Politicians, lawyers, and the 'Inquirer'

“One of Mayor Nutter's sharpest former critics on City Council met privately Thursday with the lame-duck mayor he'd once trashed and bashed,” reporter Claudia Vargas breathlessly informed Inquirer readers on Friday, “and both men came out smiling.”

Gosh all golly — what politicians would do such a wild and crazy thing as expediently burying their rhetorical hatchets? Vargas helpfully provides the answer: “The erstwhile Nutter critic — who not so long ago was tweeting about ‘Mayor Nutty!’ — was the man most likely to succeed him, James F. Kenney.”

Vargas conceded that “little of grit or substance was shared with the waiting assemblage of journalists.” But she insisted that “the tableau was momentous in its own right: A two-term mayor was putting aside any past points of contention and all but giving his political blessing to the man who, in a city where registered Democrats now outnumber Republicans by 7-1, stands an excellent chance of succeeding him in January.”

Bill Green on boxers

As any observer with even the teeniest smidgen of sophistication understands, politicians are much like actors, performing for impressionable audiences in order to achieve an immediate goal at a particular moment. Bill Green, Philadelphia’s former mayor, provides a better analogy: “Politicians are like prizefighters,” he remarked to me recently. “When they’re in the ring, they try to bash each other’s brains out. But once the fight is over, they often relate to each other with respect and admiration and even affection.” Why is this concept so difficult for journalists to grasp?

The Nutter-Kenney rapprochement may be the most shocking story I’ve read in the Inquirer since the paper discovered in 1997 that a respectable businessman with an idyllic suburban marriage (“If there was such a thing as a perfect couple, this was it”) had lavished thousands of dollars on a stripper at a “gentlemen’s club” on Delaware Avenue and that the stripper herself was actually a suburban mother who was stripping part-time in order to put herself through college.

Stop the presses! People aren’t always what they appear to be on the surface!

Riot in Love Park

The Inquirer’s romance with ironic hyperbole goes back at least to the time in the ’90s when the Philadelphia Zoo hired the city’s streets commissioner, Pete Hoskins, as its president. “Who in the zoo world ever would have thought,” the Inquirer’s report wondered rhetorically, “that the august Zoological Society of Philadelphia would go and entrust its future to the man in charge of collecting Philadelphia’s trash?”

Then there was the time a homeless brawl broke out in Love Park. “What could be more ironic,” wrote the Inquirer: “A riot in Love Park.” (To be sure, that story resisted the temptation to mention that the brawl occurred in the City of Brotherly Love.)

Desperate lawyers?

The Inquirer was at it again Thursday, in an editorial denouncing school district lawyers for resisting a court order to pay damages to a former school district administrator who was fired for exposing a dubious contract. “Even after a judge ordered the perpetually broke school system to pay damages to the former administrator,” wrote the shocked editorialist, “a lawyer for the district vowed to continue its quixotic and costly defense of its attack on free speech and the press.” The district’s lawyers’ most recent arguments, the Inquirer contended, “have an air of desperation….Incredibly, although the district has already lost one appeal of the case to the Third Circuit, lawyer Joe Tucker told the Inquirer that it will challenge the judge’s latest ruling.”

Now, the school district’s position may indeed be outrageous. But its lawyers are simply doing what lawyers are supposed to do: provide their clients with the most zealous possible representation, no matter how ridiculous their clients’ case may be. Like politicians, lawyers are basically actors, putting on the best possible show for their clients’ benefit. Only an editorial writer up against a deadline would take their pleadings seriously, or personally. If a lawyer admitted that his client had no case — now, that would be shocking.

No doubt the Inky isn’t the only American newspaper to practice this brand of commercialized naiveté. On the other hand, you rarely find such silliness in more sophisticated papers like, say, the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. Earth to Inquirer: Is it too much to treat your readers like thinking adults?