It's Friday afternoon at Così in Elkins Park, and a steady stream of forty-, fifty- and sixty-somethings are trickling in to collect petitions. A suburban outpost of a coffeehouse chain is not exactly the war room you might expect for the first candidate to come out of Occupy Philly. But it was good enough for Nathan Kleinman, 29, who's listing his occupation as "human rights activist" on petitions to get on the ballot for Pennsylvania's 13th Congressional District race.
Kleinman quit his job to focus on Occupy (he never actually slept at Dilworth, instead donating his tent to a homeless person), and he's been involved in some of the movement's more radical efforts: creating a "Free University" and moving homeless residents to an encampment on a Conrail property. He plans to run his campaign — and his tenure, if elected — like an Occupy assembly, with regular meetings open to the public. And he says he learned something important from the movement: "We can create the systems that should exist in a modern society but don't exist in ours."
Still, to take down U.S. Rep. Allyson Schwartz in a district that sprawls out of Northeast Philly into Montgomery County, Kleinman will likely have to lean on his more mainstream Democratic network. A former volunteer and delegate for President Obama and assistant to then-Pennsylvania Rep. Josh Shapiro, he appears to have the background for it.
Bobbi Penniman, 60, a Cheltenham resident who met Kleinman while volunteering for Obama, says she's "too old for Occupy" but not too old to gather petitions for Kleinman's campaign. "We need to get big money out of electoral politics," she says. Which is one thing most Occupiers would probably agree on.
