PENNSYLVANIA GOTRIC
Gibbons, Russell W.
committees without the party's consent. On Michigan, while White House comments tended to play down the implications of the voting, Mr. Ford said simply that the Republicans had taken "a licking"...
...In the wake of their Michigan defeat, it is this aspect of the matter that preoccupies Mr...
...Nixon leaves his successor a badly crippled Presidency, and the wrongdoing of his Administration has gravely weakened popular respect for the American government and for American institutions as a whole...
...And once again he expressed his views on the Nixon-created reelection committee: "I am disgusted with political trickery of the CREEP variety or any other creeps who are looking for an easy but unethical or illegal road to victory...
...That kind of living may never get Mullen into trouble, nor does it especially anger his frustrated legislative combatants, who see him not so much as an aggrieved power broker---definitely not an intellectual adversary--as much as a True Believer who has said of his reason for getting into the abortion controversy: "God has told me what I must do...
...10 May 1974:230 In 1965 Mullen actually took a look at the budget of former Republican Gov...
...for the party to try to gloss it over, he said, would be unrealistic...
...After having had time to mull over the results from Michigan, however, he cautioned his fellow-Republicans against allowing the Democrats to turn the fall elections into a national referendum on President Nixon...
...Both party leaders were furious with the upstart representative from Philadelphia, and what happened, says Harrisburg political hand Willard Randall, was "that half of the fat was glued back on to the mutilated hide of the GSA, but Mullen had saved the taxpayers $75million and had won his point and there never was a budget like that again...
...He sees this month's party primary as an opportunity to "decide whether to approve or reject an incumbent Governor whose record against the Right to Life of the unborn is crystal clear...
...The nationwide trucker's strike earlier this year gained Milton Shapp some credibility and increased popularity when he took on the Nixon Administration and its energy policy, and most pundits see him with a good political shot this November...
...Commonweal: 231...
...The disclosures angered Mullen, who holds that a man's privacy of earnings are as sacred as the Legislature's right to control fornication and adultery...
...It is this fact which is tragic, not the lost confidence in the Republican party...
...This is in reference to the Governor's support for liberalized divorce reform and his veto of the Legislature's action making abortion illegal...
...Two years ago Philadelphia Magazine profiled Mullen and said that he "makes about $75,000 a year from his law practice, from rents on properties he has acquired, from his combined $15,000 salary and expenses as a state legistalor, has two homes, two apartments, two cars, travels widely and eats a little too well...
...The state's religious diversity and tradition suggest less doctrinaire attitudes on divorce and abortion, but there is no doubt that the Mullen emphasis upon morality and the family is reaching a wide audience...
...Thank God the magazine sells for a buck," he said at the time, "most people in my district couldn't afford to buy it...
...His challenger, though, has chosen morality and the decline of the family as the crux of his gubernatorial campaign, and many political sophisticates in Harrisburg and Philadelphia are taking notice of the campaign...
...Mullen had also made a name for himself, and soon afterward he ventured into controversial issues which would eventually lead him to the role of spokesman for what one colleague calls "the anti-abortion and pro-electric chair" factions...
...The well-oiled machine which functioned smoothly and predictably for over three decades in conducting the affairs of Pittsburgh, and which interlocked with that in Philadelphia under former Mayor Tate was always a comfort to the Democrats in Presidential years...
...A Western Pennsylvania Congressman, whose district embraces a steel-producing valley heavy with ethnic communities, recently had 26,000 returns on a poll sampling opinion for capital punishment, and reported that all but six percent approved the death penalty for either first degree murder or "second time murderers...
...Faith that, if not in this life, surely in the next, he will be amply rewarded...
...Marty Mullen has two decades in the state legislature, but his real accomplishment is that he has become something of a Wilbur Mills to that body and as chairman of the House Appropriations Committee is the bread man for any state project, whether urgent or porkbarrel, needed or foolish...
...But their concern, and the publicity given to it in the media, should not obscure what is the more important fact: not since Harding has there been such a corrupt Administration, and if this fact has understandably hurt the GOP, it has dealt the nation as a whole a far more serious wound...
...Because of the multitude of scandals and unhappy revelations that have come to be lumped under the general heading of Watergate, the American people have tended to lose confidence not only in the GOP but in the very process of government itself...
...Ford and the party professionals, and this is understandable enough...
...Mullen has also attacked Shapp because of the Governor's pledge that he will not use the electric chair while he is in office...
...Ford had always expressed confidence that the potential impeachment proceedings would not hurt Republican prospects this fall...
...What Mullen proceeded to do outraged Democratic as well as Republican pols: he and a team of legislative hawkshaws began tearing apart that greatest of all porkbarrels outside Washington: the capital construction budget of the Pennsylvania General State Authority, which for years has fed as an equal opportunity employer the needs of both Republicans and Democrats alike--and especially Republican and Democratic architects, contractors, engineering firms and party organizations...
...The latter, of course would get theirs through the old percentage kickback route from the former...
...Not at issue, however, is the presence of highly-placed tax dodgers, special interest bag men or influence peddlers in government, but rather the security of the Commonwealth and its people as it involves the electric chair, colonial-era laws relating to fornication and adultery and the abortion debate...
...Although they don't go far enough in ascribing blame, in this limited condemnation Mr...
...Nixon on the other, as in his Oklahoma speech...
...And despite the daily trauma of Watergate and national political scandal, one of the largest unemployment rates in the nation, and energy and transportation crisis situations which played havoc with the Pennsylvania economy, the state's voters this May 21 will be asked to register their approval as to which man's philosophy is correct about abortion, divorce and capital punishment...
...Until the Michigan loss, for example, Mr...
...Now, by a strange irony, the most astringent partisan of them all has dealt his own party a crippling blow, one from which it may take decades to recover...
...Ford and the party leaders for whom he speaks are surely right...
...William Scranton and demanded to know where a $6-million surplus came from (the improbable answer: left over from the days when people "mistakenly sent Social Security payments to the state," which could not be returned because the addresses were lost and had since been earning interest...
...This might not seem too strange when it is recalled that Pennsylvania politics has never really been the same since the late Governor David Lee Lawrence left the scene...
...No matter what happens now, Mr...
...Now maverick Democrats who have been at war with their respective party organizations are mayors of both cities and the Governor, who has assumed what statewide leadership remains and who has made peace with once hostile labor groups, seeks a second term...
...Ford said simply that the Republicans had taken "a licking" in which Watergate played a part...
...It was this role, in fact, which awakened Mullen to the fact that he need not be an obscure head of a donothing rubber stamp committee for the budget wishes of the Governor's office, described by old Harrisburg hands as "a $2-billion pie-cutting-and-eating contest...
...For while a Brotherhood luncheon montage exists, the pols know that for their purposes the state has two big Catholic cities, a Protestant-dominated rural countryside and a Jewish occupant of the Governor's mansion...
...Part of the problem may be the notion that John Kennedy somehow swept the old religion-and-politics bugaboo under the rug before the Houston Ministers in 1960: ward politicians and county chairmen alike know otherwise in Pennsylvania...
...RUSSELL W. GIBBONS (Russell W. Gibbons, a ]requent contributor, is a labor editor living in Pittsburgh...
...Willard Randall summed him up two years ago as " . . . Marty Mullen, a dogged man, whose life and career have been a long act of faith in himself, his Church and his idea of the role of good government...
...Thus to an increasing extent the Vice President seems to be speaking for the GOP as much as for the Administration, balancing the growing conviction in Republican ranks that disaster looms ahead for themselves and the party unless they can somehow dissociate themselves from their scandalplagued President, on the one hand, with affirmations of personal support for Mr...
...They have to, because Martin Patrick Mullen is not just another candidate of an outraged morality...
...And while most of the state's newspapers and many of its officials look upon MuUen's views in a lighthearted way, they know that some of them are shared by many--perhaps most---of the state's voters...
...Nixon from the very beginning of his career has been one of the nation's most partisan Republicans...
...Although hardly heated up, the barely visible preprimary campaign amounts to a challenge to the party leadership of Democratic Governor Milton Shapp, a onetime maverick who has consolidated his political base and even somewhat soothed his constituents, who have long proclaimed via the bumper sticker medium that they live in an oppressed land of taxes...
...COMING: Thomas Powers on 'right to reply' statutes and freedom of the press 0 0 O O O 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 GOD, MAN AND THE COMMONWEALTH PENNSYLVANIA GOTHIC Pennsylvania may share the general malaise of most Americans in this second Spring of Watergate, but in the state's primary election this month citizens will have an opportunity not so much to vote their political discontent as to provide an expression of what the public morality as defined by its legislators should be...
...Not Marty Mullen, though...
...We must never again permit CREEP or any creepy successor organization to spoil the name of the Grand Old Party...
Vol. 100 • May 1974 • No. 10
