I’ve been spending a lot of time in my hometown of Philadelphia this year. The city has long since been lost to Democrats, and most of the elected Republicans there have been in office so long, it’s name and not philosophy that keep them there.
But it reminded me a lot about my life and about my feelings about the race between Jeff McWaters and Rosemary Wilson, and the scurrilous and vicious attacks made to me and about me for exercising my first amendment rights of speech and expression.
I grew up when Pennsylvania was Republican, New Jersey was Republican. I was a kid when a Democratic mayor of Philadelphia campaigned for Nixon for President.
It was and still is a blue collar town. If you worked hard, looked out for your neighbors, figured out a way to make ends meet, you were doing ok.
I grew up around politics, though not from my parents. Grandparents were political activists to a tee. As a kid, my job was usually to give campaign workers soft pretzels.
I never handed a pretzel to a rich Republican campaign worker.
In 1992, Pat Buchanan made a lot of waves attacking his own party, and he eventually left it. He was wrong on a lot of levels, but one message he carried rang true to me. The Republican Party was losing the blue-collar Reagan block of voters and becoming the party of the wealthy. It’s an attack that has persisted throughout my life.
I have nothing against Jeff McWaters, whom I’ve never so much as seen at a Republican event until this year (I don’t go to high-dollar shindigs, so I don’t know if he was at those). I’ve seen Rosemary at hundreds.
I’ve gotten mailpieces of endorsements of McWaters that read like someone Xeroxed the list of donations he and his firm have made over the years. Word is he’s spending over the million dollar mark to win a canvas that a few thousand people will vote in.
Some Republicans worked their butts off this year trying to raise $500 to pay for some signs and something to hand out at the polls on Election Day.
I have no problem with successful people. I think we tax entrepreneurs too much, and I think our tax code and regulations discourage more people from trying. But, in my blue collar heart, I wonder if that isn’t the point of such taxes and regulations.
Whoever wins this Senate seat will likely have it as long as they want it. Sen. Ken Stolle won it in 1991, and never had so much as another name on the ballot with him until he left it.
It’s Mitt Romney versus Sarah Palin in some respects. Maybe there is something in my Philly roots that makes me a little more Palin and a little less Romney. Ronald Reagan went to Eureka College, where he played football and pledged a frat. He went on to be, I believe, the greatest President we’ve ever known.
So, given the choice of a candidate who touts his huge checkbook that has helped Republicans win (And thank you Jeff, more than you know I appreciate that) and a real estate agent who ran for the routinely thankless job of School Board because she cared, then to City Council, and now maybe to the State Senate, perhaps it’s that part of my upbringing, and that part of looking out for the not-so-wealthy conservatives who rarely have a voice in the endorsement-laden campaigns and high-dollar fundraising galas, that part of me that says if we ignore the Sarah Palins in our Party, there won’t be enough voters for the Mitt Romneys to win, that makes me lean a little toward Rosemary Wilson in this race.
This message ain’t been paid for by nobody.
