fights for will.”
Think Progress is a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund. The Center for American Progress Action Fund is a nonpartisan organization.So it's the political blog tied to the Center for American Progress and this is how the CAP describes itself:
ThinkProgress was voted “Best Liberal Blog” in the 2006 Weblog Awards and chosen as an Official Honoree in the 2009 and 2012 Webby awards. It was also named best blog of 2008 by The Sidney Hillman Foundation, receiving an award for journalism excellence. In 2009, ThinkProgress was named a “Gold Award Winner” by the International Academy of Visual Arts.
The Center for American Progress is an independent nonpartisan educational institute dedicated to improving the lives of Americans through progressive ideas and action. Building on the achievements of progressive pioneers such as Teddy Roosevelt and Martin Luther King, our work addresses 21st-century challenges such as energy, national security, economic growth and opportunity, immigration, education, and health care. We develop new policy ideas, critique the policy that stems from conservative values, challenge the media to cover the issues that truly matter, and shape the national debate. Founded in 2003 by John Podesta to provide long-term leadership and support to the progressive movement, CAP is headed by Neera Tanden and based in Washington, D.C.See? National political blog of a national progressive think tank.
With a convincing win for the Democratic nomination for mayor of Pittsburgh Tuesday, Bill Peduto...And so on.
The Squirrel Hill resident admitted city Democrats' registration edge stacks the odds against him.Ha. Funny. A voter fraud joke. Wow. Cutting edge political humor. Still not true, of course, but he's a republican so I guess he's constitutionally incapable of not telling it so I guess I'll let it pass.
"My only chance of actually winning is the race is if the Democratic nominee drops dead, but then there's a possibility I'll still lose because there's a demographic of dead voters out there that still may vote him in," Wander joked.
Disclaimer: Yes, I am a member of Peduto's cyber staff.And whenever I (who had no connection to the campaign at all) wrote about Peduto or the race, Maria and I would have no communication about it whatsoever. Full disclosure.
The final poll of the Pittsburgh Mayor race, from Susquehanna, shows Bill Peduto leading Jack Wagner by 9 points, 42-33.I have to add a slight "Yes, but..." here. In an election of this size (a municipal election where the margin of victory might be a few thousand if not a few hundred votes) nothing is "safely above" or assured. The worst thing would be for a voter to assume that because these numbers point in one direction that his or her the race is over. (And this is true for either camp, Wagner or Peduto.)
But wait aren’t there a lot of undecided voters? Sure, there still are about 16% undecided, but when the pollsters pushed them to say which way they’re leaning, Wagner only gets 20% of them. With the soft supporters included, Peduto still has a 7-point lead – safely above the poll’s +/-4.88% margin of error.
Wagner would need to win 80% of the undecided voters to overtake Peduto’s lead. Could that happen? It’s unlikely in the extreme.But it's still possible. There's only one solution for this situation: VOTE!
City Councilman Bill Peduto grabbed the front-runner status he once claimed to have in the Pittsburgh mayoral race, seizing on growing disapproval of chief opponent Jack Wagner in the campaign's bitter, final weeks, a Tribune-Review poll shows.The Trib even has some art work to illustrate the swing if you wanna go see it.
Peduto surged ahead of Wagner to stake a 42 percent to 33 percent lead among 400 likely voters a week before the decisive Democratic primary on Tuesday, according to the poll by Susquehanna Polling and Research. The poll shows a 9-point gain for Peduto, 48, of Point Breeze and a 7-point drop for Wagner, 65, of Beechview since an April 1-2 survey by the Harrisburg firm.
“It looks to me like whatever the Wagner folks have done might have backfired,” said Jim Lee, president of Susquehanna Polling and Research. “All the movement has clearly gone to Peduto.”And:
Mudslinging that punctuated advertising during the past three weeks, including an anti-Peduto ad from a Republican consultant hired by a Ravenstahl political committee, impacted Wagner's popularity.The Trib quoted a Wagner spokesman saying that they'd "disavowed" the Ravenstahl ads. You remember, those, right? The swiftboat ads? It looks like Luke's swiftboat ads damaged Wagner's credibility.
“The credibility of the mayor at this point is rapidly decreasing, and that has hurt Jack Wagner,” said Gerald Shuster, a political analyst with the University of Pittsburgh. He said Wagner has not distanced himself from Ravenstahl as a federal investigation of city spending moves closer to the mayor's office.
Both campaigns said they would focus on Sunday and Monday on “get out the vote” efforts, noting that voter turnout could make the difference. Peduto will “be out on the street,” Toler said, and Wagner scheduled 20 events between Friday and Tuesday to allow him and about 400 volunteers to meet people, Abbott said.GO VOTE ON TUESDAY!
The Post Gazette endorsed Jack Wagner for two reasons that I want to refute:Reminds me of the joke about the producer and the scriptwriter, "We love this, we're behind you, we believe in you and we want to be a part of this. So we're gonna pass."
- Bill Peduto's too compromised by his position on City Council. In the paper's eyes, Council is irredeemable and Bill's got too many enemies, fatwas, and blood feuds running there to work with them if he becomes Mayor.
- Bill is, on the other hand, too cosy with our county executive Rich Fitzgerald. The PG doesn't want that kind of concentrated power running Allegheny county. Otherwise the PG calls Peduto hardworking, progressive, inspired, uncorrupted, and an all around decent guy who's partnered with them - the PG itself - to promote particular projects in Pittsburgh.
This schizophrenia in Pittsburgh's paper of note comes from the cold war between its owners, the Block family, and its managing editors. In other words between the money and the people on the ground. But more on that later.
POINT 1
Bill's been swimming with Council's sharks for more than a decade and there hasn't been a single corruption charge against him. If anything his time on Council has made him MORE progressive. He's turned away from the mad infighting to national and international sources of urban growth, studied them and tried to bring pieces of their programs to Pgh. He's not fighting for kickback dollars on building projects, or trying to settle Ward scores. He's not looking ahead to a seat on the board of Duquesne Light.
More importantly, Murphy's and Ravenstahl's administrations each in their own way demonstrated that a Mayor doesn't need to be beholden to or lovey dovey with Council to get stuff done. In fact he can ignore them half the time. If he's a driven powerhouse of a man like Murphy or the late Dick Caligiuri he can do amazing things, if he's a morally compromised teenager like Luke R he can ....well blacken the name of an entire political organization and hopefully go to jail.
What I'm saying is that there's no absolute power to corrupt anyone absolutely in any part of Pgh city government. The measure of the man determines how he'll use it. I think Bill's shown himself to be finely drawn. You can't buy him. He's a political creature. That's what he wants, the power, the work, not the payoff which could follow.
Jack Wagner's a machine politician. He has connections in Harrisburg that could smooth certain processes between our city and the capital but...how smooth do we want things between Corbett's Harrisburg and City Hall? Do you want drilling concessions at the city border which, if you've forgotten is, going roughly clockwise - Swissvale, just East of Banksville and North of Washington's landing?
Where Jack's been doing his work is probably more unsavory and just as dirty as Bill's backyard. Which is our backyard. I'd rather have someone who knows it and the bullies within that need a lesson.
Plain and simple, Luke's campaign money went to Jack. He accepted it. More importantly, the Dem powers that be - and if you think they don't exist I'm not a conspiracy theorist and you're a dreamer - they said, Yes Luke you can move that money to back Jack. Ipso facto Jack's their new man. Luke was their old one. Jack will have to owe them. Anyone humming a Who tune?
POINT 2
The plain fact of the matter is Pittsburgh will never be a great city...let me rephrase that...it will never have the political intelligence and might commensurate to its greatness until the day comes when the city IS the county. You've all read the numbers down the decades how we've gone from 600,000 to what is it now 307, 488? (Although I think we've just started to add a few, if only in Lawrenceville.) Point is, Pittsburgh isn't a city. It's a city-state. It's a heartland of sorts to the Steeler nation and it stretches spiritually almost to the Ohio and West Virginia borders, up 79 to the fields of Meadville and as far East on the turnpike till DVE dies.
Okay maybe I'm exaggerating.
But Pittsburgh as a force and as a physical entity should shed its political borders. Philadelphia did, Buffalo did, Indianapolis has, Portland will...melt the city into the county, save all that municipal waste the suburbs complain about - while they live off the shoulder of the city like pilot fish - and at the same become a regional power to rival Philly in size.
What makes Pittsburgh truly "small", what is making it smaller is its small ambitions and its petty crimes. We have a political culture that fights over what it perceives are limited resources. We horde power and money in line offices that shouldn't exist, we hold fast to doctrines both laborite and managerial which sound respectively proud and real politic but eventually lead to paralysis, we sell out for payoffs that wouldn't pay off the balance of a car.
Redefine the pie. Get out of the engine room, as my dad used to say, and realize there's a ship to sail. Insert your own metaphor.
On a practical level, I hope the Mayor and the County Exec DO work hand in hand. I hope they get along like David Lawrence and (an elected) Richard Mellon, or Dick Caliguiri and Henry Hillman (or Elsie). We NEED to move as a body that's at least county wide and these guys are our chance to do it. They're not, neither of them and even their enemies couldn't pin it on them, they're not crooks. They're decent men who've arrived at just the right time.
Because in 5 years Pittsburgh's going to blow up on the national scene. We're going to have even more powerful health care, university and resource based industries, we're going to alter the map on urban farming and urban redevelopment. We're going to be a culinary, printmaking, bookmaking, beer making, and town making model for the entire country. You're gonna be flying to Portland Oregon to drink boutique coffee a decade late or Austin Texas to see SouthXSouthwest and you're gonna take out the airline magazine of your choice and there's gonna be an article about Pittsburgh, the phoenix from the industrial flameout, the emerald city risen from the brownfields, the gem of the Appalachians that held fast against fracking (okay Brian, maybe The Paris..), and you're going to laugh. And hopefully turn around. Or have your head turned around when you get back and arrive where we first started and know the place for the first time.
And if we don't have the political vision to run alongside that urban assault, to assist and guide it, to check and delay it, we're going to be a war zone. Libertarians in the Cranberrys of their minds vs the radicals of Greater Homestead. We'll fracture even more and fight over smaller and smaller pieces of Pittsburgh's pie while the foundations despair and the drilling, banking and insurance companies chuckle.
Don't let it happen. You vote for Jack Wagner you vote for the past. Which needs to stop happening in Pittsburgh over and over again.
Listen to the PG's editors writing BETWEEN the lines of the editorial their owner demanded. Listen to the backlash.
Pick a good man not a party.
I’m Sara Wagner. My dad’s Jack Wagner and he’s running for Mayor. He knows what’s important to young people like me. He’s evolved a lot on social issues and I’m really proud of him.However, the ad itself never says anything about how he's "evolved" on social issues. I am guessing the campaign is hoping the electorate (READ: the young-uns already leaning towards Peduto) will just fill in the blanks.
As we've noted here previously, on LGBT issues especially, Wagner has come a long way since his city council days. And at debates, he routinely makes a point of emphasizing the importance of sensitivity to the "lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community." (I don't think I've ever heard him use the acronym, now that I think of it.)That link on "previously" takes you to this piece by Lauren Daley where she writes:
It's a cute spot, ending with a self-consciously dorky father-daughter fist-bump. But I can't help but feel it speaks to a certain unease about younger voters within Wagnerland: Polls consistently show Wagner lagging with that portion of the electorate.
Wagner's position on LGBT equality has evolved over the course of his political career. As a city councilor, he opposed a 1990 ordinance to include gays and lesbians in the city's anti-discrimination law. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that while Wagner acknowledged "incidents" of discrimination, "I don't believe that [Pittsburghers] discriminate in any systematic manner against homosexuals."Which of course is a good thing - it should be noted, however, that that same Daley piece points out that even though Wagner backed marriage equality, the Stonewall Democrats endorsed Bill Peduto anyway.
But during a 10-year stint in the state Senate, Wagner championed numerous pro-LGBT bills, including measures to bar discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and to punish attacks on gays and lesbians as hate crimes. In this year's mayoral race, he told the Steel City Stonewall Democrats that he backed "full equality under the law for members of the LGBT community," including "the right to marry."
During his failed 2010 gubernatorial campaign, some anti-choice groups touted Wagner as an ally, but while Wagner described himself as a "pro-life Democrat," he also said he "support[ed] the current state law" — which permits abortion. In any case, Wagner's campaign told City Paper that he pledged to "enforce [clinic-access] laws appropriately."LifePAC (which touts itself as "oldest pro-life PAC in southwestern Pennsylvania") writes that:
There can be no legitimate diversity of opinion with regard to abortion and euthanasia. The truth is that human rights begin when human lives begin.And LifePAC has endorsed Jack Wagner.
As a member of the Catholic Church we cannot support candidates or legislation that sustains keeping abortion legal. We cannot serve two masters. We must eliminate from consideration candidates who endorse policies that cannot be reconciled with moral norms that are held by all Christians.
...containing a hodge-podge of opposition material on the Democratic contender in the May 21 primary. FCC records show he'll be on air through primary day next week.The FCC link confirms that this ad is also produced by SRCP Media.
And Peduto supported raising seniors property taxes but using others people's money, including tax dollars to take exotic trips.Ominously intoned over photos of concerned seniors while the showing us these dates as "evidence" to support that assertion:
Mr. Peduto's travels start with a trip Monday to Harvard University for a national conference on the use of pension funds to revitalize neighborhoods. He said the city will pay about $600 for airfare and one night in a hotel -- the only part of his travel plans he expects taxpayers to cover.A paragraph later Lord writes:
Shortly after that, he'll take an 11-day trip to Turkey, courtesy of the Pittsburgh Dialogue Foundation, which fosters communication between cultures. That trip, which will take him from urban Istanbul to the cave warrens of Cappadocia, is about "tolerance and understanding," he said. "We'll be studying the cultural interaction between Christians, Muslims and Jews in five cities." [Emphasis added.]
Mr. Peduto got a letter from the city's Ethics Hearing Board approving the trip, noting that the foundation has no business dealings with the city.So that's it? $600 for a trip to Hah-Vahd, a trip OK-ed by the Ethics Hearing Board?
