JoePa Primary

I remember from the last Presidential election that the view gets pretty hazy about now. There is just way too much information to sort through. Even if it was all true, the average person cannot dedicate the time necessary to understand it all. The opinions fly and some have merit but most don't because most of the political pundits are anything but unbiased. More like it, call it a personal mission to be as influential as possible for egotistical reasons along with getting their prices up. Of course many strongly believe that their direction for the country is altruistic. They think their work to convince the little people of the need to become complicit in their plan is noble. But lets face it, at this point, as far as the Democratic nominee goes the rest of the population including yours truly have pretty much made up our minds and barring some extraordinary news are pretty darn sure who we will be voting for.
I need to go back to Pennsylvania because it was such a reminder of what Senator Obama is up against. In one telling move the Obama campaign refused to dole out street money in Pennsylvania. That's the precinct level money passed around to motivate workers. It should be illegal but it is part of the political tradition in Pennsylvania so it has become untouchable. This of course only bolsters my opinion of Senator Obama and I'm not suggesting he should have complied but in the politics of Philadelphia this was a blunder. This is an example of the dilemma that faces this campaign.
I know a bit about Pennsylvania because I worked with many people from there. They were new and different characters in my life. There was one real peach of a guy who grew up on Duck Shit Alley in Pringle Hill which is part of Wilkes-Barre. He was born without much but I never heard him say a bad thing about anybody and he had a heart of gold.
The Crown Royal drinking Hillary Clinton may or may not be surprised to know that today there are clubs in Wilkes Barre/Scranton that women can drink in but can't be members of. That's not to say that the women who attend these clubs want to be members, according to a friend from Wilkes-Barre. She said she reminds the members regularly, "if a woman ran this stupid club maybe it wouldn't be so deep in the hole." She told me that there are members who keep paying dues years after they move away just to have the card. "Can you imagine that, of course it's only five dollar a year," she said.
I went to a Ball Game in San Diego once with another guy from Wilkes-Barre who was so drunk he fell over a railing and down ten feet to a lower deck and laughed that he held onto his cup.
I was introduced to the shots and beer thing in Pennsylvania in the dead of winter as what seemed a practical matter. I've spent time in Pennsylvania basements talking about great floods that reached levels twenty feet above where I was standing and have been to small town hockey games and listened to stories about town populations that in 1935 were triple what they are today. I've heard the stories of the once thriving steel mills and the struggle to survive cold winters in poorly insulated houses and scrounging for coal.To this day good jobs are hard to come by and they often go to the people who "know somebody" or thought to anyway. The fact is that the people I've known from Pennsylvania are a little tougher and not so bothered by the same things as me. I am glad to have know them for this alone.
Things change slowly there and I think that it is fair to say that life has been a little harder in much of the state than in much of the rest of the country. It's a big state east to west especially and I've never been to Philadelphia but I know that where I have been change is viewed skeptically because it's track record is so bad. The odds that change will be for the better are viewed as even at best.
The more I think about Pennsylvania the more I think it is remarkable that Senator Obama was able to get the votes he did there.