Uber-liberal Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News and the Philly politics blog Attytood took a hammer to the Democratic Party in Pennsylvania this morning. Well deserved in my humble opinion. 

The PA Democratic party is a microcosm of the national party if you ask me. Entrenched in major cities and primarily minority communities, they have given up trying to speak to, and fight for the causes of anyone outside of those areas. And on top of that, we see in Pennsylvania two prominent Democrats (Kane and McCord) in the middle of corruption scandals, or about to enter guilty pleas in court.

And yet, the party seems to stay with the status quo in its leadership.

It needs to do better.

These should be heady days for the Democrats here in the Keystone State -- Gov. Tom Wolf became the first candidate to beat an incumbent governor since the state allowed them to run for re-election in the 1960s. And he did so with a fairlly liberal platform, including a plan to tax fracking (something that happens in every other energy producing state, even blood-red Texas) to pay for our underfunded schools.

But the bigger picture looks awful. Wolf, despite winning in a landslide, had reverse coattails; the new legislature may be the most conservative in state history, which casts serious doubt on whether he'll fulfill any of his campaign promises. But it gets worse. The first Democrat ever elected attorney general in Pennsylvania history, Kathleen Kane, is devoting much of her time not to fighting polluters and assorted white-collar crooks but to prevent her own indictment on perjury charges. And now we learn that state treasurer Rob McCord is quitting and pleading guilty to federal extortion charges, after pressuring state contractors to give money to his own failed bid for the governor's mansion. Even here in Philadelphia, the somewhat hopeful entry of (loose cannon) Councilman Jim Kenney into the mayor's race doesn't change the fact that the current front-runners support illiberal ideas like unfettered charter schools or wholesale pot arrests.

What a mess. But why?

In recent times, most notably the reign of former Gov. Ed Rendell in the 2000s, Democrats have been more a cult of personality than a party of ideas. The Rendell  era was marked by a few good policies (renewable energy) subsumed by its anything-goes-ethically mentality. Today, Rendell makes phone calls for fracking companies, lobbies for European-style austerity and gives paid speeches to groups that on the State Department's terrorism list. Some liberal.

But his approach taught his successors what really mattered in Pa. politics was raising a lot of money and keep it vague. Other Northeastern states elected progressive attorneys general who took on polluters or Wall Street or stressed consumer protection; the resume-deprived Kane won the AG slot in 2012 (on the ticket with Obama) by running as a Republican-lite "prosecutor-not-a-politician" who was endorsed by the Clintons (pure payback; her foe, the liberal Iraq vet Patrick Murphy, had backed Obama over Hillary in '08), and had a trailer full of cash thanks to her husband's family trucking business. Her difficulties in doing the actual job -- and turning to insider Dick Sprague when she got in a jam -- probably shouldn't come as a shock.

In 2014, the Dems could have recaptured the governor's mansion purely through ideology -- compared to the utter poverty of Tom Corbett's empty-headed kissing up to the Tea Party -- but it was easier to coast on Wolf's $10 million stake. That level of spending apparently drove treasurer McCord out of his mind; by his own admission, he then threatened would-be donors so he could raise money to compete with Wolf -- thus further tarnishing the Democratic brand just as Wolf was starting out.