Hoeffel's run for governor is latest in a long quest

First in a series of profiles of Pennsylvania's gubernatorial candidates.

For a 59-year-old who lives just a mile and a half from the Abington house where he grew up, Joe Hoeffel sure has gotten around.

Politically, that is.

Since 1974, he has run for office at almost every level of government representing his hometown - save the township commissioners, a few state offices, and the U.S. presidency - and has often won.

"I've never wanted to tread water," he said in a recent interview. "I've always been willing to accept a new challenge in politics and government when I thought the time was right."

That thought has put him on the campaign trail 17 times. Along the way, he has become an acknowledged master of Democratic politicking in Montgomery County, a Republican stronghold in the days when he first put himself on a ballot.

Now Hoeffel, a Montgomery County commissioner, is running for governor in the May 18 Democratic primary.

It is his third attempt to add a statewide office to his extended political resume. The lean, nearly bald pol has claimed the left side of the Democratic field, calling himself "the only true progressive in the race" for the nomination.

But the political realities of money and demographics have proved daunting.

He entered the governor's race relatively late, about a year behind Allegheny County Executive Dan Onorato, and has trailed badly in fund-raising ever since. April filings showed Hoeffel had $101,582 on hand, compared to Onorato's $6.7 million.

The geographic edge he had as the only candidate from the state's Democrat-rich southeastern corner evaporated when State Sen. Anthony Hardy Williams of Philadelphia entered the race late. Williams also has surged past Hoeffel in fund-raising, thanks to $1.5 million donated by three businessmen who support his push for charter schools.

Hoeffel is soldiering on, proclaiming himself the "socially liberal, fiscally responsible" candidate at every turn.

He tells crowds that he wants to raise state revenue with stiff taxes on natural-gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale and that he can build a fairer taxation system with a graduated income tax and restructured corporate taxes. Education, he says, can be improved without funding charter schools.

This package, despite political circumstance, is the message Hoeffel says will propel him from Norristown to the governor's office. He has endured hard fights before.

In 1976, he became his Abington district's first Democratic state representative since 1912. In 1998, he took the 13th Congressional District away from the Republicans on his fourth try.

He dropped a 2006 lieutenant-governor run after one day because Gov. Rendell, a fellow southeasterner, wanted geographic diversity.

Running for higher office is what he does. He is not shy about it. In 2007, on the day he announced his run for county commissioner, he refused to guarantee he would serve out a full term.

If he has been professionally peripatetic, Joseph Merrill Hoeffel 3d has lived a solidly rooted civilian life. He and his wife, Francesca, a nurse in Philadelphia public schools for two decades, have lived in the same Abington house for 31 years. The couple reported $156,630 in 2008 income, including Hoeffel's county commissioner salary of $86,000, along with tax-exempt interest income of $12,499 and $1,145 in dividends, both indicators of substantial investment holdings. Hoeffel has declined to provide details about his investments, but his campaign said his assets would be put into a blind trust if he were elected.

Asked to recall any enduring crises, Hoeffel said the closest he could come was his well-managed diabetes, which he developed in the 1990s. He wears an insulin pump and keeps himself in trim shape.

Little about his early life seemed to presage a career as an itinerant Democratic standard-bearer on formerly hard-core Republican ground.

For one thing, he grew up in a privileged Republican household.

Joseph Merrill Hoeffel Jr., a surgeon at Abington Memorial Hospital, was a GOP man until the last decade of his life, even as he wore a "Republicans for Hoeffel" pin when his son was on the trail. He and wife Eleanore came from Wisconsin, where the first Joe Hoeffel was, in 1921, the first coach of the NFL's Green Bay Packers.

Joe 3d wasn't much for politics until his time at Boston University, when opposition to the Vietnam War led him into campaigning for presidential candidate George S. McGovern. He has been a political animal ever since.

Hoeffel got his first political job in 1973 as a staffer for newly elected U.S. Rep. Gerry Studds (D., Mass.). Months out of college and green as fresh hay, Hoeffel was assigned to legislation on foreign overfishing.

"He came up with calling it 'the Great Protein Robbery,' and we were generating press releases," recalled Bill Woodward, then a Studds staffer and now a writer on foreign policy. "Joe was just this enormous hydrant of positive energy for the office."

Hoeffel worked for Studds about a year before coming home to Abington to challenge four-term State Rep. Daniel E. Beren in 1974. Beren was the county Republican chair. Hoeffel was a 24-year-old neophyte, but he was positioned to benefit from the national mood over Watergate.

He lost by just 1,505 votes and impressed many. The winner was the first of several Hoeffel opponents who now regard him well.

"He's bright," said Beren, now 80 and a Harrisburg lobbyist. "We have different philosophies on government, but that doesn't mean that I don't respect him."

Beren stepped down after that term, and Hoeffel won the seat. He spent eight years in the legislature, quit to run for Congress in 1984, lost, lost again in 1986, and stayed out of office until his 1991 election as county commissioner.

There, he exploited a personality conflict between the county's two Republican commissioners, Mario Mele and Jon D. Fox. He sided with Mele on a range of 2-1 votes and bargained so adroitly on issues from road-building to reassessment that all three call the era cordial.

"I'd welcome him to change parties," says Fox, a lawyer and fellow Abingtonian.

Hoeffel did not stick as commissioner, departing in 1998 for a successful run for Congress. He held his minority seat for three terms, got one law passed - renaming a post office - and gave 30 speeches critical of the Iraq War he voted to authorize.

"That vote is my biggest regret," Hoeffel says. "I believed at the time we had to disarm Saddam Hussein."

Had he held on in Congress, Hoeffel could have had his own committee by now, as a senior member of the Democratic majority. Instead, he ran for higher office.

He took on then-Republican Sen. Arlen Specter in 2004, despite Specter's long incumbency, higher visibility, and roots in the same southeastern Pennsylvania power base. Again, Hoeffel lost.

"Winston Churchill ran for a lot of offices, I think," Specter said."So did Abraham Lincoln. So he's in good company."

Out of office again, he made one of his periodic returns to practicing civil law, with a degree he earned at Temple University night school while a state legislator. After his short-lived run for lieutenant governor, he worked in Rendell's administration, soliciting overseas trade.

In 2007, Montgomery County politics came calling again. Hoeffel was recruited for a commissioner's race that again left him the sole Democrat of three commissioners.

Again seeing opportunity in a Republican schism, Hoeffel teamed with one commissioner, James R. Matthews, to cut the other, Bruce L. Castor Jr. - the election's top vote-getter - out of power. The Hoeffel-Matthews partnership has flourished, with each crediting the other with more moderate ideas than initially perceived.

"I didn't think I would ever see the day when I would take a Democrat over to my country club and sit and have a beer with him," Matthews said.

Castor, by contrast, has berated Matthews for enabling Hoeffel to enact promised economic-development and other spending plans that Castor calls tax-and-spend extravagance. He blasted Hoeffel for aligning himself with Matthews after campaigning against "cronyism" in Matthews' previous term.

"Joe is an opportunist and a hypocrite of the highest order," Castor said, "who will do or say anything it takes to get elected."

On the gubernatorial trail, Hoeffel boasts of his skill at post-election rapprochement, which he claims will be an asset in gridlock-wracked Harrisburg.

"I've demonstrated my ability to defeat Republicans on Election Day and work with them on the next day," Hoeffel said, "and that's what the next governor is going to have to do."

Under his original calculation, he would have needed a tide of voters like Jimmy Allen, 62, a retired teacher and community activist from West Philadelphia, to get him to Harrisburg.

It seemed to work for just a moment during a recent campaign stop. Allen, wearing a sweatshirt from President Obama's campaign, told Hoeffel his points on education issues "sounded like Obama."

But Allen later declared himself fully on board with Williams, despite liking the intellectual feel of Hoeffel's numbers-heavy analyses of the state's financial miseries.

"He has some good points, but he's not well-rounded enough to run a whole state," Allen said. "He can handle a county."

Back in Abington, one needn't walk far in the flowery neighborhood where the Hoeffels have lived for three decades to find his message resonating.

"My wife and I always vote for the most progressive candidate, and that's Joe," said Sam Pierce, 37, a physical therapist who moved here four years ago. "We voted for him for Senate before we lived next to him. We're both very progressive."

Age: 59. Born Sept. 3, 1950, in Philadelphia.

Residence: Abington, Montgomery County.

Education: William Penn Charter School; B.A. in English, Boston University, 1972; J.D., Temple University School of Law, 1986.

Business Experience: Associate at Norristown law firms of Wright, Manning, Kinkaid & Oliver, 1987-90, and Kane, Pugh & Driscoll, 1990-91; of counsel to Murphy & Oliver, Norristown, 1991-99; of counsel to Kohn, Swift & Graf, Philadelphia, 2005-07. Currently of counsel to Murphy & Haskins, Norristown.

Political Experience: state representative, 1977-84; Montgomery County commissioner, 1991-98 and 2004-present; member of Congress, 1999-2004.

Family: Wife, Francesca; two children. EndText