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Jewish World Review August 2, 2000 / 29 Tamuz, 5760
Chris Matthews
He had come to our new little school in northeast
Philadelphia with two missions: to give us some safety
rules and to buck up our spirits.
New York might have the biggest of everything, he said
looking out on our hopeful little faces, but we in
Philadelphia had the first.
And then he started the familiar Philly litany: the first fire
department, the first free public library, the first zoo, the
first...
This is the great fall-back position of the millions of us
who grew up in the city that God cruelly placed in the
shadow of the greatest metropolis ever known.
The worst thing was the TV commercials. No matter
what was being sold, it was as if Philadelphia didn't exist.
In New York, in Chicago, in Cleveland, in Detroit, in
Cincinnati, some '50s housewife was using and loving
some dish soap or laundry detergent. Philadelphia? We
never got so much as a mention.
This week, Philadelphia is stepping briefly from the
shadows. The Republicans are coming, and with them every reporter and TV
camera in the country. There will be jokes, of course, many of them mimicking
W.C. Fields' epitaph about preferring the city only to the grave. Talk about
damning with faint praise.
But there will also be that Holy Grail of every Philadelphian: recognition.
We loved Rocky being from Philadelphia. What better metaphor for our town
than the club fighter finally getting his title shot? We loved "Sixth Sense" being
shot on our streets. What better city to have a young kid being able to see dead
people? We even loved watching that bad cop played by Danny Glover in
"Witness" trying to find the scared Amish kid in that row of men's toilets at the
30th Street train station.
For Philadelphia, this coming week will be a return to the glory days. We were,
after all, the country's first convention city. Philly is where a get-together of
politicians signed the Declaration of Independence, where they drafted the
Constitution and agreed to the Bill of Rights.
It didn't stop there. Teddy Roosevelt was nominated for vice president in
Philadelphia a century ago. Why? Because the Republican boss in New York
wanted to get this John McCain-type maverick out of the governor's chair.
FDR gave his "rendezvous with destiny" speech, accepting re-nomination in
1936, in Philadelphia. Four years later, a long-time Democrat named Wendell
Willkie won the Republican nomination on the 6th ballot. That's quite a feat
given that he ran third the first time the delegates voted.
In 1948, Philadelphia hosted both conventions — one for the Republicans to
nominate the heavy favorite, New York governor Thomas E. Dewey, and the
other convention to nominate the odds-on underdog, Harry Truman. Truman
surprised everybody, especially the rival Republicans, by demanding that the
GOP-controlled Congress reconvene and pass the platform it had adopted in
the same convention hall.
This week, all that history and recognition will come tumbling home to the city
that's often been overshadowed and skipped over.
It was a New Yorker, Woody Allen, who said that 90 percent of life is
showing up. It takes a Philadelphian to understand how true that
07/31/00: Bush-Cheney ticket: A constitutional problem
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