State Republicans are on stage getting the crowd juiced, leading cheers where the answer to questions about Gore or his running mate, Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., is a resounding “No!” and the questions about Bush and his No. 2, former defense secretary Dick Cheney meet with an enthusiastic “Yesssss!”

Jock jams blast from the loudspeakers: that “Are You Ready for This?” bass-blaster, and the Who’s “We Won’t Get Fooled Again.” Ricky Martin’s “The Cup of Life,” a Bush campaign staple, adds some salsa to the entirely white-bread event.

“Pennsylvania is for Bush — Big Time,” reads one banner, alluding to Cheney’s yes-man response to Bush’s crude assessment of a New York Times reporter. No, the fight for Pennsylvania is not taking place here, but among the blue-collar Catholics in Philly and Pittsburgh, and in moderate Republican enclaves like Montgomery County outside Philadelphia. So Bush also spends Saturday in Philadelphia, where he meets with the head of the local Archdiocese, Cardinal Anthony Joseph Bevilaqua, and then holds a rally at a school in Montgomery County.

Its a new little East Coast swing for Bush; Pennsylvania’s 23 electoral votes are highly contested, though recent polls have Gore leading. Bush, his wife, Laura, and former joint chiefs chairman Gen. Colin Powell are en route from Dearborn, Mich., where they all appeared with Cheney at Ford Field earlier Saturday. Thats where a local Teamsters official gave Powell an unfortunate introduction as Adam Clayton Powell, New York’s long-dead, flamboyant Democratic congressman.

More notably, it was there that Cheney, the former defense secretary, took up arms on behalf of his boss, who it was revealed Thursday had been arrested in 1976 at the age of 30 for driving under the influence of alcohol. Bush’s sister Dorothy, then 17, was in the car, along with another underage friend, David Bremer, Bush’s friend Pete Rousel, Australian tennis star John Newcombe, and his wife.

News of his arrest had been leaked to the press by Tom Connolly, the losing Democratic candidate for governor of Maine in 1998, which Bush cited in an interview Friday with the Fox News Channel as evidence of the whole incident being an example of “dirty tricks.”

Likewise, in Dearborn, Cheney — who himself has two DUI arrests under his rather expansive belt — called the news report “typical last-minute acts of desperation. Frankly, I think we’re all a little tired of the Clinton-Gore routine.”

Powell, meanwhile, ordered the crowd: “Don’t be distracted by the little sniping that comes in from the flanks.”

That sniping would no doubt include the point that two years ago, Bush was asked by Dallas Morning News reporter Wayne Slater if he’d ever been arrested since 1968 — the date of another arrest for misdemeanor theft. According to Slater, Bush said no, which is clearly a lie, though Bush disputes this recollection.

On Friday, Bush spokeswoman Karen Hughes tried to argue that since Slater had been given the impression that Bush had been lying, Bush had actually been telling the truth.

“The reporter later told me that he was left with the impression that the governor in fact had been involved in some sort of incident involving alcohol,” she said.

It was a remarkably Clintonian bit of parsing — with a Bush twist. Americans should add to their already tested tolerance of political double-speak the Bush team’s Madison Avenue conviction that if you repeat a phrase enough — like “I’m a leader,” or “compassionate conservative” — the public will begin to accept the phrase, regardless of the deeds (or lack thereof) surrounding the rhetoric.

We saw a stellar example of this during a hastily scheduled press conference on Friday in Grand Rapids, Mich. There, Hughes called Bush “forthcoming” about his past five times, and asserted eight times that he had “acknowledged” his imperfect past.

Of course, the truth is that Bush has been anything but “forthcoming” about anything other than the vague idea that there’s some “irresponsible” behavior in his past. He has yet to even release the military records that might shed light on his “missing year” of National Guard service. And he never “acknowledged” anything about the 1976 arrest until he was forced to on Thursday night.

Nor has he been forthcoming in this affair. The Bush campaign originally said that at the time of the arrest Bush’s sister Dorothy was 18, then the legal age for drinking. But then it was pointed out that according to her birth certificate she was actually 17 at the time. The names of friends who were there have been released to the press in dribs and drabs, as were the exact events of that night.

Bush is now saying that he doesn’t remember if he had been handcuffed, or whether he purchased alcohol for his sister or her underage boyfriend. In his Friday interview with Fox News Channel’s Carl Cameron, Bush didn’t even answer the question as to whether there were any other brushes with the law that the public has yet to hear about.

And, as the Boston Globe reports on Saturday, in 1978, when Bush attempted to regain his driving privileges in Maine suspended as a result of his DUI, he portrayed himself as a casual drinker. Writing that he drank only “infrequently” and had an “occasional beer,” Bush seemed to contradict his admissions that he was a problem drinker until 1986.

Are these nit-picky questions? Maybe. But they’re certainly at least as important as how much Al Gore’s mother-in-law spends on prescription drug medication — Gore’s fibs, which consumed media attention for a week and helped to send his Democratic Convention-buoyed poll numbers spiraling downward.

Andrew and Catherine’s mother, Carol, 45, claims that it “wasn’t necessarily a lie to a reporter. It was an abstention.” She says she supports Bush because “he’s trustworthy.” The Patterson brood does phone-banking for the Bush-Cheney ticket. Catherine “dials the phone, he [Andrew] does the stats, and I do the talking,” she says.

Jerry Narrow, 55, an electronics technician from Hopewell, Penn., is assuredly the only rally attendee wearing both a sticker that says “Sportsmen for Bush” and a yarmulke. “I was in Israel over Yom Kippur when they were attacked,” Narrow says, citing the unrest in the Middle East as evidence as to why it’s important that he have the right to own firearms in Hopewell. Of Gore, the Republican committeeman says, “I can’t believe anything he says” — and not just about guns, he says.

A cheer erupts when it’s announced that Bush’s plane has landed. The 757 creeps into view from behind a powder-blue next-door hangar, lumbering slowly like a brontosaurus out for a Sunday stroll.

The plane swivels around so that its front door is visible.

Bush, his wife and Powell emerge to cheers.

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, thought to be on Bush’s short-list for veep until Cheney picked himself for the job, greets them warmly.

Bush delivers his standard stump speech, apparently unrattled by any of the events of the last few days, kicking back into his strategy of projecting confidence so as to self-perpetuate his ordination. After his Fox News Channel interview on Friday, Bush went for a run on Saginaw Valley State University’s track. Outside a hotel in Saginaw, Bush offered a whimsical little skit, tossing an imaginary coin up in the air, waiting dramatically for the coin to return to Earth.

There is something indisputably charming about his positive nature. At Fairmont Senior High School in Morgantown, W.Va., late Friday night, Bush emerged from the school greeted with cheers and applause from several local fans who were milling about the press corps.

Bush’s eyes widened. “I appreciate the press corps applauding,” he said as he approached the scrum.

Then, as the local backers approached to shake his hand, Bush realized that it hadn’t been members of the press applauding at all. “You’re not in the press corps,” he said. “I thought you were in the press corps.”

He walked away, and a reporter joked good-naturedly, “What an optimist you are.”

Bush turned back to the small crowd.

“Well-spoken,” he said. “Very well-spoken.”

Will any of this have an effect on the election? Will there be a backlash against the media, or against Gore since a Maine Democrat leaked the tale? Bevilaqua has forgiven Bush for his South Carolina primary trip to fundamentalist Bob Jones University, where he cozied up with a faculty whose teachings have compared the pope to the antichrist — an issue that Arizona Sen. John McCain attempted, ultimately unsuccessfully, to use against him during the GOP primaries.

America can be a forgiving place, especially if one apologizes and owns up to one’s misdeeds.

“He made no excuses, he owned up to it, he paid the price,” says Patterson. “This administration, on the other hand, has continually passed the buck and never owned up to anything.” Patterson’s a Republican stalwart, of course, but few Americans probably are even remotely aware of the many ways Bush has been less-than-forthright about this issue. And thats no thanks to the media — the New York Times didn’t even mention Slater’s contention that Bush had lied to him about not having been arrested.

A Friday night poll by ABC News showed 83 percent of the public saying the DUI in Bush’s past is irrelevant to the election in three days. Most of those who think it an issue are predisposed against Bush to begin with. Five percent of all voters say the arrest makes them less likely to vote for Bush — but 4 percent say it will make them more likely to vote for him.

The prevailing wisdom on the press plane seems to be that Bush will skate on this, as he has skated on everything throughout his life, the luckiest man in the world.

In Michigan on Friday, Sen. Spencer Abraham, R-Mich., sums up the prevailing wisdom rather pithily: “There are many people who have been stopped while driving. I think that the question is, you know, I mean, I don’t know.”

–Gov. George W. Bush, July 25

July 4

BUSH: Hey, terrific news. Powell’s guys are sending out feelers.

CHENEY: That’s great! He’d sew it up for us. His approval ratings are through the roof. (pause)

BUSH: So, what do we do? Should I call him? Are we done?

CHENEY: Almost. There is one thing.

BUSH: What?

CHENEY: Well, I’m sure you remember, back in your father’s term, that incident at the dinner for the Japanese prime minister.

BUSH (chuckling): Oh, you mean El Puko. The champion hurler. Heave-ho! Hey, maybe my dad just knew what was going to happen with the Japanese economy.

CHENEY: Well, Governor, I’m afraid there’s more to the story. I was over at our super-secret spy network, Echelon, and I came across this. (hands him photographs). Governor, I’m sure you’ll be as shocked and disappointed as I was. It’s a little grainy, but I think you’ll see what I’m talking about.

BUSH: What’s this? It looks like the general is seasoning my father’s chicken.

CHENEY: That’s what your father thought. But as you can see from this close-up, the general is actually holding a bottle of —

BUSH (interrupting): Ipecac!

CHENEY: I’m afraid so, sir.

BUSH (angry): He told Dad it was his special Caribbean jerk chicken recipe. (turning contemplative) I always did feel ill after his barbecues. … Wait a minute — I just had a thought. Gulf War Syndrome … Oh, never mind. Forget Powell. He’s out. Who else is there?

CHENEY: Well, there’s Kasich, sir.

BUSH: Love him. Love that guy.

CHENEY: Knows a ton about the budget.

BUSH: Lots of vitality. Lots of vim and vigor.

CHENEY: Ohio’s a tossup state.

BUSH: Is there anything wrong with him? Aside from the haircut, I mean.

CHENEY: Well, there is one thing. During legislative mark-up sessions, he likes to watch cartoons.

BUSH: Great! I like cartoons, too. (pause)

CHENEY (taken aback): There’s also a problem with his musical taste.

BUSH: I know, I know, the whole Grateful Dead thing. Tried to climb on stage. I guess that’s OK. Might bring up the whole drug issue again. But we can handle it.

CHENEY: No, sir, that’s not it.

BUSH: What is it then?

CHENEY: He doesn’t like the Oak Ridge Boys.

BUSH: Next!

CHENEY: Chuck Hagel.

BUSH: Good man. Got that war record. Brings in the McCain vote.

CHENEY: Sir. Do you know what Hagel means in Chinese?

BUSH: No.

(Cheney leans over and whispers something into Bush’s ear.)

BUSH (listening): Mmm hmm. Mmm hmmm … The Chinese have a word for that too, huh??

CHENEY: Yes, sir. You’d be buying yourself four years of superpower confrontation.

BUSH: So, there’s no hope, then.

CHENEY: No, sir. Take it from me. I know their leaders.

BUSH (growing despondent): Well, damn. Who else is there. Liddy Dole.

CHENEY: Now you’re talking, Governor. She’d bring real energy to the campaign.

BUSH (getting excited): She’d get the girls in. Gore won’t know what to do. If he picks Feinstein he’ll look like a copycat.

CHENEY: Yes, sir.

BUSH: Great, Dick, this is great. But, let’s think about this for a minute. Elizabeth Dole. Any skeletons in the closet? Nannies? Maids? Interns?

CHENEY: Nope. Clean as a whistle.

BUSH: Looks like we got ourselves a running mate!

CHENEY: I said there were no skeletons. But, sir — remember how with McCain you were concerned about policy differences? I think you might be going down that same road with Mrs. Dole.

BUSH (puzzled): Really? I thought she had no ideas at all.

CHENEY: Not exactly, sir. She actually has a few.

BUSH: Well, that could be trouble. (pause) What are they? Any problem areas?

CHENEY: Governor, you’ll recall that as part of our screening process, I took it upon myself to conduct one-on-one interviews with the most serious candidates.

BUSH: Yeah, yeah.

CHENEY: During our interview, Mrs. Dole referred to “compassionate conservatism” as “a crock of shit.”

BUSH: (pause) That smarts. (longer pause) She probably got that from Bob.

CHENEY: I’m sorry, sir.

BUSH (brightening): But hey, I suppose we can paper that over. A couple days with Marvin Olasky should soften her up. If that’s all there is, I think we can deal with it.

CHENEY (a bit stunned): Um … um … but there’s one more thing.

BUSH: Yes?

CHENEY: It’s about Hispanics, sir.

BUSH: Oh. Mis amigos de la sur! Welcome! Bienveni- …

CHENEY (cutting him off): She hates them, sir.

BUSH: What’s that?

CHENEY: She hates Hispanics, sir. Except that’s not what she calls them.

BUSH: Jesus, what does she call them?

CHENEY (grimly): Let’s just say certain Mexican dishes are involved.

BUSH (stunned): Wow. That won’t do. That definitely cuts it for her. (pause) I never realized our pool of candidates was so thin.

CHENEY: Well, we’re taking a tough, thorough look at them, sir.

BUSH: There was one more, wasn’t there? Tom Ridge.

CHENEY: Great guy. Our polls show we would carry Pennsylvania.

BUSH: The abortion thing. That’ll blow over. My pro-life friends — where’re they gonna go?

CHENEY: Not to Buchanan, not this time.

BUSH (happily): So it’s Ridge, then.

CHENEY: There’s just one thing.

BUSH. Uh-oh.

CHENEY: I’m afraid it’s a bit awkward.

BUSH: Go on, go on.

CHENEY (pauses)

BUSH: Yes?

CHENEY: Flatulence.

BUSH: You’re kidding. (pause) Well, it happens to all of us now and then, I guess.

CHENEY: I’m not talking just a little here. You can’t see it on TV. He looks great and all. But it’s hell to be around, I tell you. (a long pause, while this sinks in and Bush considers his options)

BUSH: I did tell the American people my running mate would have to be someone I’m comfortable with. (He glances at Cheney.) Actually, I’m feeling pretty comfortable right now.

CHENEY: Mi también, amigo.

“It’s Gov. Ridge acting as a surrogate for the campaign,” Bush spokeswoman Mindy Tucker said of the release. “It’s a political release for him, directly in regards to the vice president’s visit to Pennsylvania.”

But the release also gave Ridge the opportunity to tout his record. “We put out the release locally, and the Bush campaign put it out nationally,” said Leslie Gromis, who works both as a regional chairperson of the Bush campaign and as executive director of Ridge’s leadership fund.

While Bush and his advisors remained huddled in Kennebunkport, Maine, responsibility for responding to Gore’s speech fell partially to Ridge, the pro-choice, Catholic governor who has been the most public of vice-presidential candidates. The release quickly scrolled through Ridge’s record as a tax-cutting job creator and bureaucratic reformer in the glowing language of press releases, giving Ridge a chance to show his feathers to the national press corps with an OK from the presumptive presidential nominee.

“There will probably be more and more of this as the campaign goes on, whether it comes from vice presidential candidates or not,” Tucker said. “A lot of people will be acting as surrogates, working to get Gov. Bush elected president.”

“This was just something the Bush campaign wanted to do,” Gromis said. “Don’t read anything into this.”

“But I think he’d be an excellent candidate; the Republicans would be hard-pressed to find a better one.”

On April 26, Bush named Dick Cheney, former defense secretary in the Bush White House, to write up the short list of potential No. 2s. Now that the individuals who would seem to actually attract swing voters — Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and former Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Colin Powell — have removed themselves from consideration, the list seems to be broadening to include Elizabeth Dole, New York Gov. George Pataki, New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman and several other serious contenders.

But Ridge seems to be at the top, at least as far as pundits and various political observers have it. “I think he’s No. 1 on the short list,” says William Kristol, editor and publisher of the conservative Weekly Standard, who has had several conversations with “people reasonably close to Bush” about who Bush will pick as his nominee for vice president. “I think Bush would like to pick Ridge, but I think they’re worried about a pro-life revolt and giving [the issue] to [Pat] Buchanan.”

But his abortion stance aside, there are plenty in Pennsylvania right now grumbling about other, more substantial reasons the rest of the country should view Ridge warily. Predictably, many of these individuals are Democratic officials, and Ridge’s team sees clear partisan reasons for this campaign. “If Tom Ridge is on the ticket, the Democrats in Harrisburg know they have no chance of winning back the Statehouse,” says Ridge spokesman Tim Reeves. “That’s what this is about.”

They’re not all Democrats, though. State Rep. John Lawless — a pro-life conservative Republican from outside Philadelphia — notes that “we’ve had six years of a great economy. I mean, I’m not ready to be governor, but I probably could have run the state, too. He’s had a great ride on the economy, all these guys have.

“Who isn’t a good governor today?” Lawless says. “Who isn’t a good president today?”

He’s received great press as a member of Bush’s short-list for veep, but the question — raised by naysayers and also his own, at best, modest record during a period of unparalleled prosperity in his state — is whether the idea of Tom Ridge may be better than the reality.

So who is Tom Ridge, really? A perfect GOP V.P., or just a common hack with good P.R. and great luck?

Governor of a populous, electoral-rich, rust-belt state, Ridge was also on the short list for V.P. in 1996 for Bob Dole, and it’s no wonder. In addition to having a pleasing mien, Ridge embodies, in the estimation of Philadelphia Daily News political scribe John Baer, “the great American story.”

Born with impaired hearing in a Pittsburgh steel town, Ridge was raised in veterans’ public housing by a mother and a father working two jobs, after which he earned a scholarship to Harvard. After his first year of law school, he was drafted into the Army. In Vietnam, Ridge served as an infantry staff sergeant and was awarded the Bronze Star for Valor, the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry and the Combat Infantry Badge.

After finishing his law degree in 1972, Ridge served as an assistant district attorney in Erie County, and won election to the U.S. House in 1982 from a swing district, where he was a voice of moderation. He campaigned for governor in 1994 on a typical GOP gubernatorial platform: school choice, welfare reform, privatization, cutting taxes, cleaning up the state capital, reforming workers compensation and tough crime rhetoric.

It worked, and he won by 3 percentage points.

He became popular, but not wildly so, because his approval rating seems rooted in little more than his pleasant nature. “It’s because of way he conducts himself,” says Baer. “He’s one of those rare politicians that is seemingly unflappable. Plus, he’s a genuinely nice guy.”

“I don’t know that people are wildly enthusiastic about Ridge,” says Pennsylvania political observer Terry Madonna of Millersville State University, who nonetheless gives Ridge’s tenure positive marks.

Even predictably negative foes aren’t exactly damning. “I’d give him about a C-minus,” says State Rep. Mike Veon, Democratic whip. “He gets good marks for producing, like P.T. Barnum, ‘the greatest show on earth.’ But like any circus act, it’s a lot of smoke and mirrors.”

And, according to Lawless, Ridge is a “nice guy” and a “bright man” who is simply too “corporate-driven.”

Even a top Pennsylvania House Democratic aide has little nasty to say about Ridge. He isn’t such a bad guy, the staffer says, it’s just that “his whole tenure has been a blown opportunity,” assessed the aide. “He’s got a pretty amazing public relations machine out there, and he is a well-liked guy, but he hasn’t done much.”

The case should not be overstated — few argue that Ridge is evil, or even incompetent.

Certainly, in comparison with typical Harrisburg fare, Ridge comes out smelling like a rose. “What we’ve been used to is damage,” says Baer. “And what Ridge has been able to do is sort of prevent any damage. The state seems to be OK.”

This has helped Ridge in more direct comparisons — the electoral kind. His opponents in 1994 and 1998 were ludicrous Democratic hacks; the choice of Ridge was a difficult one to condemn. Generally, critics allow, he’s a nice guy and completely benign personally.

But benign is not, of course, the same thing as good.

Ridge spokesman Tim Reeves argues that since January 1995, more than 250,000 new jobs have come into the state, which he says is largely due to Ridge’s ability to build a better business climate by slashing around $4 billion in business taxes. “You can’t be for jobs and against business,” Reeves says, “and you can’t be for business and against competitive business taxes.”

But objective observers say that Ridge overstates his own case. “If the economy were bad, his approval ratings would be substantially lower,” says Madonna, who watches poll numbers like others watch the stock market. “He has had a set of fortuitous circumstances, the likes of which have never before been seen in Pennsylvania politics. He’s the first governor in modern Pennsylvania history to inherit hundreds of millions of dollars in budget surpluses.”

Ridge has also benefited from having had a GOP-controlled state Senate and General Assembly run by, in Madonna’s words, “an extraordinarily compliant group of legislators.”

It’s an enviable position for a governor. In a similar situation, Michigan’s Republican Gov. John Engler used his resultant bully pulpit to push through a controversial school voucher program. Wisconsin’s Tommy Thompson enacted a comprehensive welfare-to-work package. New York’s George Pataki even went out on a limb and embraced a number of gun-safety measures, incurring the wrath of the National Rifle Association, and worked closely with the Democrat-controlled Legislature on health care.

And what’s Tom Ridge done in the same situation? As Ridge spokesman Reeves — a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter turned self-described “hopeless sycophant” — correctly states, “What he’s done is exactly what he said he would do. Whether or not you agree with the results, no one’s argument should be that they’re surprised.”

Ridge’s first move, convening a special session on crime, resulted in three dozen bills being passed, including increased penalties for criminals — three strikes, Megan’s Law, tougher punishment for juvenile offenders — as well as the creation of a Victim’s Advocate office.

Pennsylvania business growth had been hobbled for years by abuse of the ludicrously strong union state workers compensation laws, and he set about reforming that as well. And, of course, he tackled welfare reform.

But Ridge’s No. 1 priority has always been bringing more jobs to the state by producing a more compliant atmosphere for business. Job growth is up, unemployment is down, spokesman Reeves argues, so what are all these Democrats complaining about?

He’s right, in a way. Harrisburg Democrats, not surprisingly, do tend to seize on the ugliest statistics about the state, projectile-vomiting on Ridge’s glossy sheen. And what they seize on is this: The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that Pennsylvania’s job growth staggered last year — the state ranks 47th nationally, lagging significantly behind each of its neighboring states. (New York is 20th, Maryland at 17th, Delaware at 9th, New Jersey at 26th, Ohio at 38th, and even lowly West Virginia, usually good for a laugh, edges by in 43rd). From 1998-99, Democrats fume, the Keystone State added only 5,900 jobs.

“Many Pennsylvanians who were previously unable to find work have moved,” slams Democratic State Sen. Vince Fumo, invoking the state’s notorious brain-drain and population loss, which is expected to lead to the loss of two congressional seats after federal redistricting based on the 2000 census. “Ridge administration policies … focused too narrowly on tax cuts geared only toward big business,” Fumo has said. “Large corporations have continued their trend toward downsizing while small businesses and high-tech start-up companies who are a major source of new job creation have not received broad-based tax relief.”

That seems something of a stretch. On the whole, Pennsylvania’s economy is chugging along just fine, and to damn Ridge with one minor glitch of a statistic — while withholding credit for Ridge’s six previous years of bravura performances, at least according to the Bureau of Labor statistics — is partisanship at its worst. When Ridge took office, Pennsylvania ranked 45th among the states in job growth; by 1998 Pennsylvania ranked 16. And, Reeves claims, the state’s massive population loss is part of a three-decade-long trend.

“It’s amazing to us when they cite” the new Bureau of Labor Statistics figure, Reeves says. “Our state is so partisan,” he says, repeating a Rutgers University study that ranked Pennsylvania as having one of the most harshly partisan state capitals in the nation.

“It’s amazing to us that people are willing to tear down Pennsylvania to people like you to take a shot at Governor Ridge,” Reeves says. “I mean, we’re not naive; we play hard. But our unemployment rate is lower than the national average and our job growth is related to that. We have almost statistical full employment.”

The main shot that Democrats and some Republicans, like Lawless, take at Ridge, however, is that he’s worked a little too hard on behalf of business; they point often at the $400 million worth of bonds Ridge lobbied for to build four new stadiums, two in Philadelphia and two in Pittsburgh. Democrat Rendell says all four, but particularly the ones in Pittsburgh, were crucial to the cities’ economies to attract jobs and tourism.

Republican Lawless, though, wonders why middle-class taxpayers are saddled with paying for bonds that will only help corporations that rent out skyboxes at the stadiums. Middle-class taxpayers “can’t afford tickets to the games anyway, or the $5 hotdogs or whatever,” he says. “Why are we paying that bond money so Tom Ridge can give millionaires and billionaires playgrounds? Why not put that into reducing property taxes or to seniors to pay for their prescription drugs?”

Lawless has similar criticism for the $430 million deal Ridge worked out with a Norweigan company, Kvaerner ASA, that promised to build a private shipyard in Philadelphia. After fumbling the original deal with German company Meyer Werft, (a Philadelphia Business Journal op-ed called it “Ridge’s Amateur Hour”) Ridge worked hard for a worse deal with Kvaerner; that project fell through and eventually was decried on a July 1999 NBC Nightly News program, “The Fleecing of America,” for costing taxpayers $606,000 per job in an industry almost wiped out in this country due to cheap overseas labor.

Lawless’ rant, however, develops into a deeper critique when he discusses how the “corporate-driven” Ridge ended up securing the votes in the General Assembly for his various corporation-coddling projects.

To understand Lawless’ story, you have to understand that Harrisburg is one of the sleaziest state capitals in the country. Pennsylvania campaign-finance laws are among the flimsiest, and the state’s spirit of democracy has seen better days. Pennsylvania has more uncontested state legislative elections than most any other comparably sized state, with almost 90 percent of Statehouse members running unopposed in primaries and 38 percent running unopposed in the general election. Voter turnout is significantly down.

Ridge promised to clean up the capitol when he ran for governor in 1994, saying he had “one message — change Harrisburg honestly.” He decried pay raises for the Legislature and, significantly, railed against “legislative initiative grants.” The grants, nicknamed “WAMs,” for “walking-around money,” were given to General Assembly members for projects in their districts, doled out by legislative leaders to good soldiers as they campaigned for reelection. WAMs were Pennsylvania sleaze at its greasiest: secretive, stinking of cronyism, far removed from the very people whose cash was being spent.

“WAMs were a legal slush fund through which legislative leaders would buy off votes,” says Barry Kauffman, executive director of Pennsylvania Common Cause.

Assessing the choice between Ridge and Lt. Gov Singel, the Allentown Morning Call made it pretty clear what it thought of Harrisburg. “Given the choice between a candidate steeped in Harrisburg’s political culture and one nurtured outside it, take the outsider,” the paper wrote in its 1994 endorsement of Ridge.

When a newspaper considers the guy from Washington, D.C., to be the obvious “clean” candidate, you know something’s rotten in the state of Keystone.

Ridge changed his tune on the pay raise for state legislators pretty quick, soon signing into law an 18 percent pay raise for the General Assembly and state Senate.

“The governor was initially opposed to that,” Reeves acknowledges. “The General Assembly made it very clear in very short order how important it was to them, and what an impediment it would be to any business being done if he didn’t sign off on it. So he did what he believed was the right thing for him to do at time for Pennsylvania. It wasn’t something that he enjoyed.”

Far more troubling: After Ridge was elected, he soon replaced WAMs with “Community Revitalization Program” grants, or CRPs, to be administered by … guess who?

“He basically took over the WAMs system through CRP grants,” says Common Cause’s Kauffman. “From what we’ve been told by some grant administrators, basically what Ridge does is he reserves certain amounts of the grant money to use to buy votes on legislative initiatives. And it’s all technically legal.”

Auditor General Bob Casey Jr., a Democrat, studied the CRP program early on and found that $15 million had been given in grants without “any formal or written criteria.”

“Ridge said he was going to do away with WAMs, but all he did really was escalate them, as it turns out,” says Republican Lawless. “I sat in a meeting during Ridge’s first term, and I will never forget it. One representative said, ‘Governor, what about you taking away WAMs?’ And at this point it was clear that WAMs weren’t going away, they were just gonna be completely under his control.

“So the representative said, ‘What about this monument in Erie?’ that Ridge was having built. And I’ll never forget it as long as I live, Ridge said, ‘You know what, George, you’re right. WAMs are gone.’ And the representative said, ‘Well? What about that?’ And Ridge looked at him and said, ‘Well, when you’re governor, you can get WAMs.’ And that’s how he gets his votes when he needs them.”

Just last week, Lawless says, when Ridge was pushing forward an education bill that would take away local control from failing schools, Ridge pulled out the old CRP paycheck. “There’s a representative who said he was against it, against it, against it. Then he voted for it. And I said, ‘Why? I thought you were against it!’ And he said, ‘I am against it. But I can’t turn down the money they offered me.’ He buys their votes.”

“Well,” Lawless catches himself, “‘buy’ is a bad word. Let’s say he negotiates them very well with public funds.”

Spokesman Reeves argues that there’s nothing hypocritical in Ridge’s stand. “Look back to what he said during the campaign,” Reeves says. “He said, ‘We’ve got to take it out from the closet and get it out for everybody to see.’ Before, with the WAM program, you no idea how much money was in the state budget for these projects. Now you can see exactly how much money is going into it.”

But since 1996, CRP grants have amounted to more than $150 million in various project payoffs — the merit selection process for all of them completely secret.

To make matters worse, Ridge has even spent state tax dollars to keep the CRP grant process secret. Last September, the Tribune-Review and WPXI-TV, both of western Pennsylvania, have sued the Ridge administration to open up the CRP grant-giving process to the light of day.

Reeves says it’s all just a matter of timing. “It’s the line between public scrutiny of an internal deliberative process and public scrutiny of every expenditure of money,” he says. “In this state, public-interest law is focused on the moment of the expenditure of the money.” One wonders how that argument would fly with Tim Reeves back when he was a reporter at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Money’s a big thing for Ridge, and not just in terms of giving it to compliant legislators. He raised more in preparation for his 1998 reelection campaign than anyone in state history — $15 million, to his Democratic opponent’s $500,000. Like Bush’s presidential “Pioneers,” Ridge formed a special “Governor’s Club” of individuals who could raise $25,000 for him. He later former a similar group called his “Leadership Circle.”

“Look at the kind of money he raises,” says Lawless. “You think they do that because they like him? People don’t put that money up for no reason at all.”

Often, it seems as though their reasons are pretty clear: