But in the last few weeks it’s become a campaign about lawsuits, marital infidelity, a gay gym, a marathon, abortion and a dead cat.


The nearly million-dollar race looks more like one for the U.S. Senate than the state Senate.


That’s because the incumbent is one of the most powerful men in the Legislature, Senate Majority Leader David “Chip” Brightbill.


At stake isn’t just his job. It could be the future of the reform movement.


If Brightbill wins, analysts say, most of the wind will be taken out of the reformers’ sails.


But if Mike Folmer — “Citizen Mike,” his Web site says — wins, Harrisburg may be shaken to its foundations. At least that’s the story line being pursued by newspapers from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia.


Lancaster County is only tangentially involved in the story. Northwestern parts of the county were added to the 48th in the 2001 redistricting.


Knocking off Brightbill would be a shot heard round Pennsylvania.


“Leaders are literally more likely to die or go to jail than be defeated,” Dr. G. Terry Madonna of Franklin & Marshall College and Dr. Michael Young of Michael Young Strategic Research, wrote in a recent analysis.


“ ... May 16 looms as critical for the reformers. They need to defeat a sufficient number of incumbent legislators to sustain their momentum — and success is increasingly defined as bagging some of the legislative leadership seeking renomination.”




Raising the roof




It started, as so many campaigns for the Legislature this year did, on July 7.


That’s when lawmakers voted themselves a healthy pay raise in the middle of the night. Brightbill was one of the yes votes; the Folmer campaign charges he was one of the architects.


The Constitutional Organization of Lebanon, which included Folmer, a former Lebanon City councilman, and two former Lancaster Countians, Louis and Laurel Lynn Petolicchio, started casting about for a champion.


Folmer, a Democrat turned Republican, eventually agreed to run against the 24-year veteran.


When he announced his campaign in January, he admitted that he had left his wife Sheila for a time and had cheated on her. They divorced. Eventually they reconciled. Folmer’s campaign says they remarried, although Brightbill partisans say they haven’t been able to find any record of a remarriage.


Folmer’s history hit the headlines last week, as the Brightbill camp revealed details of a lawsuit filed in 1998 by Margaret Blom, then of York, who said Folmer “churned” her investments to earn commissions as a broker with the Edward Jones investment house. She also said they had a brief affair.


The lawsuit was settled for $2,500.


Brightbill’s campaign also gave the media details of a 1999 bankruptcy filing involving a Lebanon woman, Ginger L. Reedy, who listed Folmer as “co-debtor” on more than $21,000 of credit card debt.


“Mike Folmer, who claims this race is about integrity and accountability, never made himself accountable for these debts to four companies,” Brightbill spokesman Erik Arneson said. “The debts continue.”


Blom, who appeared at a press conference called by the Brightbill campaign, called Folmer “a charming and gifted actor who will do and say anything he can or needs to say to get what he wants.”


Folmer fired back at a press conference the next night: “So what’s a powerful, tax-hiking, pay-raising politician to do when his campaign is on the ropes? Nothing short of running the dirtiest campaign in the history of Pennsylvania politics.”


Sheila Folmer added, “Sen. Brightbill, I’m appalled by the lengths you go to destroy my husband and my family.” Folmer, who now sells tires wholesale, repeated that he made “personal mistakes” in the past but said he did nothing wrong in the Blom case, which he called an example of why the state needs tort reform. He said after a debate Tuesday at Elizabethtown College that his pastor, Ron Zeigler of Church of the Servant, travels everywhere with him for support and accountability.


His campaign said he didn’t know about the bankruptcy until last week.


“I never said I was a perfect man,” he said Tuesday.




Making (air) waves




The lawsuit and infidelity charges focused attention away from the flood of nasty TV ads that had been pouring out of the race.


Brightbill’s ads claimed Folmer was frequently absent from Lebanon City Council meetings. (His campaign said the meetings he missed were work sessions.)


Pennsylvania Club for Growth, the local chapter of the national fiscal-hawk organization, ran ads accusing “Liberal Chip Brightbill” of voting for the four largest tax increases in state history.


“The concept of Chip Brightbill being a ‘liberal’ is not at all compatible with the hundreds of day-to-day decisions I’ve seen him make over 10 years,” his spokesman, Arneson, said.


Of the more than $900,000 raised in the race, Brightbill had $833,000 in the last filing period, while Folmer showed $71,000 — not counting $85,000 in ads sponsored by the Club for Growth.


Folmer’s campaign has slapped Brightbill for taking money from the family of a slots license applicant, even though Brightbill has said he’s anti-gambling. Brightbill’s campaign slammed Folmer for getting more than $32,000 of his cash from Bob Guzzardi, who owned a gay gym in Philadelphia.


“Bob Guzzardi has supported numerous conservative candidates such as Rick Santorum, Pat Toomey and Frank Ryan,” Laurel Lynn Petolicchio said. “... As for Guzzardi’s business interests, how should they fit in?”


Folmer supporters were arguing over the weekend that Brightbill’s name being listed earlier this year among donors to Lebanon Family Health Services, which, among other services, offers referrals to abortion providers, proves that Brightbill is not pro-life, as he’s been claiming in this race.


Arneson said the agency also provides prenatal care, mammograms and other health care to low-income women: “There’s a lot of good work done by that organization.”


Most voters, he said, are concerned about “which candidate will be more likely to make consistently good policy judgments into the future.”


“There is a four-letter word I would use to describe Chip: fair.”


Folmer’s take on that: “What has consensus got the state of Pennsylvania over the last 24 years? “... Maybe it’s time that we need to fight. Maybe it’s time to say no.”




Upping the ante




Then there’s that pay raise.


At the Tuesday debate at E-town College, Folmer didn’t mention the pay raise until his closing statement.


Others haven’t been as reticent. Gene Stilp, the anti-pay-raise activist running for lieutenant governor, last month staged a 26.2-mile walk from Mount Gretna — where Brightbill lives — to Harrisburg to protest Brightbill’s taking of $143-per-day “per diem” payments for going to work.


Finally, there’s the dead cat.


The Petolicchios — Laurel Lynn is a former Donegal Area GOP chairwoman and ran as a Constitution Party candidate against Sen. Noah Wenger in the 36th District four years ago — said they returned home last week to find their kitten dead near the road.


Because the kitten was found right after a batch of Brightbill signs was installed near their home on a dead-end road, and because the Petolicchios saw a suspicious vehicle near their house at the time, Laurel Lynn blames Brightbill’s camp.


The Humane Society of Lebanon County even offered to test the cat’s remains to determine a cause of death.


That forced the Brightbill campaign to deny killing the cat. Theater of the absurd?


Remember those high stakes.


The Philadelphia Inquirer has been calling Folmer. The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review is covering the race extensively. Folmer said average citizens across the district, those who don’t think they count in politics, are pinning their hopes on an upset of Brightbill.


“This is a great opportunity for a new majority ... to change the way the General Assembly does business.” “If no leaders lose and few incumbents are defeated, the game is just about up for the reform movement and its agenda,” pundits Madonna and Young wrote. “... If incumbents are overwhelmingly re-nominated, then the reform movement is dead.”


But if a lot of incumbents lose, along with several leaders, “the floodgates may well open for reform.”