Wednesday, November 05, 2003

By Mackenzie Carpenter and Barbara White Stack, Post-Gazette Staff Writers

Shortly before 11 last night, when news organizations were confident enough to call Democratic candidate Max Baer the winner of a state Supreme Court seat, the candidate responded with a quip showing some uncertainty: "That and 50 cents will get you a cup of coffee."

	At the Omni William Penn last night, Max Baer (center) celebrates his victory in the state Supreme Court race with newly elected Allegheny County Chief Executive Dan Onorato, a fellow Democrat. (Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette)

Still, his supporters cheered, hugged and felt assured he had won the race over Republican candidate Joan Orie Melvin.

"I can say with confidence that he's won," said Allegheny County Democratic Chairman Tom Flaherty, shortly after peering at numbers scribbled in a notebook, showing Baer, a county Common Pleas judge, with a strong lead in Allegheny County over Melvin, a state Superior Court jurist.

That, combined with an expected 200,000-vote margin of victory in Philadelphia, was enough to make Flaherty and other Baer supporters fairly sure their party would end the night with three Democrats and four Republicans on the bench.

Baer, 55, of Mt. Lebanon, spent most of the evening in a hotel room at the Omni William Penn Hotel, Downtown, watching the vote tally while downstairs a crowd of Democrats celebrated victories that included Dan Onorato's win as county chief executive.

Similarly, at the Melvin gathering in the Pittsburgh Marriott North in Cranberry, the candidate was nowhere to be seen late in the evening. A couple dozen of her supporters quietly ate hors d'oeuvres and drank wine while awaiting her arrival, possibly from her home in nearby Marshall.

Flaherty said he believed Baer won because the Democrats united behind him with no defections and they were organized and disciplined. "He addressed all of the issues and he worked hard. He was tested in the primary. His opponent was not. He was like a locomotive. He kept running and never stopped."

Advisors to Baer were closeted last night for much of the evening in what his campaign manager called the "war room" of the contender who called himself the "fighting judge."

One of his supporters in the crowd, Laurel Rosenberg, said she voted for Baer because he was "candid about the abortion issue, about women's issues, about family issues."

She said Melvin's commercials featuring her six children, insulted her as a woman, "It said, 'Vote for me because I have six kids.' "

A Melvin supporter, Conrad Zano of Stanton Heights, said Melvin's children took the day off from school to provide her with last-minute support. Zano, a North Allegheny school bus driver, has transported the children to school for six years.

Melvin, 47, was the first Republican woman elected to the state Superior Court and the first to the Allegheny County Common Pleas bench.

It was a tough campaign with both candidates criticized for judicial decisions in cases involving children. Baer was blasted first, for a case in which he repeatedly refused to move a young girl from the home of a foster father who had been convicted of incest and who impregnated his own 13-year-old daughter nearly 40 years earlier. Superior Court sent the case back to him for reconsideration, and he finally moved the girl.

Later, Melvin took heat for ruling, when she was on the Common Pleas bench, that a technicality prevented the prosecution of a babysitter accused of sexually abusing two young girls. Melvin's decision was overturned and both the Superior and Supreme courts criticized her for misinterpreting the law.

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