Scranton, PA is still struggled with a 10% unemployment, above the declining official national average – which does not account for the rising number of unemployed who have given up looking for work. VP candidate Paul Ryan took VP Joe Biden to task with this statistic in the October 11 debate in Kentucky, since Scranton is “Fightin’ Joe Biden’s” hometown. Sadly, Joe spent more time fighting for attention, interrupting Congressman Ryan, whose decent presentation of inescapable facts – including the failing domestic and foreign policies of the Obama administration – made Biden’s laughter and mockery hollow and harrowing for his crippled general election ticket.
A Republican resurgence seems to be on the rise in Pennsylvania already, with the two debates in the past month inclining PA voters to say “No Way!” to four more years of the current administration. However, not since 1988, when moderate “Read My Lips” Republican George Herber Walker Bush rode the Reagan wave into office, has a Republican presidential candidate taken the Keystone State. Trends from recent elections may spill into a red restoration in the otherwise reliably blue commonwealth.
Currently, Governor Mitt Romney is closing in for the win in Pennsylvania, with polling suggest that the former Governor now sits within the margin of error against President Obama. Rasmussen Reports has just released that US Senate GOP candidate Tom Smith is also with striking distance of taking down “pro-life” (in reality pro-choice by his voting record) Bob Casey. ABC-27 reports that Casey has a mere two-point lead. Not good for a Senator who was hoping to coast on another years of “Hope and Change” from Obama. A failed debate followed by the flailing of Vice President Joe Biden during the October 11 debate with VP candidate Paul Ryan have soured the enlightened voters in the mid-Atlantic and throughout the country on another Obama term.
Tom Smith is a private businessman who has outlined a plan to tame deficits and end job killing regulations in the Senate. In contrast to a Pennsylvanian who has helped build jobs and inject free enterprise, Bob Casey has spent the past six years running from the moderate interests of Pennsylvania to support the job-killing, overburdening regulations of President Obama, supporting ObamaCare, the failed 2009 stimulus, and pushing for increases in the debt ceiling without offering requisite cuts to keep the country solvent.
Mr. Smith should go to Washington instead of “Just-in-Case” Casey, who has not made the case to voters that he deserves another term. Besides, Casey came to office during a bad year for all Republicans, 2006, when “compassionate conservative” President George W. Bush had replaced – no, eviscerated — “limited government” with unlimited entitlements and spending, including No Child Left Behind, Medicare expansions, and even an unseemly intervention into the incapacitated Terry Schiavo of Florida (let’s not forget two under-planned and over-budgeted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan). Big Government then and now is neither compassionate nor conservative.
In contrast to the previous Republican administration, and in stark divergence from the current progressive administration of taxes, spending, and regulatory schemes, the Romney-Ryan ticket has offered in substance and style controversial yet sound proposals for taming the costs of entitlements, balancing the budget, yet maintaining the provisions for current seniors. Romney took down taxes and spending in Massachusetts, working with an 87% Democratic legislature. He offered business incentives, even taunting former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger with lower taxes.
The voters in Pennsylvania have signaled over the past six years that they favor conservative candidates. Bob Casey advertised himself as a pro-life Democrat and won the backing of Democratic Senatorial Committee Chairman Chuck Schumer, even though liberal party activists protested Casey’s ascendancy. Sadly, he has fallen from his stance, favoring the Big Government liberalism of Obama-Pelosi-Reid. From 2010 on, the limited government brand is returning to the Keystone State, the state which may hold the key to a Romney-Ryan win, economic recovery in the United States, and a final stone to sink the Obama administration, drowning in red ink and caught red-handed with broken promises.