A late entry, Williams has a pool of backers

ANTHONY Hardy Williams first had to convince people he was seriously running for governor.

The state senator from Philadelphia was such a late entry in the May 18 Democratic primary that political players wondered how he could hope to win.

Then came the money - millions poured in from a few people who, like Williams, support using public money for private-school tuition vouchers as one way to reform education in the state.

Finally, Williams started throwing political punches at the Democratic front-runner, Allegheny County Executive Dan Onorato, slamming him in campaign commercials for increasing local taxes and for opposing abortion.

"I'm not running for governor because it's a lark or I'm frustrated or angry," Williams said. "I'm running for governor because I have ideas."

Those ideas are drawn from his political career - improve education, create jobs, crack down on illegal guns and control spending.

Williams was a struggling student and apathetic about politics for the son of a political powerhouse in Philadelphia. The late state Sen. Hardy Williams died in early January, just weeks before his son entered the race.

A scholarship to a Quaker boarding school in Chester County turned around his academics.

His father tugged him from the private sector - a turn as an executive with Pepsi Co. before running his own vending company - into a run for the state House. The two deftly engineered the son as Senate replacement when the father stepped down in 1998 on the eve of the filing deadline.

Williams, who is also running for re-election to his Senate seat this year, found his pace working with Democrats and Republicans from the city to push for better school safety in the 1990s. His focus on education turned to how it can resuscitate communities by training future workers who then help lure business investment.

Question Williams about vouchers and he bristles, questioning why poor children shouldn't have a right to a good education just because of where they live. And he rejects concerns that pulling public money from failing schools will only speed their demise.

"If it's a bad school, if it's dangerous, if it's not performing academically, how does it get worse?" Williams asks. "We have to rightsize the bureaucracy. So maybe the building gets smaller. Or maybe it goes away in some places because it's so bad."

With a majority of Pennsylvania students not attending a four-year college, Williams wants community colleges to offer remedial math and science classes to give people a chance at entry-level jobs in emerging industries. He wants corporations to cooperate with those programs, providing detailed descriptions of the skills they need in new employees.

Williams worked five years ago to create funding for what became the Philadelphia Gun Violence Task Force, a pilot program supported by state Attorney General Tom Corbett, the Republican front-runner for governor.

Williams decried a reduction in funding this year for the program, which prosecutes people for illegal gun sales, and called for more money to take the mission statewide.

Like every candidate running for governor, Williams acknowledges that the state faces a significant budget crisis. Williams trains his focus here on collecting delinquent taxes, which he says run to $1.5 billion, rather than identifying spending cuts he would be willing to make.

"I'm a person who doesn't believe in slash-and-burn," Williams said when asked how he would deal with the state budget.