Category: Hardscrabble Mon Valley Watch || By

With the Pennsylvania primary less than a week away, it's about time to check on the nation's most inexhaustible natural resource --- the hot air generated by political pundits --- to see what Rust Belt cliches they've managed to unearth.

Frankly, there haven't been as many stories for Hardscrabble Mon Valley Watch as there were four years ago. Chalk that up to an uncontested Democratic primary --- there's no reason to come to the Mon Valley (yet), but I would expect the Hardscrabble Mon Valley Watch to heat up in the fall, when the nation's political reporters descend on the coffee shops and taverns to soak up "local color" and figure out if (in the words of perpetual gaffe machine Ed Rendell) "white working-class voters" will vote for Obama.

. . .

Rick Santorum may be out of the Republican presidential race, but as long as Google searches are around, Santorum will continue to provide pungency to the nation's politics. From the Politicker blog of the New York Observer:

Western Pennsylvania, land of coal, sharp-rising hills, shuttered mines. It is a part of the country that Rick Santorum isn't so much from; it is a part of the country that Rick Santorum is ...

In speeches, Mr. Santorum rhapsodizes about the area, calling it the perfect place to grow up, telling voters, "I don't have Wall Street experience, but I have experience growing up in a small town in western Pennsylvania, growing up in a steel town."

He learned everything, he says, "growing up with folks who worked in the mills and the mines in western Pennsylvania."

Yes, indeed, because Richard John Santorum is the son of clinical psychologist Aldo Santorum, who used to traipse, rusty lunchbucket in hand, down to the psychology mines every day, and Catherine Santorum, a nursing supervisor, who toiled hard in the nursing mills.

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In The Atlantic, Molly Ball wonders whether Santorum might make a good running mate for the presumptive presidential nominee and concludes that he wouldn't, because "Romney's slickly professional veneer" would contrast too sharply with "Santorum's hardscrabble air and tone of resentment." Molly doesn't mention any Rust Belt cliches, but hey, she has said the secret word! (Tube City hard hat tip: Neil B.)

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Meanwhile, Alex Leary of the Tampa Bay Times (via Politico.com) writes a "mood of the electorate" piece and drops in on Somerset County, where he touches base with a Sears hardware salesman and a shopper at Save-a-Lot, then makes sure to point how "western Pennsylvania ... has lost well-paying jobs in steel mills and manufacturing plants."

It sure has, and the way Sears is going, it will soon lose well-paying jobs selling ratchets and radial-arm saws.

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Turning to local races, Louis Jacobson, writing for Philadelphia-based PoliticsPA, visits the Critz-Altmire Democratic primary for the new 12th Congressional District, located in "this blue-collar corner of western Pennsylvania." After making sure to mention the "soon-to-be-shuttered zinc smelter" in Center Township, Beaver County, the article notes that

After a decades-long decline, the region is experiencing slow economic recovery, some of it due to Marcellus shale gas drilling, some of it from the absence of a real estate crash, and some of it from a re-emergent manufacturing sector.

Yeah? Tell it to the guys in the hardware department at Sears, Louie.

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Finally, this isn't a hardscrabble sighting, but I do love this story in Politico about Michelle Obama, who "touted her blue-collar background and her husband's record in office at a pair of Pittsburgh fundraisers Tuesday" before heading to "a $250-per-person fundraiser at the Rivers Club Downtown" and "the Fox Chapel home of Cindy Shapira for a $10,000 per couple dinner."

Nothing says "blue-collar background" like $10,000 per couple dinners in Fox Chapel. Did they serve beef-a-roni or Kraft macaroni and cheese?

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