A Mayor Kenney would...(fill in the blank)

SOMETIMES larger than life and always controversial, Philadelphia's new mayors for the last half-century have always arrived at City Hall on Day One with one important thing in the metaphorical briefcase. That would be a theme, an idea so simple it could fit on a bumper sticker.

Law-and-order? That was Frank Rizzo, on the day he figuratively took the police nightstick out of his cummerbund to assume the mayoralty in January 1972.

Restore fiscal sanity? That was Ed Rendell, who arrived at Broad and Market two decades later with a mission to balance the books, even if it meant city workers no longer reaped the vacation benefits of Flag Day.

John Street? Eliminate blight. Michael Nutter? End corruption.

Jim Kenney's theme?

Uhhhhhh . . .

"Every neighborhood matters," Kenney told the Daily News in a telephone interview yesterday. He explained that if he's elected mayor on Tuesday his priority will be to assure that neglected far-flung sections of Philadelphia will prosper, just as much as Center City and the handful of hip and redeveloping neighborhoods nearby.

"The key for me is allowing every citizen to reach the potential that God intended for him," the Democratic mayoral nominee immediately added. "I believe in a Supreme Being, and we were put on the Earth for a purpose, and that purpose is our potential." And he said cities and government can help with that.

That's certainly a little different from the less-celestial goal that Street announced in his 1999 campaign - to get 40,000 abandoned cars off the street.

Barring swarming locusts or massive lightning strikes on polling places, Kenney, 57, a South Philly native and former at-large City Council member - is all but guaranteed to become Philadelphia's 99th mayor, thanks to the Democrats' massive edge in voter registration.

But the successful narrative that the Kenney campaign spun in the May primary - ultimate rowhouse guy, son of a firefighter who evolved into a 21st century progressive in the style of New York's Bill de Blasio - has kind of faded in the endless lull between then and Tuesday's vote, not to mention January's inauguration.

"I think when you don't have competition, you don't have a need to be clear about what you are going to do," said Sam Katz, who ran for mayor three times as a Republican, nearly winning in 1999, and toyed with running this year as an independent.

"It probably makes sense, politically, to be as unclear as possible."

Political experts agree that the weird rhythms of the 2015 race helped Kenney - not just the lack of a serious fall race, when his main opposition is GOP political neophyte Melissa Murray Bailey, but also the Democratic primary when his chief opponents, former District Attorney Lynne Abraham and state Sen. Anthony Hardy Williams, largely imploded.

Entering the race late, Kenney relied more on his bio and his record in Council than specific policy proposals to build a coalition that stretched all the way from the ultra-liberal Working Families Party to the Fraternal Order of Police, with considerable black and Latino support.

Neil Oxman, the political strategist who crafted winning mayoral messages for Wilson Goode, Rendell and Nutter - and produced ads for a pro-Kenney political-action committee - told the People Paper that "99 percent of the reason that Kenney won is that voters figured out pretty early that he was the best candidate and that the other two were unacceptable."

But a strange kind of political ennui also hovered over the race. On one hand, city voters seem fairly pleased with some aspects of the last eight years - the relative lack of corruption in City Hall, a slowly improving economy, and the cachet of trendy restaurants or special events like Pope Francis' recent visit and the Democratic convention next year.

Oxman noted that although Nutter's campaign took off in 2007 after he promised voters that he wasn't like the unpopular incumbent Street, there was little incentive to campaign against Nutter's legacy in 2015. The current mayor's approval rating at the start of the year - in a poll paid for by his own campaign - stood at 57 percent.

On the other hand, the city's entrenched crises - the highest rate of deep poverty of any U.S. city, the cash-strapped public schools - may have depressed citizens beyond a new mayor's ability to promise to fix them. That's especially true for the schools, which are run by a state commission and have struggled to get any fiscal relief from Harrisburg.

Kenney said he has ambitious goals that are both large - making poverty a front-burner issue at City Hall - and more focused, such as a major expansion of pre-kindergarten education.

State Rep. Dwight Evans, a key supporter in the May primary, noted that budget gridlock in Harrisburg might force Kenney to turn to foundations and a re-jiggering of city spending priorities to add seats in pre-K. And that might take some time.

"I hate '100 days,' " Kenney said yesterday, sharply dismissing the benchmark against which new officeholders typically have been judged since the time of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The mayoral hopeful also said that setting hard numerical goals can create problems if those specific targets are not met.

Meanwhile, the summer's lack of local political excitement also brought increased focus on Kenney's ties to labor unions and to insiders like electricians chief John Dougherty, leading to some grumbling that meeting the new boss might be, well, same as the old bosses.

Kenney dismisses such talk, noting that diverse relationships will be key to getting anything done in the next four years.

"I think my union support bodes well for my ability to have conversations with them that are constructive and positive and forward-thinking." he said. "You can't get anywhere if you're an avowed enemy."

On Twitter: @Will_Bunch

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