Has it really been eight years since Chris Bowers and I sat down with Chaka Fattah?

Now we both have children. And Rep. Fattah looks like he’s going to jail.

I can’t speak for Bowers, but I walked away from my meeting with Fattah in 2007 pretty adamantly opposed to him becoming the mayor of Philadelphia. I actually considered running for Congress against him because I was that unimpressed. Because of the ground rules of the meeting, I never discussed it. The closest I came was here in a post where I talked about all the mayoral candidates and explained my endorsement of Michael Nutter.

Chaka Fattah is another matter. Fattah sits on the powerful House Appropriations committee. He’s in a position to bring home some badly needed bacon to the city. I’m generally pleased with his work as my congressman. And, having met him, I think he is better suited for the job that he has than he is for any kind of executive position. No details here…just my gut feeling. As a result, I haven’t really cared what his proposals are. I think he is the wrong personality type for the job. You can read an impassioned endorsement of Fattah here [ed note: link is dead]. For the record, though, I don’t like Fattah’s position on gambling and I think his ideas on housing are from bizarro world.

One thing I think I can divulge now is that Fattah was really unhappy in Congress and calculated that it would be close to a decade before he got control of any of the subcommittees at Appropriations. He wanted out. He wanted out in 2007 because he didn’t see his career going anywhere. He was kind of right about that. Eight years later, he’s still only the ninth-ranking Democrat on the committee. He did rise to be the ranking member on the Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies, which means he might have been chairman one day if he’d engaged in less bribery and racketeering.

My personal appraisal of the man was that he was in the pocket of gambling interests and wasn’t quite all there mentally. At the time, I was as charitable as I could be and I honored the agreement I made about not disclosing details of our discussion. But I am not in the least surprised to learn that he is crooked. That was how I sized him up eight long years ago.