Basking in our new glory
PITTSBURGH
EAT your heart out, New Hampshire.
You got five days in the sun between Iowa's caucuses and your winter primary. Here in Southwestern Pennsylvania we hardly ever get five days in a row of sun anytime of the year - the specialty in these parts is "partly cloudy" - but Pennsylvania is getting a full five weeks of attention between the showdowns in Ohio and Texas and next Tuesday's primary here.
Think of this as New Hampshire Primary II. Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are on television. They're on the streets. They're at the universities. They're at high-tech plants and in union halls. For gosh sakes, just the other day one of them was at a service station where I sometimes gas up.
This happens to people on the Connecticut River and the Merrimack, not the Allegheny and the Monongahela. But the difference between what we're experiencing and what goes on every four years in New Hampshire is that this has never happened here before - a political contest conducted between Lake Erie and the Atlantic seacoast that actually counts.
Pennsylvania always holds its primary in April. It never matters for much. The candidates come here and go through the motions, but mostly they ignore the place. Until now. In recent days both candidates have been 1.8 miles from my house. The guy who runs the Obama campaign for this part of the state lives two houses away. This is the sort of thing people say in Manchester, Concord, Nashua, Durham, and Hanover. Now we do, too.
Now that Pennsylvania isn't a coda to someone else's sonata, this state has changed the subject.
In Iowa they force the candidates to talk about ethanol, and the result is a surge in corn-based fuels that may be efficient only if your main motivation is to raise the price of corn. In New Hampshire they force the candidates to talk about taxes, which is good if you think that you can't have a strong economy if you actually collect taxes.
Pennsylvania is worried about rusty manufacturing industries, to be sure, but that was your father's Pennsylvania. Today the state's preoccupation, along with trade, is high-tech and hospitals, and if you examine it carefully you might conclude that the medical industry is the new steel industry here. We talk about the Pittsburgh Steelers, but the real growth here is in nursing. But the big worry here: finding jobs for all those smart young people who come to Pitt and Carnegie-Mellon and can't stay in town even if they want to, which they often do. So it's no surprise that Clinton and Obama have been talking about manufacturing, emphasizing their health plans while continuing the drumbeat of jobs, jobs, jobs.
No one here worries about the consequences of uncontrolled growth. We're shrinking. Few people worry about immigrants taking over. We have almost no immigrants. Those two factors are game-changers, politically. They change the conversation.
But this primary already has changed Pennsylvania. Voter registration in a state that isn't one of America's growth engines increased by an astonishing 8 percent since November, a measure of the great interest prompted by this primary. The political complexion of the state has changed as well; two onetime anchors of Republican strength around Philadelphia, Bucks and Montgomery counties, now are Democratic in registration. The earth has shifted - and the implications for the November election are enormous. Four years ago, Pennsylvania was regarded as a swing state. Today it has to be regarded, in the argot of political professionals, as leaning Democratic.
But the truth is that, as Henry Higgins, who is not registered to vote in Pennsylvania, would put it, we've grown accustomed to their faces - the candidates', that is. So the other day, when, by some fluke of scheduling, not one presidential candidate was in town, people here were upset. Put off. Offended. Dissed. Betrayed, even. How dare they?
It struck me then that Pennsylvania - so full of sandstone, limestone, anthracite, oil, and gas - had truly become the Granite State. We like being the center of the political universe. We could get used to this. Our spiritual cousins in New Hampshire did.
David M. Shribman, former Washington bureau chief of the Globe, is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. 