In Working-Class Pennsylvania, Uncertain Territory for McCain and Obama

By Michael Powell

Wander up a gravel road and ask George Timko about Barack Obama and John McCain and he wrinkles his nose.

Neither of those guys strikes him as a prize.

Timko is a burly fellow, with close-cropped white hair and a Fu Manchu mustache and a gold necklace that rests on his bare chest.

“Barack Obama makes me nervous,” said Timko, a 65-year-old retiree with a garden hose in hand. “Who is he? Where’d he come from? “

As for Senator McCain? He shook his head. “He keeps talking about being a prisoner of war back in Vietnam: Great. The economy stinks; tell me his plan?”

To roam the rural reaches of western Pennsylvania, through white working-class counties, is to understand the breadth of the challenge facing the two presidential candidates. But this economically ravaged region, once so solidly Democratic, poses a particular hurdle for Obama.

From the desolation of Aliquippa – where the Jones & Laughlin steel mill loomed at the foot of the main boulevard – to the fading beauty of Beaver Falls to the neatly tended homes of retired steel workers in Hopewell, one hears much hesitating talk about Obama, some simply quizzical or skeptically political, and some not so subtly racial.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York ran ahead 40 percentage points over Obama here during the Democratic primary. With its enclaves of white working-class laborers and retirees and fraying party loyalties, it has become a most uncertain political terrain and an inviting target for McCain – and one that could tip the electoral balance in Pennsylvania, a place packed with electoral votes.

Labor operatives line up behind Obama, and about a third of the 35 white voters who were interviewed leaned toward him. But no one feels confident predicting how many white Clinton voters will transfer their affections to Obama.

Raccoon Township, with a population of just over 3,000, sprawls atop a hill in Beaver County, a 92 percent white, but with narrower margins: Al Gore bested George W. Bush by 8 percentage points in 2000; John Kerry took Bush by less than 3 percentage points in 2004.

Political scientists tend to paint Pennsylvania in broad swaths: There’s Philadelphia and its liberal-to-centrist suburbs; the middle of the state, which is rural, gun-loving and rightward leaning; and the western third, which, except for Pittsburgh, tends to hold ever- so-tenuously to Democratic loyalties.

The Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, in a poll conducted last week, found Obama piling up big margins in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, but lagging in these working-class counties.

“This is not an easy land for any candidate, and you might say a black one has more trouble than most,” said G. Terry Madonna, the center’s director.

To what extent white voter concern has become a surrogate for racial anxiety is unclear.

Many voters talk of reading a stream of false and shadowy rumors purveyed by e-mail: Obama does not put his hand on his heart during the national anthem, he is a Muslim, he did not say hello to enlisted men in Afghanistan. Some disregard these rumors; some do not.

Obama is an Ivy League-educated lawyer campaigning in towns where an eighth-grade education and a sturdy back once purchased a good life. And he talks of soaring hope to people mistrustful of the same.

“People around here want pragmatic, practical language,” said Tina Shannon, the 49-year-old daughter of a steel-mill worker and a liberal activist. “They don’t want high-flown talk.”

This said, McCain quickens few pulses. Vietnam, where he served in the military and was held captive for more than five years, seems distant. And not all laugh at his commercials poking fun at Obama’s “celebrity” status.

Down the gravel road from Timko’s home, Brenda Goff, 55, a pharmacy worker who describes herself as a “Hillary girl” but is fine with Obama. As for McCain?

“I don’t like his commercials – it’s like he thinks we’re stupid,” Goff said.

Issues might seem to break toward Obama. Only two of 38 people interviewed – most in random door-knocking – favored remaining in Iraq. (Obama advocates a 16-month withdrawal timetable; McCain vows to stay until the war is won but suggests that he would have troops out by 2013.)

Few want a handout, but fewer want government to abandon them.

A simmering hurt suffuses their words, a sense that neither hard work nor their unions could save them.

James Stanford, a retired and still heavily muscled steel- worker, stood behind his screen door and spoke of a pension that evaporated.

“Obama got one thing right,” Stanford said. “We are bitter here.”

John Sylvester, 76, remembers when you could not find a parking space in Beaver Falls. You danced Saturday night at the Sons of Italy Club and drank with Dutch Town and River Rat neighborhood boys.

Sylvester labored in a steel mill for 42 years. Then the mill owner declared bankruptcy.

Now he was bent over a chipped fire hydrant, putting down a coat of yellow paint for $7 an hour.

His blue eyes were piercing beneath a white sun visor. “I got a little money in the end but nothing to speak of,” he said.

Decades of job losses have created a youthful diaspora – you can knock on many doors without finding anyone under age 45. Declining enrollments forced Raccoon Township to close its elementary and middle schools. Political wisdom holds that such fractures favor the Democrats.

But Obama does not sound like a sure bet.

“Obama’s very charismatic,” Sylvester said, “but if you listen closely, he hasn’t said a whole lot.”

Originally published by The New York Times Media Group.

(c) 2008 International Herald Tribune. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All rights Reserved.