POLITICS

The Pennsylvania Primary:

Revenge of The Blob!

by Stump Connolly

Fri, Apr 25 2008

There are only two ways through Pennsylvania. One is on a beeline across the state on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. The other follows the presidential primary trail from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh with intermediate stops in towns like Altoona, Lackawanna, and, yes, Punxsutawney, where every day is Groundhog Day in politics this year.

Pennsylvanians like to call their domain the Keystone State because it forms the arch connecting the northern and southern colonies, and serves as a gateway to the vast bounty of America. It's squared off borders, which stretch from New Jersey to Ohio with a jut out to give it a port on the Great Lakes, contain a populace that historically got as far as they could in America, and settled for it.

There are two big cities in Pennsylvania -- and many small ones. Philadelphia at the southeastern tip is as American as apple pie. Home of the first Continental Congress in 1776, it sits at the nexus of power in the East Coast establishment.

Pittsburgh, on the other end of the state, came to prominence more than a century later. Faced with the dilemma of how to exploit their newfound horde of iron, coal and oil resources, the Carnegies, Rockefellers, Fricks and Morgans built their mills, mines and factories there and filled them with immigrant labor from Europe – Poles, Croatians and Ukrainians, to give names to the largest contingent -- eager to take on the work.

The two cities –– as different as night and day –– have between them about 60% of the Democratic voters in the state. Philadelphia and its four surrounding counties gave John Kerry 1.2 million votes in 2004; Pittsburgh and its three metropolitan counties accounted for another 500,000.

Polls leading up to the primary showed Sen. Barack Obama with a wide lead in Philadelphia and a narrow edge in its suburbs, but they also showed Sen. Hillary Clinton winning by a 3-1 margin among Democrats in the Pittsburgh area.

The winner in Pennsylvania, both sides agree, would come out of the vast expanse of territory in between: an amalgam of renegade frontiersmen and Quaker, Amish, Catholic, and Lutheran devotees -- mostly Republican, but with a fair share of disaffected Democrats -- living in small towns that Obama, on the eve of the race, unfortunately characterized as bitter people clinging to their guns and religion. [LINK]

Debate Fatigue

I arrived in Philadelphia just in time for the ABC News debate in the National Constitution Center, the 21st of the campaign. The first person I ran into was a weary Roger Simon, chief political correspondent for Politico, who has attended every one.

A poll released that day reported a majority of American people wanted to see the race continue to the very end. “I want their names – and addresses,” he scoffed before dumping his laptop at a press table. I asked him whether he was live blogging the event. “That’s too easy,” he said. “I’m a columnist. I have to make sense of it all.”

The first order of business for ABC moderators Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos was to rehash the truthiness of the charges that had been flying back and forth between the Clinton and Obama camps in the six-week lull since the last primary.

Clinton was given an opportunity to correct her claim to have arrived in Bosnia under sniper fire (“I just said some things that weren't in
keeping with what I knew to be the case.”) Obama, in his turn, was called to account for his “bitter” remarks (“It's not the first time that I've made a statement that was mangled up. It's not going to be the last.”)

Just when Obama thought he’d put that issue to bed, Gibson and Stephanopoulos were back at him with a question about his pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright (“Do you think Reverend Wright loves America as much as you do?”), then another about why he doesn’t wear an American flag on his lapel, and another about his association with former Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers. Fifty-two minutes of questions, most about his judgment and character, before a substantive issue was raised.

“It was not a good night for Obama,” Howard Fineman commented afterwards on NBC. “It raised questions that will be dragged out over the next months.” In the New York Times the next day, David Brooks compared his performance to “Michael Dukakis in a tank, John Kerry’s windsurfing or John Edwards’s haircut.” [ LINK]

In the spin room afterward, Obama’s chief strategist David Axelrod tried to convince reporters the good people of Pennsylvania would see past these distractions. “One good thing about running against Hillary Clinton is that nobody will say that you can’t handle a negative campaign,” he said.

But the attack had not come from Clinton. She stood on stage grinning like a Cheshire cat while Gibson and Stephanopoulos carried her water. She already had an ad running on TV decrying Obama’s bitter remarks; now they were serving up a whole slew of new ways to twist the knife.

When the dust cleared, one thing was perfectly clear. Any notion that the candidates would spend their last days in Pennsylvania debating the issues was gone.

This primary would be a test of who could pander most to the pride, patriotism, fears and resentments of the good people of Pennsylvania –– that great blob of untamed emotions we sometimes call The American Spirit.

The Morning After

In fact, both candidates had been pandering their way through Pennsylvania for six weeks.

Obama downed a Yuengling in Latrobe; fiddled with a Slinky in Johnstown; tasted a chilidog and bowled a 37 in Altoona; fed a calf in State College; sampled homemade chocolates in Lititz; toured a garment factory in Allentown; and nibbled on cheese at Philadelphia's Italian Market. (Thank you, Philadelphia Inquirer.)

Meanwhile, Clinton toured factory floors in a hard hat, told stories of learning to shoot a rifle with her grandfather at Lake Winola, and knocked back Whiskey shots in a Kokomo tavern. At one point, The Note’s Rick Klein suggested they forget the rest of the primaries and just settle it all with a chug-a-lug contest.

I caught up with Clinton the morning after the debate at a “Mothers & Daughters” symposium at Haverford College. She arrived with her daughter Chelsea and mother Dorothy, and she was beaming. “How many of you saw the debate last night?” she asked. All but a few dozen of the 300 women in the room raised their hands.

Acknowledging a contingent of students from nearby Bryn Mawr College, Clinton noted that she herself was the recipient of a fine education from a seven sisters school (Wellesley) then launched into a litany of promises (er, solutions) that included equal pay for women, tax credits for child care, more early childhood education, and even a cure for breast cancer.

After she finished pouring syrup on the pancakes, she took a couple crumpet questions. The last was what students should tell voters when they go out canvassing.

“Just knock on the door and say she’s really nice,” Clinton smiled, “or you can put it another way, ‘she’s not as bad as you think.’”

From Haverford, it was an easy train ride back into Philadelphia. The next night, Obama would kick off his five-day blitz of the state with a rally before 35,000 supporters on the steps of Independence Hall. But I knew it was time to get off the campaign trail.

I’d heard enough of the speeches. Now it was time to listen to the echo.

Driving West

I got in my car and headed west. The road out of Haverford passes through what are considered two good size cities, Lancaster (pop. 55,000) and Harrisburg (pop. 50,000), the state capital.

In a shopping mall outside Lancaster, it takes me a while to find six people willing to admit they are Democrats. When I do, five of the six, all women, say they are voting for Clinton. (The lone holdout is a young music store clerk who just moved down from New York.)

They cite a comfort level with Hillary, good memories of husband Bill and “experience” as their reasons. An elderly mall walker says she liked Obama at first, but she was turned off “when he insulted us in Pennsylvania . . . and with the minister thing on top of that, I’m going for Hillary.” It’s a refrain I would hear more than once again on my trip across the state.

At Harrisburg, I branch off onto US 22 as it rises up along the Susquehanna and Juniata Rivers into the Appalachian Mountains. For the next 200 miles, the only signs I see of a presidential campaign are roadside placards for Ron Paul. This is where small town Pennsylvania lives, a thousand little dots on the map, sequestered off the highway on even smaller roads.

For all of Pennsylvania’s bigness, you forget that most of it is a mountain range. The trees on the hillsides are just breaking bud and the rivers are at their spring high water mark. At Clearfield, where the Appalachians crest, I stop in at a local diner and find myself sitting at the counter next to a young man in a lumberjack shirt. He buries his head in his plate as I banter with the waitress about the primary. When she steps away, I ask him his preference. He looks both ways so as not to be overheard. “Hillary,” he says. “But that’s because I’m gay, and I really appreciate what the Clintons did for us.”

My destination for the evening is Punxsutawney (pop. 6,200), the epicenter of a minor holiday known as Groundhog Day. Getting there puts me on a course of even smaller two-lane blacktops filled with signs warning of deer, Amish horse carts and drunk drivers.

I arrive well after dark. The only room available is at the old Pantall Hotel. It’s almost 10 PM and the hotel bar is closing. The bartender, a student at the community college in nearby Indiana (pop. 15,000), serves up a Rolling Rock and says she will be voting for Clinton. One reason, she says, is that the Obama girl on campus is so pushy and obnoxious she wants to kill her. More to the point, her brother is serving in Afghanistan and she admires how Hillary dealt with disabled vets on a TV show she saw once. “She was so real,” she says, “she gets it.”

The next morning, I open the local Punxsutawney Spirit to find I’m not the only junkie who’s fallen off the political wagon. Two days earlier, Bill Clinton was having dinner with Joanne LuPone just down the road in Brookville (pop. 4,000). Before dinner, he addressed 500 people gathered around her front porch and said, “I love going into small towns. I’m the designated ambassador to small town America for Hillary’s campaign.”

My reason for going to Punxsutawney – besides buying a T-shirt -- was to see Punxsutawney Phil, the ageless groundhog who predicts all things bright and stormy. So after breakfast, I walk across the town square and find him curled up on a rock under cloudless skies with temperatures in the high 70’s. He can not only see his shadow, he’s basking in it. Sorry folks, looks like six more weeks of campaigning!

 

The Backside of The Mountain

From the peaks of the Appalachians, the land slopes down into the industrial valleys on the western side of the state. It was here around Titusville that oil was first discovered in America in 1859, and here along the backside of the mountain lie some of the richest iron ore deposits and coal reserves on the planet. Even before the rise of the railroads, the meandering paths of the Alleghany and Monongahela Rivers brought all this natural bounty together in a town called Pittsburgh, where it is made into steel –– or was.

In its prime, Pittsburgh supplied almost a third of the world’s steel. Blast furnaces bellowed smoke up and down its rivers, steelworkers earned a healthy wage, and unions ran the town. Starting in the 1970’s, the steel mills, one by one, began to close. Foreign competition drove down prices, and the unions were reluctant to give back their wage gains (and even that might not have helped). The last of the steelworks closed in the late 1980’s.

The recovery was slow and painful. The city’s population dropped from a high of 600,000 in 1950 to 333,000. The skyline today is pristine and clear. City neighborhoods are coming back to life. The economy thrives on jobs in financial services, health care, robotics and an array of small fabricating and assembly plants left over from the good old days. I’m anxious to see the transformation, but I still have a few more stops to make along the way.

The Cherry Tree Mine

Just outside Stiffletown (pop. 400), I turn off into the parking lot of the Cherry Tree Mine, an independent coal mine cut into the side of a mountain that no one but the locals know is there. Steady streams of trucks pick up the coal and haul it 15 miles away to the power plant at Homer City (pop. 1,850).

Tom Dunmire, the mine manager, says the plant is the new face of coal mining in western Pennsylvania. When the steel mills closed, most of the larger coal mines that fueled them either closed with them or consolidated.

The Cherry Tree Mine opened three years ago to fill the gap by finding smaller veins and servicing local energy companies without the baggage of corporate and union restrictions. It employs 108 people. Although it is non-union, its wages start at $22/hour with full benefits, roughly the same as larger mines with union contracts.

Dunmire surmises his workers are about equally divided between Republicans and Democrats. A good number are Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans (and their opinions on the war are similarly divided). Among the Democrats, he sees little support for Obama. “Could it be racism?” I ask. “Maybe there’s a little of that,” he says. “But there’s a lifestyle here that he’s just not a part of.”

Johnstown

Down the road is Johnstown (pop. 23,000), a regional center known for its hard luck, having flooded not once but three times. The Clinton campaign office is buzzing with activity. A block away, the Obama campaign office is as quiet as a flower shop. A single volunteer makes phone calls while her children draw pictures of the candidate on a table set out with crayons.

Johnstown is represented in Congress by Rep. John Murtha, a 16-term Democrat and Clinton supporter, who has used his powerful position on the House Armed Services Committee to earmark billions of dollars in federal contracts for his district. As a result, in an otherwise conservative area, Johnstown and the surrounding district is almost 2-1 Democratic.

The problem that besets Johnstown, and all of western Pennsylvania, is not the closing of the steel mills. That happened 25 years ago. It’s the steady erosion of other light manufacturing jobs lured overseas by cheaper labor costs in a new global economy. There are signs this trend could be reversed. A new Gamesa plant on the outskirts of town employs 150 people manufacturing propeller blades for wind turbines. These are the new “green” jobs both Clinton and Obama say they will encourage if they are the next president.

The larger concern here is that the population is shrinking faster than the jobs are coming in. Over the last six years, it has dropped 7 percent; and the medium income of the remaining households hovers around $34,000 a year. Emily Cain, a Clinton field worker, says voters here are ripe for Clinton’s message of concrete solutions to their problems.

“We’ve targeted this area,” she says, “and we’re going to get every vote that’s out there.” Her counterpart for Obama is not so optimistic – or eager. “Remember, we were never supposed to win Pennsylvania. But come November, we’ll know a lot more about this state than we did coming in,” he says.

Pittsburgh

The downside of breaking away from the campaign trail is you sometimes find yourself in a city with no candidates to follow. Thus I found myself in Pittsburgh the weekend before the primary with only one event to cover, a Pittsburgh Steelers tailgate party for Obama in the parking lot outside the Steelers stadium. It was hosted by Dan Rooney, owner of the franchise, and featured five former Steeler greats (Franco Harris, Dwight White, Robin Cole, Ed Nelson and J.T. Thomas), all talking about how a last minute push for Obama could put him over the goal line.

With the exception of The Steelers --–– “Don’t count Obama out. Dan Rooney is big in this town,” a fan tells me --–– the rest of the Democratic machine in Pittsburgh is lined up behind Clinton. “She got here early and lined up all the important endorsements before anyone knew it would be race,” one prominent Democrat told me. “All you see or hear is Clinton. She’s got the mayor, the governor, the women and the unions. She led the St. Patrick’s Day parade. What’s left for Obama to get?”

What’s left? How about the voters? For their opinion, I went to a mall in a middle class suburb just outside Pittsburgh. And not just any mall, but the Monroeville Mall where George Romero filmed his famous “Dawn of The Dead” in 1978.

The Monroeville Mall

I stood on a Saturday morning at the entrance of the Monroeville Mall intent on gathering 25 straw ballots from Democratic voters planning to vote in the primary. The crowd exemplified Pittsburgh diversity. They were both young and old, black and white, mothers pushing baby carriages and elderly couples doing weekend errands.

To get my 25 Democrats, I had to interview 44 people, 12 of whom were voting for John McCain and seven more who were undecided. The Stump poll, as I call it, came out Obama 13, Clinton 12, with the deciding vote belonging to a young African-American schoolteacher picking up tuxedos for a friend’s wedding.

Here are the top ten reasons people gave to explain their vote:

An African-American mother with child (Clinton): “She was the most poised in the debate.”

A middle-aged white man (Obama): “Hillary was already president before. Why should we let her do it again?”

A middle-aged white couple (Obama); “We need a different approach.” (wife). “It’s change. That’s what he’s selling.”(husband).

An elderly white man (Clinton): “She’s been there . . . and that Obama is a little bit of an oreo. You know his middle name is Hussein so maybe he’s a plant. That worries me.”

A white shoe store manager (Clinton): “She’s better for the working guy.”

Another African-American woman (Clinton): “She’s more experienced . . . and I liked her husband so if we can’t have him, she’s a good compromise.”

Wife (Clinton): “I’m for Hillary because she’s a woman and I’m sick of men running this world.”
Husband (Clinton): “I’m with her.”
Wife: “You better be.”

An elderly white woman overhearing (Obama): “I wouldn’t vote for her for dogcatcher. I’m for Obama.”

A white mother with three kids (Obama): “He’s more honest and he’s not a mudslinger . . . I don’t trust Hillary. I’m a teacher and that’s what I teach my kids. He’ll be a good role model.”

A young African-American man (Obama): “America is in real trouble. We need some fresh ideas . . . and I like that he’s a Christian.”

I climb back into my car thinking there’s no rhyme or reason in what will happen Tuesday. No issues are driving this choice. Not the economy, not health care, not Iraq. Tuesday’s primary will be just a good old-fashioned gut check. Who’s most like me? And how many “me’s” are out there?

The Tide Turns Ugly

On Election Day, the me’s turned out in droves, on both sides. Obama came out of Philadelphia’s central city with a 130,000-vote lead over Clinton – 30,000 more than his advisors thought would be needed to win the state – and he won a better than expected 45% of the vote in Alleghany County, home of Pittsburgh. Then returns from the rest of the state –– all those little cities and small towns on the map –– started rolling in.

The cumulative effect was the double-digit victory pundits said Clinton would need to carry her campaign forward. She racked up heavy margins around Scranton (74%), Allentown (60%), Punxsutawney (63%), Erie (63%), Johnstown (72%), and the counties surrounding Pittsburgh (70%). According to exit polls, she won handily among Catholics, white women, and the less affluent and less educated white men, otherwise known in political meta-speak as “lunch bucket, blue collar, Reagan Democrats.”

Over the coming weeks, Clinton supporters will argue to the superdelegates that the Democratic nominee cannot win in November without them (ignoring, of course, the converse: what Democrat would want to win without the college-educated, liberal, young and African-America voters who support Obama?)

There is a silent killer stalking through this Clinton victory, and it came to light in an exit poll question asking whether race was a major factor in deciding who to vote for. Twelve percent of the white voters, 75% of whom voted for Clinton, said it was.

Call it ignorance, call it racism, call it The Jeremiah Wright factor, but call it for what it is. In that great blob of untamed emotions we call the American spirit, there’s an evil vein of ugliness we have not yet finished mining.