Monica Yant Kinney: A Phila. primary that's no choice at all

If the past is the future, where are we now? Sorry to be cerebral, but after attending John Dougherty's campaign announcement last week, my head is spinning.

Yours would be, too, if you had experienced the Pennsport time warp.

In it, one rough-and-tumble Philadelphia politician under federal investigation claims to be a "pleasant change" from another who has already been indicted and faces a corruption trial in the fall.

If only I still lived in the First State Senatorial District, which stretches from the airport to Port Richmond. Because the choice between Johnny Doc and Vince Fumo is one for the ages - one that must make Center City progressives wonder if last year's mayor's race was a dream.

Didn't they just elect a reformer?

And yet moments after Mayor Nutter installed three former federal prosecutors as his ethics police, voters again face throwback candidates who think good government is foreign food best avoided.

Just last month, Local 98 - the powerful electricians union run with an iron hand by Dougherty - sued the city's Board of Ethics.

The union's political action committee spent $2.4 million last year - including $140,000 on "propaganda" for failed mayoral candidate Tom Knox - but is refusing to open its books as state law requires. The electricians think such snooping violates their constitutional rights.

A year earlier, Dougherty - who flirted with a mayoral run - tried to get the city's pesky new campaign-finance law tossed by the state Supreme Court.

This is the future?

Johnny Doc's campaign slogan is "Real change, real results, real fast." His first rally, however, was just real strange.

If I didn't know better, I'd think his advisers called Central Casting and ordered up an afternoon of South Philly stereotypes.

Cue the crowd of rabid union members, many of whom moved out of the city and can't vote for Doc unless they break the law.

Cue the Fralinger String Band, since it's suicide to hold any political event that close to Two Street without Mummers.

Cue the Catholic priest, who all but canonized the candidate.

The would-be senator is well-known for his work with the Variety Club charity for children. But somehow Msgr. George Tomachek forgot to mention that in 2006, FBI, IRS and Department of Labor agents raided Dougherty's home.

The search was part of an investigation of Johnny Doc's good friend Donald "Gus" Dougherty Jr., an electrical contractor of no relation.

Gus Dougherty was indicted in June on 100 counts of fraud and tax evasion. He's charged with stealing $869,000 from a union benefits plan, bribing a bank boss, and making illegal payments to his pal John by selling him a house below market value and doing $115,000 worth of electrical work gratis.

It's against federal law for a union contractor to lavish freebies on a union leader. John Dougherty has not been charged with a crime, and he denies any wrongdoing. Not surprisingly, he ignored the matter at his campaign rally.

Instead, Dougherty's wife, Cecilia, told the crowd that he's a nice, normal guy. Hours earlier, he joined her at home for "a peanut-butter sandwich and chocolate milk."

I like PB&J, too, but it's hard to see how all-American lunch preferences make him more fit for office than the man who has held it in a 30-year death grip. Fumo and Dougherty may hate each other, but both are controversial.

Granted, City Councilman Bill Green declared Dougherty "tougher than Fumo and more honest than Lincoln." But shouldn't voters hear from Dougherty himself about the cloud hanging over him? If not now, then sometime soon, before the April 22 primary?

When I pressed him on it, Dougherty told me proudly, "I've been subpoenaed for 15 years."

Subpoenas fly, he said, when you fight big companies for the little guy. And he'll never stop fighting.

"Anybody who knows me knows I get stuff done," was how Doc put it.

There it is, Philadelphia. Your political future, boasting that real leaders get investigated by the feds as a price for being so effective.

If that's true, why not just vote for Fumo?