"Reformers"

There are several people lining up for the state legislative seat held by Lisa Bennington, a district covering Bloomfield and other parts of Pittsburgh's East End, plus working-class suburbs like Etna, Millvale and Sharpsburg. Bennington is abandoning her constituents after only one term, having discovered that she is bored with Harrisburg and able to make a lot more money as a divorce attorney (and would still have been able to do so even if she had taken the pay raise she had vociferously denounced Frank Pistella for supporting).

This whole sorry episode is an illustration of why this city's so-called "reformers" are ultimately a gaggle of worthless, self-important hacks -- or would-be hacks who fancy themselves so much better than the current crop of hacks in charge. Bennington ran against Pistella for absolutely no reason at all, basing her entire campaign on the faux-populist fury about the pay raise. She attracted plenty of support from the usual upper-middle-class liberal sources, even though Pistella was fine on the issues (abortion and gay rights) that these same people claim to treasure most. Unfortunately for Pistella -- and his constituents -- Bennington was the only character to jump into the race against him, and she was able to benefit from both diffuse voter anger and Pistella's laziness when it came to campaigning. The same crew of supposedly liberal know-nothings backed some nitwit seller of party favors -- who was most notable for having been in the Post-Gazette for renovating her house -- against one of the best overall members of the House, Don Walko, though Walko was at least able to make it because two other nitwits split the anti-Walko vote.

To Bennington's credit, she does at least appear to have most of the right positions on the issues, even if she's not interested in doing much about them. So when she got to Harrisburg, she realized that the problem was not Big Bad Bill DeWeese's support of the pay raise, but the Republicans' war on basic human decency, and DeWeese -- however imperfect -- was the elected leader of those who wanted to stand in the way of these enemies of humanity. She recognized enough of the facts to publicly defend DeWeese from the media witch-hunt set off by the opening stages of the Tom Corbett gubernatorial campaign.

But now, she's tired of trying to do things for her constituents for less money than she can make in the so-called "private sector," so it's back to that stuff for her. Good riddance, though unfortunately, it looks like we'll end up with a real hack of some sort in her place -- and in the place of the once-acceptable Pistella.