Dicker says she's 'in it to win it'

THE TOP TWO aides to state Senate candidate Anne Dicker left her campaign over the weekend, following several days of intrigue over the possibility that she or attorney Larry Farnese would get out of the race.

Dicker said yesterday that she'd fired her campaign manager, Karim Olaechea, after a series of disagreements on the direction of her campaign - and a conversation with political consultant Larry Ceisler, an adviser to the third candidate in the Senate race, union leader John Dougherty.

Dicker's finance director, Matt Goldfine, decided on his own to follow Olaechea out the door.

Both Dicker and Olaechea were circumspect about the disagreements between them. But one major factor appeared to be a campaign stratagem that backfired - a proposal last week to the Farnese campaign that the two candidates agree to a public debate to be run and judged by the Inquirer and Daily News editorial boards.

Whoever won would face Dougherty, the business manager of the electricians union, in a head-to-head battle for the Democratic Senate nomination. Whoever lost would go into court to have his or her name taken off the April 22 primary ballot, and "throw the full weight of [his or her] campaign behind the other," according to an e-mail drafted by Olaechea.

The Farnese campaign rejected the proposal last Wednesday, but the next day Olaechea shared the idea with the news media - a decision that made Dicker look particularly vulnerable when the Sunday edition of the Inquirer carried an endorsement for Farnese.

Ceisler, a paid consultant to Dougherty's electricians union, said he got a telephone call from Dicker Saturday afternoon, after the Inquirer's endorsement appeared on the Internet.

"She was crying, she was really upset about the endorsement and she said her campaign manager wanted her to drop out of the race, he said she didn't have a chance," Ceisler said yesterday. "She asked me to share some of our polling information, which showed she was still in second place . . . I said if I was running in second place, I wouldn't drop out, I'd ask him [Farnese] to drop out."

Dicker confirmed yesterday that she had signed off on the edit-board debate proposal made last week to the Farnese campaign – pitched by Olaechea to Farnese aide Brian Abernathy at a Rittenhouse Square coffee shop.

"It was a risk I was willing to take if those were the terms," Dicker said.

Dicker said yesterday she's in the race to stay. "I'm in it to win it and anything else is not good," she said.

Abernathy claimed that Farnese's polls show him ahead of Dicker and edging closer to Dougherty, with a good chance of winning a three-way race. But he acknowledged, "There's still a potential for the two of us to split the vote and for Dougherty to squeak in."

Dicker, 35, of Queen Village, is a co-founder of Casino-Free Philadelphia, which has organized and led community opposition to the Foxwoods and SugarHouse casinos, proposed for two sites on the Delaware riverfront.

She was the first challenger to announce last summer that she'd oppose Vincent J. Fumo, the 30-year incumbent facing a 139-count federal corruption indictment.

But Dicker's had difficulty raising money for campaign advertising, and appeared slow to recognize Dougherty as a major threat when he jumped into the race in January.

The latest campaign-finance reports, disclosed Friday, showed Dougherty outspending both his rivals by hundreds of thousands of dollars. As of last week, the union leader had spent more than $500,000 and still had $243,390 left in his campaign treasury, compared with $83,000 for Farnese and $26,000 for Dicker.

Farnese has taken the lead in attacking Dougherty's record, calling for the release of search warrants and subpoenas from a federal grand-jury probe involving the union leader and putting up ads that cite Dougherty's union for repeated violations of federal labor laws.

Meanwhile Dougherty has adopted a defensive strategy. He avoids direct interchanges with reporters, refuses to discuss alleged gifts from an indicted electrical contractor, Donald "Gus" Dougherty, and ignores requests for copies of subpoenas and search warrants tied to the pending federal probe.

The Inquirer reported Saturday that John Dougherty had stayed rent-free in a riverfront apartment building owned by developer Peter DePaul, later a part-owner of the Foxwoods casino franchise, while Dougherty's Pennsport home was undergoing renovations in 2005.

DePaul responded to the story by saying that Dougherty had repeatedly asked to pay rent during his stay but that he didn't want to charge him.

The Daily News had looked into the same allegations two years ago. Asked in 2006 whether he had lived rent-free in DePaul's Dockside building while his house was being renovated, Dougherty told a Daily News reporter: "Most definitely not . . . Not the truth. Not the truth."

The Dougherty campaign said yesterday that it had no comment on Dougherty's arrangements with DePaul. *

Staff writer Dave Davies contributed to this report.