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Wednesday, November 06, 2002

Bred to a harder thing
Than triumph, turn away
And like a laughing string
Whereon mad fingers play
Amid a place of stone
Be secret and exult
Because of all things known
That is most difficult

-- William Butler Yeats

In 1986, Mike Fisher stood outside his room at the Adam's Mark Hotel in Philadelphia and smiled wisely. He had just been beaten in a particularly nasty election in which he was the candidate for lieutenant governor, paired with Young Bill Scranton.

Bob Casey, in a maneuver at once brilliant and cruel, had detonated a 30-second commercial that convinced voters in the state's religious core that Scranton, if elected, would invite Ravi Shankar to play at the inaugural. Scranton retired from politics. Fisher was just getting started.

"I got my name out," Fisher told me, his hand on the doorknob. That was about all he would say. We were just meeting for the first time and he talked carefully around the subject but when I suggested he would run for governor at the first opening, he smiled, arched his eyebrows and replied, "Do you think so? I guess we'll see."

Then he went to bed, beaten but no longer anonymous -- a common bargain in politics, but one he was willing to accept at the time.

Last night, 16 years after a glorious retreat on the order of Dunkirk, Mike Fisher, a decent, honorable man, once again got his name out only to have it kicked back at him in a race where personality beat ideology. This says nothing about how the state will be governed in the next four years, any more than the cartoon on a box of Rice Krispies tells you how they will taste.

"I was just counting and this will be my 14th election night with a contest," Fisher said as commuters straggled past him at the Steel Plaza subway station. "You've gotta get in elections understanding one of two things can happen. Either result, I'll survive."

An aide stopped by with word from Philadelphia. Turnout, they told Fisher, was light. Fisher opined that the turnout in Philly's northeast neighborhoods, where Republicans are kept, might be heavy. Campaign rhetoric and Philly-baiting notwithstanding, Fisher has spent years trying to find happiness in that city and always those efforts have been unavailing.

Bad things have tended to happen to Fisher in Philadelphia, the kind of things one expects to hear foretold in a misty room with a robed Gypsy muttering into a crystal. In 1994 I watched as Fisher, hopping into an aide's car on Broad Street, lost his grip on his valise, which flew open, scattering his debate briefing papers into the wind. As a carload of staff howled in terror, Fisher dodged through moving traffic to snatch up every last page, narrowly avoiding a bus, which -- this being Philadelphia -- would likely have won the driver a city bonus for further reducing the population of Republicans.

Minutes later, Fisher's driver missed the turnoff for the airport, ended up in New Jersey and, as the boss laughingly scolded him for crossing state lines, the car spun into a wide turn and missed an oncoming pickup truck by mere inches.

Would have gotten him name recognition.

Last night, after standing in a chilly subway station, reaching out to whatever hands would return his grasp, Fisher packed up the campaign and repaired to the presidential suite on the 26th floor of the Westin Convention Center hotel. In a world of metaphorical overreaching, it might as well have been the gubernatorial suite.

He left the place smiling and unsurprised. Mike Fisher last night was bred to a harder thing than triumph.