Thursday, April 13, 2006

A Philadelphia Story, Pt. 2

I swear, part of me knew it -- Philadelphia's CityPaper reports that the 12th St. Gym protests I wrote about yesterday were cooked up by supporters of Bob Casey, Jr. -- a.k.a. the Democratic challenger to Rick Santorum's senate seat in PA.

You can follow the whole unfolding story -- I did -- via Philebrity, a.k.a. Philadelphia's very best indie-rock-reject wannabe-Gawker blog.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow! Nice call Tim. Do you think this will backfire against Casey or is Santorum going down?

Tim said...

No, I don't think it'll backfire against Casey. It wasn' as though they staged it -- they just lit the fire. For one thing, what the protestors were protesting against were true -- the co-owner really was a big Santorum supporter, and he'd actually had a long history of gay-bashing (especially AIDS-bashing) much earlier than this. The CityPaper article does a good job of attacking the apathy of Philly's gay community about this issue for the past ten years. It only took off when Casey's people got involved.

The other thing is that Philadelphians have always had a curious response to political stunts, especially in the context of a heated campaign. Three years ago, in the mayoral race, someone allegedly through a molotov cocktail at Republican challanger Sam Katz's office. No response. Then it was discovered that the FBI had bugged Mayor John Street's office as part of a corruption investigation. Street's support from Democrats went through the roof.