Word: wards
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...April 14, eight days before the Pennsylvania primary, the 69 ward leaders of Philadelphia will gather at the state party's annual Jefferson-Jackson dinner to hear from Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Clinton will arrive at the big tent next to the Sheet Metal Workers Union at 6 p.m. and make her presentation at 6:15. Obama will arrive at 7 p.m. and make his at 7:15. You've heard the old Will Rogers line "I am not a member of any organized party; I'm a Democrat." Well, the Philadelphia Democratic Party is an organized political party...
Organized into wards, the local party is further broken down into hundreds of voting divisions. Each division is overseen by two committee persons whose job it is to get their neighbors to vote for the endorsed candidate for every office. My grandfather Charles Patrick Shields was a Democratic committeeman in the 43rd Ward. As you might figure by his name, he was an Irish-American classic. He lived with Grandmom in a row house in Nicetown, on 15th Street, a short walk from the busy corner of Broad Street and Hunting Park. Every night when he was working the night...
What still unites the city's ethnic groups is the goal of a big Democratic win in November. Ward leaders like old Mike Stack of the 58th up in Somerton, where my parents moved us to, still boast of the fact that Jack Kennedy was elected by guys like them. Philadelphia gave Kennedy a 330,000-vote plurality in 1960, enough to swamp the rest of the state. Back then, Pennsylvania had as many electoral votes as California, a state Kennedy lost to native son Richard Nixon...
...with my parents and two younger sisters in a quieter part of town, we soon grew bored with the limited options for non-partiers. So we rented a car and drove across the bridge spanning Lake Pontchartrain, passing the recently rebuilt levees on our way to the Lower Ninth Ward. Debris on the shore stretched inland for hundreds of yards before giving way to rows of houses—if they could still be called that. Roofs snapped in two rested precariously above splintered and warped planks of wood. Tacked-up plastic sheets covered some of the holes where windows...
...Delhi, Beijing has built up an impressive lineup of stadiums for the 2008 Olympic Games. In addition to sprucing up its transport system and taking measures to improve its air quality, Beijing has even had time for over-the-top measures like testing cloud-diffusing technology to ward off untimely rains. But then, as New Delhi's supporters would say, that's because India is a democracy rather than an autocracy: Beijing has not had to contend with citizens' protests the way New Delhi has - from environmentalists protesting construction on the Yamuna's floodplains and conservationists protesting construction...