Pittsburgh is pivoting. It could be a lesson for Democrats
PITTSBURGH — Newly elected Pittsburgh Mayor Corey O’Connor strolled into Big Jim’s — a dimly lit shot-and-a-beer bar that doubles as a neighborhood restaurant in an area called “the Run,” an Appalachian term for localities adjacent to a stream, places often driven over but not usually seen by the general public. This one, in the lower Greenfield neighborhood where O’Connor’s father — the late Pittsburgh Mayor Bob O’Connor — lived, is no different. Commuters leaving work in the city zoom home overhead on Interstate 376. Large portions, good food and no-nonsense service have helped Big Jim’s stay popular. It opened in 1977, the year steel mills began their epic collapse. Today, Pittsburgh faces a different kind of economic collapse. The last two Democratic mayors, Bill Peduto and Ed Gainey, neglected the basics and invested in projects with more flash such as Peduto’s pursuit of Amazon’s HQ2 and Gainey’s appearances at political rallies on national issues mayors have no jurisdiction over.
While the city appeared to flourish, the rot ate deep — exemplified most dramatically when on Jan. 28, 2022, the Fern Hollow Bridge collapsed, taking multiple vehicles and a bus with it. It was a miracle no one was killed. Lapses in bridge maintenance and oversight by the city were partly to blame.
ANYTHING SELENA DOES IS TOP NOTCH . YEARS AGO SHE WAS KICKED OUT OF SCHOOL BECAUSE SHE REFUSED TO GO TO RECESS . SHE SIMPLY TOLD THEM :
" I D O N ' T P L A Y "
First off I am a life long Republican from the upper Ohio Valley, but live closer to the headwaters of the Potomac now.
Growing up my father was a Republican Committeeman in West Virginia while my “uncle” (the husband of my mother’s cousin, daughter of the cousins who had taken my orphaned mother in) but definitely uncle to me was a Democrat Committeeman in adjacent Pennsylvania. My father had a bad ear condition that prevented him from enlisting for WW II, but he and my uncle worked at a munitions plant in Steubenville that manufactured Bofor guns and commuted to work together with a very Irish Democrat neighbor. They were good friends, who sat together at family gatherings and discussed the world and their political differences in tones of mutual respect. This was Party politics of the 1950s and 60s. Times have, of course, have changed but having paid attention to John Fetterman, the only rational Democrat in my opinion and I include opportunist Joe Manchin among those less than rational!
I write this, rather long account to illustrate the point that if the Democrat Party is to redeem itself from Progressivism it will take a working movement from the industrial heartland of America where ever it is in the early to mid 2000s.