Western Pennsylvania Enjoys Its Surprise Role in the Presidential Race by Shannon Reed
 |
| Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Some rights reserved. |
April 14, 2008
Here are some of the things that one doesn’t find in Johnstown, Pennsylvania: a GAP (it closed earlier this year). A Barnes and Noble. More than one Starbucks (the first opened last Christmas). A wine store. A rate of unemployment below 10 percent. But for the last six weeks, what you can often find in Johnstown, among the perogies and abandoned steel mills, are Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama or one of their surrogates, as they campaign to win Pennsylvania’s Democratic delegates.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Early this year, when Democratic Johnstowners thought about the April 22 primary at all, it was to ponder whether it would be worth squeezing in a trip to the V.F.W., just to pull the lever for or against someone whose nomination was already assured. But we’ve been treated to (some might say tortured by) the most exciting Democratic nomination race in my memory, and, far from being the little city that no one cared about, Johnstown, and the rest of Pennsylvania, has become the object of much attention.
There have been many calls for Clinton to drop out of the race, which is a bit sexist; would pundits and politicians encourage a man who’s in second place in such a close race to fold? It’s great for all voters that the race is continuing, but it’s even more fantastic for my hometown.
I grew up in Johnstown, and, although I now live in Brooklyn, New York, I visit my parents there regularly. It is an area of great natural beauty; bleak depression (the town has been decimated by three major floods in the last 150 years); stoic acceptance (during the first, most famous flood, in 1889, three babies were born to mothers who named them “Flood,” “Flood,” and “Moses”); fierce patriotism of all stripes along with numerous military support and engineering companies brought to the region by Representative John Murtha; multiple generations of families living in close proximity; and a sort of relentless optimism that never quite believes anyone’s promises, but knows something better is around the corner. We are the people who usually do not get attention from, or a voice to speak to, the presidential candidates.
That has changed. Some days, it seems like no one in Johnstown can go to read magazines in the library without a microphone appearing in front of their face. It’s fun to watch, because Johnstowners are both full of opinions and not very media-savvy, plunging eagerly into topics much of the rest of the country has been too careful to approach. The media in particular has enjoyed questioning whether a woman or an African-American can win the state. Baldly put: “Are Pennsylvanians more racist or more sexist?”
Earlier this year, I wrote an editorial about voting in New York’s primary for The Johnstown Tribune-Democrat, the substance of which could be boiled down to: “Hey, I liked voting for a woman!” The outcry astounded me. Readers of the paper posted a series of comments slamming me online. I was called a “nitwit,” “a good reason to repeal the 19th Amendment” and a bad teacher. A few more thoughtful responses indicated that they were willing to vote for a woman, “just not this woman.”
I couldn’t help but think about this when reading an article in the New York Times, with a dateline of Latrobe, Pennsylvania, a town not far from Johnstown. Writer Paul Vitello quoted an ex-steel worker: “When I worked in the steel mill, there were always a few guys who were black. But you wouldn’t even know they were black, we got along so well.”
Depending on your mindset, you can see the comment as a step forward—the man went on to say he’d vote for Obama—or no kind of step at all, just the worst kind of multi-culturalism, making all people of color welcome if they’ll just be, you know, more white. It seemed to me that there was a correlation here: We’ll vote for a woman, maybe just not this woman. We won’t normally vote for an African-American, but we’ll maybe vote for this one.
This response, while it might be difficult to accept, is far more honest than pretending that race is not an issue and that a person’s gender doesn’t affect how they’re perceived. This kind of wrestling with inner prejudice has been happening all over the country, but it’s in Pennsylvania that people are willing to say it—and conversations I’ve had show that many go on to explore their own reactions. How thankful we can be that the campaign has gone on so long that people can think through these questions.
I do believe that, in the end, most Pennsylvania Democrats are excited by their unexpected chance to make history on the 22nd, and push either a woman or an African-American man closer to becoming our nation’s president.
I don’t know which way the voting will go. It’s no secret that I’m, as a friend recently said, “still a Hillary girl,” but I applaud both candidates for the times they’ve sought to be straight for and about folks in my state—even when remarkably tone-deaf, as in Obama’s revealing comments that Pennsylvanians’ loss of jobs causes them to “cling to guns, or religion, or antipathy towards people who aren’t like them.” I applaud folks in my state for being honest right back.
We live in a democracy, where everyone is supposed to get a say. This year, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, got to speak up and be heard, and we have Hillary Clinton’s tenacity to thank.
###
|
Discuss This