A year after getting thoughts from 15 random folks at the “Open City Hall” held by Mayor Nutter the day after his swearing in, the Inquirer’s Patrick Kerkstra tracked some of those people down to see how they felt about the mayor one year in.

Needless to say, they ain’t too happy.  One guy goes so far as to wonder “Did we pick the wrong person?”

Inspired by the question of Mr. Anthony Yates, let’s add a variation of it to our earlier request for assessments of Nutter’s first year.  Consider that the other choices for mayor were Dwight Evans, Chaka Fattah, Bob Brady, Tom Knox and Al Taubenberger (note: links to candidate websites may no longer work).  If you still recall the types of campaigns they ran, the platforms they put forth and the messages they tried to deliver, how do you think things would be different if any of them had won instead of Nutter?

There are many critics of counterfactual history who say, with some merit, that it’s a useless exercise.  But what the heck?  Let’s have a little fun with this thought experiment.  Alan and I are kicking around the idea of getting the former candidates themselves to weigh in on this question but in the meantime, feel free to take a shot at rewriting history yourself.

(By the way, here’s a link to the archives of The Next Mayor blog.  Click on the months on the right side to get to posts from the campaign and take a stroll down memory lane.)