What’s more, Fumo and other caucus leaders had significant say over the location and size of member offices, the size of staffs, even party campaign funds to a greater extent than is allowed now. Before he was ruined by greed, Fumo, as a senator, had certain tools at his disposal, such as WAM - “walking-around money” he could dispense to fellow legislators for their pet projects, to influence their votes. ONCE UPON A time - when Vince Fumo ruled Harrisburg and Tom Wolf was just a business owner in York - state government worked. For it isn’t just about Tom Wolf not being able to pass his agenda, but whether our government can function at all. In fact, what’s at stake is much more fundamental than that, and more threatening. Yet Wolf’s problem, almost two years into his tenure, hasn’t solely been caused by an aversion to making tough deals with our rough-and-tumble state legislature. But it certainly seemed to be a surprise to Tom Wolf. This doesn’t feel like much of a news flash. There was a basic flaw in that plan, however: No matter how nice or smart or well-meaning Wolf might be, politics doesn’t change - except that it’s gotten even nastier in the hardball world of Harrisburg. He wanted to be governor in order to solve some of the state’s biggest problems. But this much seems clear: He arrived in Harrisburg as an honest broker. We can argue forever about whether his progressive initiatives make sense, whether government should really try to do all the things Wolf has proposed. Tom Wolf seems to be offering something larger than an agenda, something beyond Democrat vs. It’s the path we must go down because it makes so much sense. And his bearing makes things seem quite simple: A holistic approach to addiction has nothing to do with an ideological agenda, or politics. “We’re not just pushing it under the carpet,” Wolf says. In Johnstown, after the governor’s addiction-center tour, I walk with him to his car, and he mentions his mentor in graduate school at MIT who killed himself, and how suicide was once stigmatized the way cholera was in the Middle Ages, as a “mark of God.” The governor’s point is that we’re on the cusp of understanding addiction in a new way, as a medical condition that it’s really about brain wiring, and that in locking addicts up as criminals we’re spending seven times more than if we really tried to understand why they start abusing drugs. The current infighting at the capital, however, doesn’t seem like political debate it feels more like it’s part and parcel of the deepening divide in values that is separating so many of us from each other. Tom Wolf has a very different belief about what he was elected to do. The Republican-dominated General Assembly in Harrisburg has an idea - one it isn’t shy about expressing - of what government should not be. Perhaps none of that should be surprising in this strange political era. Twenty months into his administration, he has only a few small victories to show for all his bold ambition. Instead, there was an unprecedented nine-month budget standoff with the House and Senate, and many of Wolf’s transformative hopes - especially a huge increase in education spending - were dashed by the end of his first year. Wolf deemed his first budget so pristine and beautifully wrought that it shouldn’t be tampered with, and he seemed certain the General Assembly would see the light of his wisdom. Indeed, he seemed to be what voters hungered for - a Jeep-driving non-career politician (his only experience was two years as Ed Rendell’s revenue secretary) whose sole ambition appeared to be to do what was best for Pennsylvania. Who, as eight or 10 others wait patiently to meet him, is eager to discover that my father had seven sisters and no brothers and so forth, as if he has made the trek from the capital to learn about exactly that.īeing a different sort of politician - an outsider who ran the family kitchen-cabinet-making business, with a doctorate from MIT in political science - is part of the Wolf story, of course, one that helped get him the governorship almost two years ago. Every politician wants to engage, certainly, but I’ve never met one who seems so genuinely curious. In the following weeks, I will share my experience with many people who know Wolf well, and they all have the same reaction: Yes, they say, laughing, that’s Tom exactly. “The Hubers in York might have come from Switzerland, too,” the governor suggests. I tell him no, that my father’s parents emigrated from Zürich more than a hundred years ago. He wants to know if I’m related to any of them. “There are a lot of Hubers in York,” the governor tells me - Wolf lives just outside that city. When Wolf turns to me, the governor, tall and pale and bald, wearing outdated wire-rimmed glasses, nods and smiles (he’s been told I’m writing about him) and says, “Where are you from?”īut that’s not what he means - he means my background, my ancestors.
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