Apr 19, 2024 3 min read

Cheers: Austin Murphy, the former congressman and state legislator, died last weekend at the age of 96, and as a remembrance that appeared in the Herald-Standard noted, his time in the public eye was noteworthy for both accomplishment and controversy. By the time Murphy, a Democrat, won a congressional seat in 1976 for a district that included Washington, Greene and Fayette counties, he was no stranger to voters, having served in both chambers of the Pennsylvania General Assembly in the years before he went from Washington, Pa., to Washington, D.C. And Murphy was respected by his constituents for the attention he paid to pocketbook issues and the presence he maintained in the community. Vince Vicites, a Fayette County commissioner, explained that he believed Murphy served the community well. “He was grassroots-oriented,” Vicites said. “He was visible in the district. I judge him by his results.” Those results kept him in the good graces of voters despite a rebuke from the U.S. House of Representatives for, among other things, keeping a ghost employee on the payroll, and revelations not long after that he had fathered a child out of wedlock. In 1990, Pittsburgh political consultant Dennis Casey described Murphy’s appeal this way: “One of the things about Western Pennsylvania is that there is a very strong work ethic there. I think people view it as, well, the guy’s doing his job, everybody makes mistakes.”

Jeers: In the same way that Captain Louis Renault was shocked to find gambling going on at Rick Blaine’s cafe in the movie classic “Casablanca,” many observers were also “shocked” at the news last week that the marriage of ABC-TV’s “Golden Bachelor” had foundered after only three months. Gerry Turner and Theresa Nist, the seventy-something couple who wed at the conclusion of “The Golden Bachelor” in January, announced their split on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” and now gossip columnists are working overtime trying to figure out what went wrong. A columnist for the Los Angeles Times opined that the separation “has created what may be the biggest embarrassment” in the history of the “Bachelor” franchise. You’ll forgive our cynicism, but it seems that any courtship that is carried out in front of cameras, with the pressure that one contestant ultimately be chosen for a walk down the aisle, is hardly a way for anybody to build a durable union. Television programs like “The Bachelor” may be billed as “reality TV,” but their actual resemblance to reality is scant at best.

Cheers: Along with Austin Murphy, another longtime fixture of Capitol Hill died this week. Former U.S. Sen Bob Graham of Florida died at age 87 four years after suffering a stroke. The New York Times obituary pointed out an interesting fact about Graham – in order to maintain touch with his constituents and understand the way they lived, he would periodically take on everyday jobs. He applied for food stamps, worked as a circus clown, collected garbage, filled potholes, picked crops in the heat of the day and did all kinds of other jobs, many of them thankless. Graham acknowledged that he was not wildly charismatic – a fact that might well have kept him off the Democratic Party’s ticket the many times he was mentioned as a potential running mate, and caused his 2004 presidential bid to go nowhere. But he told the Times in 2003, “I think what the American people want right now is someone who can give them a sense of steady leadership, as opposed to an emotional jolt.” That’s something the American people should want in any season.