Tim Burns was all smiles Wednesday night in Johnstown, and not
just because the Republican congressional candidate was enjoying
chili dogs at his favorite hometown diner, Coney Island Lunch. An
hour earlier, in a public forum at a local high school, his
Democratic opponent seemed to admit what the Burns campaign had
been saying for days, that attack ads slamming the GOP
candidate’s tax positions were a lie.
“So I want to take this opportunity, that if I’ve misstated
Mr. Burns’s position on something, that I apologize. I didn’t
mean to do that,” said Mark Critz, a former aide to the late Rep.
Jack Murtha, whose February death vacated the seat to be filled
by a May 18 special election. “It was my understanding that
[Burns] did support the Fair Tax, and if that’s wrong, I
apologize.”
The inclusion of two “ifs” meant this wasn’t exactly an
apology, nor did it appear specifically to include the TV ads
funded by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee,
warning that “Burns supports putting a 23-percent sales tax on
just about everything we buy.”
FactCheck.org called that a “quite misleading” attack, since
it doesn’t mention (a) that the so-called “Fair Tax” would
abolish the IRS and repeal all federal income taxes, or (b) that
Burns merely has said he would “ultimately” prefer such a policy
while acknowledging “practical” problems with going “from where
we are today to the Fair Tax.”
Yet Critz’s conditional apology was sufficient for a
National Republican Congressional Committee spokesman to issue a
press release: “Now that Critz has apologized for lying, he
should promise to stop any other smear tactics by either his
campaign or Speaker Pelosi’s Democratic Congressional Campaign
Committee.”
Such are the daily clashes that define the intense battle
for Pennsylvania’s 12th District — now less than three
weeks from an election that could put a Republican in the seat
held for more than a three decades by Murtha, the 19-term
Democrat who rose to become chairman of the powerful House
Appropriations Committee before his Feb. 8 death. The potential
parallels to Sen.
Scott Brown’s January special-election upset — replacing the
departed Ted Kennedy in heavily Democratic Massachusetts — are
obvious enough. But to quote another famous Massachusetts
Democrat, all politics is local and Murtha was the master of a
peculiarly local brand of Pennsylvania politics.
Murtha’s ghost looms large over the 12th District, which
sprawls in a bizarre
gerrymander over a predominantly rural area stretching from
the southwestern corner of the state up to Ebensburg in Cambria
County, a three-hour drive away. The crab-like geographical
outlines of the erstwhile dominion of Murthadom, however, are no
more bizarre than the political landscape in a district where
Democrats hold a 2-to-1 registration advantage — John Kerry
carried the 12th in 2004 — but John McCain beat Barack Obama in
2008.
This is the part of Pennsylvania whose small-town residents
Obama infamously
described at a San Francisco fundraising event two years ago:
“It’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling
to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like
them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way
to explain their frustrations.”
Democrats seem to be banking on the “anti-trade sentiment,”
a genuine phenomenon in a Rust Belt region where the unemployment
rate — as high as 13.5 percent in Fayette County, and well above
10 percent in other 12th District counties — would be even
higher, were it not for the fact that for decades, ambitious
young people have been moving away in search of better prospects
elsewhere. The DCCC attack ads portray Burns’s signature on a
no-tax-increase pledge as favoring “tax breaks for
companies that ship jobs overseas.”
That kind of accusation is transparently intended to appeal
to surviving adherents of the arcane ideology of Murthanomics,
wherein the keys to prosperity are protectionism and pork-barrel
federal spending. Republicans may laugh at Murthanomics as a
misguided nostalgia for the days of Smoot-Hawley, but at least a
third of the audience at Wednesday night’s forum at Westmont
Hilltop High applauded when Critz pledged to bring home the
budget earmarks just like his late boss used to do. And even
Burns — a successful entrepreneur who surely knows better —
apparently felt compelled to make semi-protectionist “fair trade”
noises about China “dumping” steel into the U.S. market.
Many Republicans learned to loathe Murtha when, in 2006, he
accused Marines of killing Iraqi civilians “in
cold blood,” but the departed Democrat remains an object of
bipartisan reverence in the 12th District. “My parents and
grandparents are all Republicans, but they wouldn’t hear a word
against Murtha,” one local GOP operative explained.
Fortunately for Burns, he is not campaigning against
Murtha. The Republican is not really campaigning against Critz,
either, except to portray him as the tool of a Washington
political apparatus viewed with suspicion by bitter gun-clinging
Pennsylvanians.
“Do you think Nancy Pelosi would be working so hard to get
Mark Critz elected… if she thought for one minute that he was
going to vote against her agenda?” Burns said in his final
remarks Wednesday, which ended with a cheerful invitation. “I
can’t come to Johnstown without stopping at Coney Island for a
hot dog, so that’s where we’re going after the debate — maybe
I’ll see some of you there.”
An hour later at the downtown diner, Burns and his staff
seemed confident that they’ve seized the momentum in this
neck-and-neck race. Top political oddsmaker Charlie Cook
switched the 12th District from “toss-up” to “leans
Republican,” and Sarah Palin’s Facebook endorsement
on Monday unleashed a torrent of online donations that totaled
more than $80,000 Wednesday afternoon and passed the $100,000
mark by mid-day Thursday, campaign sources said.
Some of that money got injected into the recession-plagued
local economy as the Republican campaigners placed their orders
at the stainless-steel counter. During coming weeks, much more
out-of-town cash is likely to end up in the register at Coney Island Lunch
— “Best Hot Dogs and Hamburgers in U.S.A. Since 1916,” as the
sign outside proclaims. The national media will soon be pouring
into the 12th District to cover the big election, and they won’t
want to miss the diner’s specialty sandwich, a chili cheeseburger
topped with a fried egg, known as the Sundowner.
“Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it,” Tim Burns said, an
argument he may want to use with area voters who haven’t elected
a Republican to the House of Representatives since the
42-year-old candidate was in kindergarten.
