Race, Western Pennsylvania and Barack Obama

I know Western PA very well. I was born and raised in Beaver County, an alumnus of Blackhawk High School, Geneva College, the University of Pittsburgh, and a was former district staff person for two Members of the House of Representatives, Ron Klink and Mike Doyle (D-Pittsburgh), I have spent nearly 2/3 of my forty-two years in that part of the country.

I read with interest Jack Murtha’s comment about Barack Obama’s chances in western Pennsylvania. Congressman Murtha has been in office for decades and knows a great deal about local politics. Unfortunately, Murtha has the same weakness as Senator Joe Biden – the filter between his brain and his mouth sometimes has a defect and sometimes does not operate properly.

Here is what I mean by the above statement. Murtha is correct that Obama is going to have trouble winning parts of Pennsylvania, but it is not primarily because of race, it is because of a comfort level that has not been built up over the last five months. Simply put, Barack Obama is very different from anyone these people have ever met in their lives. There are not a lot of people in Pittsburgh who are part black, part white and part Muslim – in fact, there is probably only one and that is Senator Obama.

The point of the article is that the people of western Pennsylvania will vote for Barack Obama when he and his campaign staff connects with them…just like any other candidate for office. Western Pennsylvania is very neighborhood and small-town orientated. Even today, I know people who have lived in Dormont (south of the Liberty Tubes) and have rarely left their suburb of Pittsburgh for years. Cultivating long-term relationships and developing a comfort level with neighbors and political leaders is a western Pennsylvania tradition. Senator Clinton did not win Pittsburgh overwhelmingly because she was a better candidate, or a better campaigner, she won because of the history and the relationships she and Bill Clinton has developed since 1992.

But times are a changing…

Waneta Acker, an 88 year old Democratic Party worker from Wheeling, West Virginia is the focus of the story. Here she describes the initial misgivings and the building cooperation between white West Virginia Democrats and African-American Obama volunteers.

And the same local white Democrats kept coming to the headquarters, despite the life-sized cutouts of Obama. “I was surprised so many of them [white Democrats] have changed,” says Acker. “Where they didn’t accept the fact that he was colored, now they’ve changed their attitude. Really.”

“It’s a different era,” she muses. “I accept it.”

The issue for Barack Obama is establishing a level of comfort with the people of western Pennsylvania. Some of that can be helped by Obama by being in western PA. Some of that comfort level can be built by teamwork of local party apparatus and Obama volunteers. Time, energy, and cooperation are the keys to establishing any winning organization.

As Ms. Acker and my own experience has proven, the people of western Pennsylvania (and the Tri-State area) will support Barack Obama, but first, they have be comfortable with him. Race does matter but relationships mean more.