"If it was Bush, Reagan, Romney, McCain, you’d kind of know what to get ready for. I don’t know what to get ready for," Jim Kenney said. | Getty Philly mayor: 'I'd take George W. back in a minute'

With just days to go before Donald Trump takes office, Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney says he and his fellow mayors have no idea what to expect from the incoming administration.

"I’d take George W. back in a minute," Kenney said in an interview Tuesday, referring to the president who won just 19 percent of the vote in Philadelphia in his 2004 reelection. "If it was Bush, Reagan, Romney, McCain, you’d kind of know what to get ready for. I don’t know what to get ready for."


Republican mayors seem to be just as flummoxed, said Kenney, who's in Washington for the U.S. Conference of Mayors annual winter meeting. And mayors are just as uncertain about Trump's nominee for secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Ben Carson, who's expected to be confirmed easily but has no track record on housing issues. One of Carson's own advisers cast doubt on Carson's qualifications for running a federal agency before he accepted the post.

"You’ve got a guy who goes to his confirmation hearing and says he doesn’t know what he’s doing," Kenney said. "Why would you pick that guy? It’s like getting the podiatrist to do brain surgery."

But the Cabinet nominee who Kenney is most alarmed about is Attorney General nominee Jeff Sessions. The first term mayor fears the Justice Department will withdraw from the court-enforced settlements, known as consent decrees, that it has negotiated with troubled police departments as a way to reform them. Sessions has called the decrees "an end run around the democratic process."

Kenney said he worried that worse relations between police and communities in other cities would affect Philadelphia, too.

"If Ferguson happens or if Baltimore happens, it bubbles up in Philadelphia, even though we may be improving and reforming," Kenney said.

Kenney, who was elected in 2015, has nearly three years before he is up for reelection. But he weighed in on 2018, when Pennsylvania's two top Democrats, Gov. Tom Wolf and Sen. Bob Casey, are up for reelection.

Kenney thinks Wolf, who's already drawn a challenger in GOP state Sen. Scott Wagner, is in more trouble than Casey. “I think he’s gonna have a tough race, because Wagner’s got a lot of money and he’s crazy," he said.

The mayor said he loves Wolf but questioned his political instincts, especially a recent decision to deny a raft of applications for tax breaks administered by the state's economic development programs. "From a philosophical business perspective, he doesn’t think the government should be doing something like that," Kenney said. "There were 21 of them across the state and he denied all of them. And I said to him, ‘Don’t you want to cut a ribbon? Don’t you want to turn a shovel of dirt?”

Still, Kenney said he's optimistic that Democrats will do better in Pennsylvania next year than they did in 2016, when GOP Sen. Pat Toomey and Trump both eked out surprise victories in races where Democrats were favored.

John Fetterman, the mayor of the tiny, working-class community of Braddock, near Pittsburgh, who finished third in the Democratic Senate primary, would have been a better Senate candidate than Katie McGinty, who won the nomination with the support of Democrats in Washington but failed to topple Toomey, Kenney said. And he criticized Hillary Clinton's campaign for spending too much time in Philadelphia — which she carried with 83 percent of the vote — when she should have been in the battleground areas that cost her the election.

“She spent too much time in Philadelphia," Kenney said. "We didn’t need to see her. She should’ve been in Wisconsin and Michigan and western Pennsylvania. They were great events. The rallies were great. It was great to see President Clinton. But it didn’t do anything. They were voting for her, anyway.”



CORRECTION: This story has been updated to reflect that Scott Wagner is a state senator.