Featherman Receives Boost in Philly Mayor’s Race

Insurgent Republican mayoral candidate John Featherman, who’s waging an uphill battle for his party’s nomination in the May 17 primary, received a major boost earlier today when he was endorsed by the Philadelphia Inquirer, Pennsylvania’s largest daily newspaper.

In endorsing the 46-year-old Center City realtor for the Republican nomination for mayor, the Inquirer said that Featherman’s “most important contribution would be to jolt the city GOP into becoming a true opposition party.”

Unlike New York or Los Angeles, Philadelphia hasn’t elected a Republican mayor since 1947.

Four years ago, the Republican candidate for mayor barely polled 17 percent of the vote.

Considered something of a thorn in the side to the patronage-dependent Republican City Committee — viewed by critics as an appendage to Philadelphia’s powerful Democratic organization — the Columbia University-educated Featherman faces a gargantuan task.

His own party isn’t about to make it easy for him.  In an act that nearly bordered on desperation, party leaders fielded a last-minute candidate in an attempt to deny Featherman the GOP nomination, but only after several other potential candidates had flatly turned them down.

Consequently, Featherman will have to get past Karen Brown, the party’s handpicked candidate, in the primary.

A former Catholic schoolteacher, Brown was running for City Council as a Democrat when approached by Michael Meehan, the party’s general counsel, and other GOP leaders shortly before the filing deadline.

A lifelong Democrat, she received the party’s official blessing for mayor a few weeks after switching parties.

Brown’s eleventh-hour candidacy, however, has failed to excite the Republican base, as small as it is.

Widely regarded as one of the country’s leading privacy experts, Featherman is hardly a political novice. In fact, he’s something of a perennial candidate, having previously waged two campaigns for Congress as a Libertarian — winning the endorsement of the Philadelphia Inquirer in a 1998 special election — and garnering 45,775 votes on the party’s ticket in a quixotic bid for the U.S. Senate two years later.

He also briefly challenged Rick Santorum for the Republican U.S. Senate nomination in 2006, but withdrew shortly after his nominating petitions were challenged.

More recently, Featherman was the Republican nominee for the now-defunct post of Philadelphia Clerk of Quarter Sessions in 2007.

A fiscal conservative and unabashed liberal on social issues — he favors gay marriage and a woman’s right to choose — Featherman’s spirited candidacy could potentially appeal to progressive-minded Democrats and independent voters in November.

He’ll need a lot of them. Democrats currently outnumber Republicans in the City of Brotherly Love by a nearly six-to-one margin.

If he prevails in the May 17 primary, Featherman will join a long and distinguished list of Republicans who have tried to wrest the Philadelphia mayoralty from the Democrats over the past sixty years, a prominent list that includes such famous individuals as Daniel A. Poling, the “gentle fundamentalist” and longtime editor of the Christian Herald, former Minnesota governor and perennial presidential hopeful Harold E. Stassen, former Sen. Arlen Specter and Frank L. Rizzo, the tough-talking ex-police commissioner and former two-term mayor who came within 14,000 votes of upsetting Democratic Mayor W. Wilson Goode in 1987.