Opinion: Say it ain’t so, John

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I have no brief for Rep. John Murtha, the arrogant and embarrassing Pennsylvania congressman and Abscam survivor. But Murtha is being unfairly pilloried for telling my former employer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: ‘There is no question that Western Pennsylvania is a racist area.’ Like my parents and grandparents before me, I am a native Western Pennsylvanian with a family fondness for my native region, though I’m not much of a Steelers fan. But I understand what Murtha was getting at in his politically incorrect outburst.

I began (and ended) my involvement in politics in Pittsburgh in 1968 when, as a high school student, I enlisted in the insurgent army of anti-war candidate ‘Clean Gene’ McCarthy. But that didn’t stop me or my political-junkie pals from scoping out other candidates in both the primary and general elections. One of our stops on the campaign trail was an appearance by George Wallace, which provided us with the frisson of attending what we considered the equivalent of a Nazi rally.

Wallace didn’t disappoint, turning the crowd against protesters in the balconies (‘Get a haircut!’) and dusting off familiar applause lines about pointy-headed bureaucrats. I seem to recall Wallace telling the audience that ‘when the looting starts, the shooting starts,’ but that might have been at another rally.

What I am sure about is that labor unions in what then was still the Steel City were terrified that enough of their members would defect to Wallace that Richard Nixon would take Pennsylvania’s electoral votes away from Hubert Humphrey. The unions mobilized an effort to point out how anti-union Wallace had been as governor of Alabama, but then, as now, cultural issues sometimes trumped economics. Granted, by 1968 Wallace wasn’t running as a segregationist but as a populist, but even as a 17-year-old I knew that a lot of Wallace’s appeal to my fellow Pittsburghers was his racist record.

As aging people are always saying to the younger generation: You had to be there. And ‘there’ in this case includes our living room, where I remember an uncle-by-marriage from Alabama arguing to my parents that their Pittsburgh friends were just as racist as whites in Alabama; the difference was that there was more hypocrisy in the North

But that was 40 years ago, right? Right, and Barack Obama seems to be heading to solid victory in Pennsylvania. Yet a lot of the 35-year-old Western Pennsylvania white guys who warmed to Wallace in 1968 are now 75-year-old retirees, and it was to them that Murtha was referring. His full quote: ‘There’s no question Western Pennsylvania is a racist area. The older population is more hesitant.’

I wouldn’t defend Murtha’s subsequent reference to Western Pennsylvanians as ‘rednecks.’ (For one thing, Pittsburghers also have a prejudice against the South, which may have cut into Wallace’s vote.) But Murtha’s original comment vindicated Michael Kinsley’s observation that a ‘gaffe’ is Washington-speak for telling the truth. Murtha would have been smarter to stop with ‘Go Steelers.’

AP Photo/Charles Dharapak, File