The race has also received very little coverage, which suits Rendell just fine.
Despite enthusiastically supporting Specter in the Senate race, the 66-year-old Rendell insists that he has remained neutral in the gubernatorial primary. "I've stayed out of the governor's race," he said during the interview with Real Clear Politics.
Some party insiders claim that the term-limited governor has been anything but neutral. "Rendell was an early and vigorous supporter of [Dan] Onorato for Governor, delivering his considerable financial network to him," said longtime state Rep. Mark B. Cohen of Philadelphia, an astute observer of Pennsylvania politics.
One of the longest serving Democrats in the Pennsylvania legislature and one of its most progressive members -- he introduced legislation last year to legalize medical marijuana -- Cohen believes that the man once dubbed "America's Mayor" views Allegheny County Executive Onorato as someone shaped in his own image, an economically conservative and socially moderate to liberal Democrat capable of stitching together the party's various factions in building a winning coalition in a marginally blue state like Pennsylvania.
Despite his disingenuous claims of neutrality, there is more than ample evidence to suggest that Rendell has thrown the weight of his extensive political operation behind Onorato's candidacy. "It's not exactly the best-kept secret in Harrisburg that (Rendell) has given tacit support to Onorato," said Franklin & Marshall College political science professor G. Terry Madonna, director of the schools' Center for Politics and Public Affairs. According to Madonna, Rendell's key fundraisers have been actively working on Onorato's behalf since last autumn.
When asked why the four Democratic candidates for governor haven't attracted more fanfare in a race that's arguably more important than the widely-watched Senate contest, Rendell matter-of-factly stated that there were "no big names" in the primary. "There's a lot of local officers and county officers running," he continued, but nobody comparable to the stature that he enjoyed, as a former mayor of Philadelphia, when he ran against Bob Casey -- another Pennsylvania household name -- in the state's hard-fought 2002 Democratic primary.
No big names? What about Jack Wagner, the state's fiscally conservative two-term auditor general? He's certainly not just some little-known local or county official, as Rendell dismissively suggests. Along with former congressman Joe Hoeffel, Wagner is one of only two candidates in the race who actually possessed some statewide name recognition before the campaign began. The same thing certainly can't be said of Rendell's candidate -- whom, coincidentally, Wagner defeated by a couple thousand votes in a bid for an open State Senate seat in 1994. The two men have been bitter foes ever since.
A Purple Heart recipient who had been badly wounded in Vietnam in an ambush that killed seven of his fellow Marines when he was nineteen, the 62-year-old Wagner, an old-style campaigner who excels at retail politics, led the entire Democratic statewide ticket in 2008 -- polling 60,000 more votes than Barack Obama at the top of the ticket -- while garnering 3.3 million votes, the second-highest number of votes in Pennsylvania history.
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