A look back at Clout’s top moments as its lead reporter says goodbye

Clout is going in a different direction today, and in the future.

Your humble guide to the inevitable shenanigans that manifest when we explore the intersection of people, power, and politics is now moving on.

So today we look back on some of the fun we had along the way. And Clout will continue next week with new chroniclers of shenanigans.

Gar Joseph dreamed up the Clout column — which often felt like a nightmare for the politicians it featured — in 1996.

Joseph, who died in 2019, was mentor to a legion of young journalists. He was philosophical about shenanigans. Clout was his academy.

The column always had an odd gravity to its light touch — drawing crazy news tips into its orbit.

Where else can you field a 2023 phone call from someone asking: “Want to see a photograph of Donald Trump and Joey Merlino at a Florida golf course?”

Why, yes, Clout wanted to see that.

We’ve seen so many faces over the years.

But if Clout had a Mount Rushmore, you’d see carved into the granite the visages of former Lt. Gov. Mike “Mikey Stacks” Stack III, Philly Democratic Party Chair Bob Brady, the late City Commissioner Marge Tartaglione, and — of course —the late State Sen. T. Milton Street Sr.

The arc of the political career for Mike Stack III could be a plot for a movie. We know just the guy for the role.

Stack was born into a Northeast Philly political family but caught the acting bug as a kid with a role as an extra in Rocky II.

A seat in the state Senate propelled him to the post of lieutenant governor, where friction between Stack, his wife, their staff, and security detail and Gov. Tom Wolf brought it all crashing down.

Voted out of office, Stack rebounded with time in Hollywood, where the tuition at the LA School of Comedy came with some open-mic gigs for him, under the stage name “Mikey Stacks.”

Clout laughed. We cried. It became a part of us.

Bob Brady, who rose from sergeant-at-arms for City Council to be a member of the U.S. House for two decades, is often miscast as an old-style big-city political boss.

Clout has always seen Brady as more of a hostage negotiator, working to keep one half of the city’s Democratic ward leaders from going to war with the other half.

Give him a blue beret. He could be a United Nations peacekeeper.

His deployments have included settling beefs about racist stereotypes in the Mummers Parade, warning progressive Democrats about wandering too far from the party, and sorting out which lawyers got the “magic seat” spots on the ballot for can’t-lose judicial posts.

A Clout favorite: Brady made national news as a member of Congress after he openly swiped from the chamber a glass of water Pope Francis used during a joint address. “How many people do you know that drank out of the same glass as the pope?” an unrepentant Brady asked.

If the afterlife has meetings, Marge Tartaglione is running them with an iron fist. And she has an ashtray in the middle of the celestial conference room table.

The nine-term head of the city commissioners, who left office in 2012 and died in 2019, would fling an amber astray onto the table in her City Hall office the second a public meeting ended. Was City Hall a no-smoking building at the time. Sure, sure. So what?

Clout still has that ashtray, one of many curiosities Tartaglione left behind when she vacated that office.

Another memento was a weathered 34-inch Adirondack baseball bat with the grip wrapped with black electrical tape. The thing likely never saw a baseball diamond but certainly seemed to have seen some street action. Clout held a contest, handing off the bat to the winner who answered three questions about the iron lady of Philly elections.

It was a cold day in West Philly in February 2011 but the crowd warmed to the unlikely comeback of former State Sen. T. Milton Street Sr., who was fresh out of 26 months in federal prison for not paying his taxes and challenging incumbent Mayor Mike Nutter in the Democratic primary.

Street, who played the political showman while his brother, former Mayor John Street, developed their tactics early in their careers, said Nutter would never debate him. He was right? But why?

“Because I am pregnant with information,” Street declared that day. “And I am prepared in any debate to wax eloquent all up and down.”

Street, who died in 2022, didn’t win. No one expected him to. But we all had a free ticket to the show.

He lost other races after that, for mayor again, for the state House, and dabbled for a bit with a congressional run. He also spent some time on the road as the mostly unlikely of Uber drivers.

Street was gearing up for another run for mayor in 2019 when he was diagnosed with cancer. He sat down with Clout in early 2020, nearly three years before he left us, for a final interview.

As always, he was indomitable.

“I’m starting to feel like I might be able to live another 80 years,” the 80-year-old told Clout that day.

Clout provides often irreverent news and analysis about people, power, and politics.