Maybe it’s the crisp fall weather. Maybe it’s that the top local football teams are playing out of state or not at all. But whatever the reason, this is Pennsylvania Weekend in the 2008 presidential race. And it is the last time, as I see it, that the campaign will focus intensively on my own Keystone State.
Why? Because, barring some as of now unforeseeable “October surprise,” Barack Obama and Joe Biden are about to put Pennsylvania away--frustratingly out of reach once again for Republicans who have been yearning to take the state for the first time in 20 years.
It’s almost certainly not going to happen.
This weekend, all of the presidential players are where they should be: Gov. Sarah Palin and Sen. John McCain in the West and the rural “T” (the wooded Appalachian hills and coal towns between and surrounding Pittsburgh and Philadelphia), while senators Obama and Biden work the East, especially the big, vote-rich suburban counties near Philly and, in Biden’s case, up in his famous first hometown of Scranton with the Clintons in tow. In the campaign’s last days, the strategy is as plainly visible as your travel schedule.
It has been the GOP’s hope--and Karl Rove’s dream--to win Pennsylvania by focusing on cultural issues (abortion, gun control, prayer in schools, evolution and the like) in the “T” and in the Roman Catholic-dominated old mining and mill towns of Western Pa. It is a strategy that helped produce GOP victories for Ronald Reagan and Bush the Elder, but it hasn’t worked since 1992, when Bill Clinton took the state and established a close working relationship with the current governor, Democrat Ed Rendell of Philly. Rendell was for Hillary in the primaries, but that was bound to change once Obama wrapped things up and shrewdly chose Biden (a semi-Philly guy, being from Scranton and nearby Wilmington, Del.) as his running mate.
The easy explanation for why Obama is ahead by 14 points in the average of state polls in Pennsylvania is that the collapsing economy has trumped culture-war issues. As blue-collar workers watch the collapse of the auto industry, so the story goes, the deer hunters and anglers in economically depressed Appalachia forget culture and remember their Democratic Party roots.
But the “Deer Hunter” explanation is dead wrong. The real reason why Obama is so far ahead is that there is a new Pennsylvania--a new Pittsburgh having joined what became a new Philly long ago. The economy is not devastated in Pennsylvania right now any more than, say, Massachusetts--with which it now shares many characteristics. Pittsburgh is a college and research town; the Philly suburbs, once the home of the old GOP establishment, long ago took their tolerant attitudes into the Democratic Party.
The new Pennsylvania is more tolerant, less culturally judgmental--and to the extent it is, it is less conservative than it used to be. However many votes the hard-core, moose-hunting and pro-life Palin may have won McCain in the “T,” she cost him just as many if not more in Philly and Pittsburgh and its suburbs, where there now are perhaps 10 times more college kids than steelworkers.
It’s logical for Palin to be looking for votes in the hometown of anti-war Rep. John Murtha, a staunch Democrat. She worked the abortion issue hard--all but accusing Obama of supporting infanticide in the process. And McCain has a great calling card in the state--his military service. There is a reason Pennsylvania was famous for its rifles. It’s part of life, as is serving in the armed forces of the United States.
But it’s not going to be enough, I don’t think. Obama speaks of and to the new--a new generation, a new global outlook--and even though Pennsylvania still has the second oldest population in the country (after Florida), there is a yearning for a new day.
Obama has one other thing going for him: he is a sports junkie who watches ESPN whenever he can. That combined with his political savvy, led him to perfectly pander when it came to Pa. sports. He said he was a Steelers fan--which won him good will where he needed it most, in the small towns around Pittsburgh. And he said he was a Phillies fan, no one anywhere else in the state would hold that against him at this point for two reasons: the Pirates are hopeless, and the Phillies haven't won a World Series in over a quarter-century.
Smart.
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