Republican uses rope-a-dope, gets air time

Kudos to Republican mayoral candidate Karen Brown for a brilliant campaign strategy.

She’s perfectly executed the old I’ll-run-such-a-non-campaign-that-some-media-outlet-screws-up-and-has-to-give-me-air-time gambit.

That’s right, Channel 10 has agreed to “extend an offer for Karen Brown to appear on our air on a date and time to be determined” after the station scheduled a broadcast town hall meeting with Mayor Nutter, perhaps forgetting he was in the middle of a re-election campaign.

The event apparently triggered a requirement in the federal communications act that when a station opens up its airwaves to a candidate for office, it has to offer an “equal opportunity” to other legally qualified candidates.

My old friend Dale Wilcox reminds me that in 1995, when then-Mayor Ed Rendell was running for re-election against under-funded Republican Joe Rocks, the crew at sports station WIP had Ed on for an hour of morning sports chat.

The Rocks campaign complained, and WIP ended up giving them an hour’s worth of 30- and 60-second spots in morning drive for the remaining six weeks of the campaign, with WIP providing the production facilities.

The Channel 10 thing may not be over. There is another candidate on the mayoral ballot – Diop Olugbala from the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement.

Channel 10 hasn’t heard from him, but he is holding a demonstration Thursday to protest his exclusion from the Channel 29 debate between Nutter and Brown scheduled for Tuesday.