How Williams fell - and Kenney rose

JIM KENNEY for the win, huh?

The former city councilman's historic landslide victory yesterday in the Democratic mayoral primary might have seemed inevitable last week, when an independent poll showed him with a staggering 27-point lead over his chief rival, state Sen. Anthony Hardy Williams.

But a Kenney victory wasn't always a sure bet.

Why, if you could take a trip in a custom DeLorean back to Feb. 8 - a few days after Kenney officially announced his candidacy - you'd find a Philadelphia magazine story with this headline: "Meet Mayoral Front-Runner Anthony Williams."

Williams was pegged as the front-runner as soon as he announced his candidacy last fall.

On paper, he had it all: a well-known name, enviable financial backing from Main Line billionaires and, experts said, a bankable advantage along racial lines.

So, what the hell happened?

Political insiders said that Kenney simply ran a smart, disciplined campaign that built momentum as it attracted support from unions and the African-American, Latino and LGBT communities, rendering the old racial-math business irrelevant along the way.

But they also criticized Williams for making a series of fatal missteps.

"I'm left with the impression that Senator Williams did not fully utilize one of his main strengths, and the issue he's most associated with, which is education, which really is the No. 1 issue in the city," Mayor Nutter said yesterday.

Nutter said Williams might have shied away from running hard on education because he didn't want to face scrutiny over his wealthy backers and their interests in education. But he was attacked over them anyway.

"If that's your issue, I think you have to grab it, you have to embrace it," Nutter said.

Political guru Neil Oxman painted the election in Seinfeldian terms. "The campaign ended up being about nothing . . . this was a marketing exercise," he said.

And in that regard, Oxman said, Williams did a poor job of marketing himself.

In a race that seemed to lack drama and tension - much of the candidates' time was spent on a never-ending assortment of forums - Oxman pegged Williams' recent bashing of Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey as the defining moment.

Ramsey, according to last week's poll - which was commissioned by the Daily News, the Inquirer, Philly.com and NBC10 - is by far the most popular political figure in the city.

"That was the dumbest thing," Oxman said.

Nutter, too, singled out Williams' repeated vows to can Ramsey as a tipping point. "I was stunned, to be honest," he said.

Political analyst Larry Ceisler said he believed that Kenney ran a "very nimble, very proactive" campaign, but also benefited from "a pro-Kenney bias" in the media.

But Ceisler also drew an interesting parallel among Kenney, Nutter and former Mayors John Street, Ed Rendell, Wilson Goode Sr. and Frank Rizzo.

"The one thing they all have in common is that they have either been elected officials in the city or they worked for the city," he said.

"They have a record . . . they can talk about things city residents can relate to. If you're a candidate who's a state-elected official, you almost have to talk in the abstract about what you have done."

Williams' campaign seemed to grow erratic in recent weeks, airing a negative ad over comments Kenney made about police use of force almost 20 years ago, and then calling an impromptu news conference in Center City to address a new mayoral poll . . . that didn't actually exist.

Former city solicitor Ken Trujillo spent months sizing up Williams as he prepared his own mayoral run. He exited the race in January because of a family emergency, and Kenney inherited his campaign staff.

Trujillo said he viewed former District Attorney Lynne Abraham as a more formidable opponent than Williams.

"My view of [Williams'] campaign is that he always ran like he was entitled to be mayor," Trujillo said. "Jim, from the beginning, had a humility about his candidacy. He never acted like he was entitled to it."