One of the disappointments so far of the Tube City Almanac Hardscrabble Mon Valley Watch has been a relative lack of reporters actually visiting the Mon Valley.
Twenty years ago, this place would have been crawling with TV crews, looking for closed steel mills to report from. Chiodo's Tavern in Homestead would have been lousy with correspondents from the Chicago Tribune.
Now, Chiodo's is a Walgreen's, and the reporters all go to Johnstown and Altoona.
On the other hand, I'm delighted to see The New York Times is living down to its reputation as a bastion of East Coast elitism. I can always count on the Times to look down its snoot at the peasants.
. . .
"Gritty" is surpassing "hardscrabble" as the word of choice when describing Pennsylvania cities, as Michael Powell of the Times illustrates:
So in Johnstown, a small, economically depressed city tucked in a valley hard by the Little Conemaugh River, Mr. Obama on Saturday spoke to the gritty reality of a city that ranks dead last on the Census Bureau's list of places likely to attract American workers. His traveling companion, Senator Bob Casey, Democrat of Pennsylvania, introduced the candidate as an "underdog fighter for an underdog state."
"If there aren't major policy differences, it's about perceptions, it's about who is feels your pain," said Greg Valliere, chief political strategist at Stanford Washington Research Group, which tracks economic policy issues. "Hillary is slightly better; she appeals to beer drinkers, Obama appeals to chardonnay drinkers."
Barack Obama hit the bowling lanes and walked the factory floor, hoisted the local brew and even nursed a calf as he introduced himself over the weekend to the working-class residents of hardscrabble towns in the valleys and mountains of southern Pennsylvania ... (at) Pleasant Valley Lanes in Altoona ... Obama exchanged his polished black oxfords for a pair of size 13-and-a-half blue-and-white Velcro bowling shoes.
(In) the first presidential campaign with an African-American as a serious contender, there may be a new gyration in the way voters think, the need to explain the vote against the candidate who is black ...
In a place like Latrobe, which the census says is 99 percent white, the race issue is almost an unexplored country that people visit like tourists with a phrase book. Driving past abandoned steel mills and a brewery and through a neatly swept downtown where tulips have sprouted along the 19th-century railroad line that spawned the city, diversity is mainly in the exterior paint of the residential bungalows.
There's something about Pennsylvania, and especially Pittsburgh, that makes the cable-TV talking heads adopt this faux blue-collar persona. They try to project a sense of "I may be a multimillionaire celebrity with a designer haircut, professional makeup and famous friends, but at heart I'm just a rugged workingman -- maybe a steelworker doing something that involves lots of sparks -- who likes to belly up to the bar of the Legion Hall for a shot and a beer."
(O)utsiders seem to find the place irresistibly exotic. Wrote a New York Times reporter, "Question to our Keystone State readers: What is it with this Pennsylvania fetish for bizarre world food combinations? In Johnstown, this New Yorker encountered the artery-clogging prospect of cheese fries."
Cheese fries? I'm thinking he was either overcome by the sheer foreignness of Johnstown, a city that puts the grit in gritty, or else he was the victim of an overly sheltered childhood. Cheese fries are readily available all over Manhattan, although perhaps not at the kinds of places where he dines.
Maybe Pennsylvania is as strange as the national press thinks and growing up there you just don't notice it. I was back in Pittsburgh for a convention of mainly out-of-staters and the hotel served what it called a Pittsburgh buffet -- city chicken (breaded veal on a stick), kielbasa, stuffed cabbage, pierogi. The guests seemed to find this novel and unusual fare. I thought, "I'm back in my high-school cafeteria."
Ask permission before photographing the natives.
First things first. Alert Reader Mr. B, McKeesport High class of '60, sends along the following announcement:
One of our McKeesport alumni, Kula Manolakis-Goughnour (class of '72), is a heart transplant recipient. She received the heart from a donor in Atlanta, GA. She is now dedicating her participation in a team event in honor of her sister Ali Manolakis. Ali fought pain on a daily basis from the age of 13 from Systemic Lupus and end-stage Renal failure. Ali's battle ended on February 24, 2007.
Kula says, "I'm taking part in the 2008 U.S. Transplant Games (Team Pittsburgh) to raise money for National Kidney Foundation of the Alleghenies: please make a donation by visiting my Firstgiving page.
"You can donate online with a credit card. All donations are secure and sent directly to National Kidney Foundation of the Alleghenies by Firstgiving, who will email you a printable record of your donation.
"Please send my page on to anyone who might like to donate!"
When you click on the above link you will see a picture of Kula's sister Ali in the upper left corner.
Assistant Police Chief Alfred Tedesco said Wednesday that city officers, in cooperation with PennDOT and the national "Smooth Operator" program, will target so-called aggressive driving next week.
If you read the Almanac through an RSS feed, you might not have seen today's exciting announcement.
Click here to see what you missed.
And we're back to what passes for "normal" here at the Almanac.
The Mon Valley is Hillary Clinton country, according to national experts. Statewide, many polls give the New York senator and former First Lady a double-digit lead among likely voters in Pennsylvania's April 22 Democratic primary.
Such overwhelming odds matter not at all to Jaala Nesbit, 24, of McKeesport, who's helping run the Mon Valley for Obama office on Shaw Avenue. A grassroots effort, the office opened in February in an old mansion across the street from the Rainbow Temple Assembly of God (the former Temple B'nai Israel).
Nesbit and other organizers held what was billed as a "Barackaque" Saturday afternoon to thank volunteers and educate visitors about the Illinois senator and his positions on the issues.
If anything, the fact that Obama remains a longshot to win Pennsylvania is making his local volunteers more excited.
"I don't like working on a campaign where there is no challenger --- where the candidate is a shoo-in," says Nesbit, a substitute teacher at the city's Cornell Intermediate School and a graduate student in instructional leadership at Robert Morris University, Moon Township.
. . .
Though the air was cold, the sunny skies helped boost the spirits of about 100 Obama supporters (and several undecided voters) who gathered Saturday.
Their mood was also lifted by the important endorsements their candidate picked up last week, including those of U.S. Sen. Bob Casey Jr. and state Senator Sean Logan of Monroeville. (Last week, state Rep. Marc Gergely of White Oak told Tube City Almanac that he is also supporting Obama.)
City Councilman Paul Shelly Jr. and David Adelman, a state senator and Democratic whip from Decatur, Ga., spoke Saturday in support of Obama, along with longtime local civil-rights activist Major Mason III.
"We have the power to organize the community like it has never been organized before," Mason told the audience, adding that "all I want to see in April is that Allegheny County went for Barack Obama."
. . .
Nesbit became aware of Obama after his stirring speech to the 2004 Democratic National Convention and his election to the U.S. Senate in 2006. Earlier this year, she volunteered to work for Obama during the South Carolina primary.
"It was a great opportunity to network with political leaders, and we felt we had to bring that type of energy back here to McKeesport," Nesbit says.
One of her companions on the southern trip was Al Washington of McKeesport, a former city council candidate and community organizer who works in the telecommunications industry.
"I like his proposals on health care and especially on education," says Washington, another leader of Mon Valley for Obama. "He believes in early education and early intervention. All of the testing we're doing is fine, but first you've got to teach the students, and you've got to pay the teachers."
. . .
Obama's focus on education plays well with young people, who are a big part of Obama's campaign, nationally as well as locally.
Some of the Mon Valley volunteers aren't old enough to vote --- including Washington's nephew, Darnell Davis, 15, a student at Boyce Campus Middle College in Monroeville. Davis made an informative and impassioned speech on behalf of Obama to small groups of people watching videos supplied by the candidate's campaign.
Washington says he's bringing to the local Obama office lessons he learned while working on Bill Clinton's successful 1992 presidential campaign. One of them is that TV commercials and speeches are useful, but they're no substitute for personal interaction.
"People base their decisions upon people they know," he says. "The candidate's (ads) are going to help, but it's the next-door neighbor who's going to win them over."
. . .
Like other Bill Clinton supporters who are now backing Obama, Washington has been disappointed by some of the former president's statements on behalf of his wife's campaign. Washington writes Bill Clinton's comments off as "one of those things you have to say when you're trying to win an election."
Nesbit thinks Obama's background as a community organizer should speak to many working-class Pennsylvanians.
"He's not a rich man," she says. "He doesn't come from money. As someone who comes from McKeesport, I know we're hard-working people who have to earn our money. I feel like we need someone like that representing us in the White House."
Though much has been made of the historic nature of the Democratic race --- a female candidate versus an African-American candidate --- Nesbit hopes the campaigns transcend old lines.
"I don't think it's about race or gender any more," she says. "I think it's about economic status, and we need someone who's going to work for us."
. . .
Still, Nesbit and others aren't blind to the deep-rooted prejudices that still exist in the Mon-Yough area. One white Obama volunteer, knocking on doors in Versailles, was supposedly told by an elderly woman that she would never vote for the Illinois senator. "I don't want it to be the 'Black House,'" the lady reportedly said.
Combine that with Clinton's commanding leads in statewide polling, and Obama's enthusiastic volunteers face a serious uphill battle.
"We've still got a lot of work to do," Washington says.
. . .
Mon Valley for Obama is located at 539 Shaw Ave., downtown. Office hours are 5 to 8:30 p.m., Monday through Friday, and 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturdays. Call (412) 628-5462.
. . .
Editor's Note: In the interest of full disclosure, I made a donation to Mon Valley for Obama after these interviews were complete. But this website remains independent, and no special consideration was made by Obama supporters to me or this website in exchange for a contribution, and I will happily cover any McKeesport-based Hillary Clinton activities, if I'm available.
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