If John McCain truly expects to win the White House, he’ll need all the help he can get – especially in Northeastern Pennsylvania.
If he succeeds here, and he might, he’ll carry Pennsylvania. If he wins the Commonwealth, he’ll become the next president. I believe the election is as simple as that.
What’s not so simple is the McCain campaign’s appalling lack of sophistication about winning the hearts and minds of the coal fields. McCain knows enough about the region’s importance to have mentioned coal during his town hall meeting yesterday in Wilkes-Barre.
But he still needs an education about who we really are.
I sat in the Kirby Center listening closely to his message and was impressed by his personality and authentic connection to the people who came out to see him on a rainy midweek morning in July.
Still, only about 800 people showed up. That meant 1,000 empty seats.
The lack of supporters means that McCain’s staff didn’t properly handle the challenge of filling the seats. I agree that many working-class people couldn’t attend simply because they were working. But others, including many unemployed, working-class people who could have shown up to lend a voice to a campaign that’s counting on them to win, stayed away.
I tried my best for weeks to get the word out on “Corbett” about the meeting.
But McCain workers failed to mention that the doors would open at 8 a.m. to everyone and anyone. Instead, they played a typical Republican game of RSVP that threw a stuffy obstacle at people who either don’t have online service or didn’t call congressional candidate Chris Hackett’s office to announce their intentions to attend.
As a result, the showing was sparse.
Given the same time to prepare, I believe I could have packed the house with enough left over in the street to make a good impression on news crews dispatched to cover the event. Local colleges could have been scoured for supporters. Church-goers and veterans’ service groups should have been recruited. Senior citizens’ centers, including the one just a few doors from the Kirby entrance, could have produced dozens of cheering old-timers who support the traditional values that McCain espouses.
McCain’s campaign staff blew countless opportunities to fill the room.
The room they did fill, however, was up the street from the Kirby at the private Westmoreland Club. This home to generations of robber barons was the scene of a $250-a-plate fundraiser where the self-professed cultural, business and societal elite take tea and sympathy for the rise and fall of the free market.
A stuffy club by any standard, attendees there bowed to the altar of Republicanism and fawned over McCain. Still, the scene snapped with stories about the upper crust and their allegiance to their party.
But fewer stories and commentary about the event appeared in local media outlets than could have appeared because McCain’s staff banned the local press from the hoity-toity club. To make matters worse, McCain’s staff allowed a handful of national print journalists to pass through the splendid front door.
A shaved-head Secret Service agent chased me off the porch and growled, “No press allowed.”
Former North Vietnam POW McCain’s captors would have been proud of America’s descent into controlled press events. In decades of covering politics – national and local – I’ve never experienced armed government agents ordering me away from a campaign speech by a sitting U.S. senator who wants to be president.
“Can I come inside?” I asked fundraiser chairman Dan Mueser as he stood on the porch and I stood in the rain.
“If you buy a ticket,” cackled a grinning woman by his side.
Although I realize that some people believe that the First Amendment is for sale, free speech cannot be sold to the highest bidder.
Somebody better tell McCain that he needs us more than we need him. Somebody better tell him that the very people whom Barack Obama insulted for their bitterness and their clinging to church and guns are the very people McCain needs to win.
If McCain truly is as genuine as he appeared at the town hall meeting, he needs to spend less time with the elite and more time with the masses.
We coal crackers know a phony when we see one and have already pegged Obama as a poseur and a fraud.
McCain is quick to say that he’ll look us in the eye and give us some of that straight talk he’s known for dishing out. So here’s some straight talk back at you, Senator. Consider it a campaign contribution.
Sue Henry
