Pa. race may be a tale of two cities

PITTSBURGH - Steelers or Eagles? Pro-football loyalties are not the only differences that divide Pennsylvania's two big cities.

In Democratic politics, the contrasts between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia are so sharp that they might decide the outcome of the state's presidential primary April 22.

The Pittsburgh area, according to polls and politicos-in-the-know, is Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton territory.

The Philadelphia area is the Keystone State's biggest stronghold for Sen. Barack Obama.

The differences that 300 miles can make stem mainly from one thing: demographics.

"Look at who Barack Obama appeals to," said John Brabender, a Republican consultant from Pittsburgh who is tracking the Democratic race from the sidelines.

Brabender ticked off the list: younger voters, better-educated voters, more-affluent voters - and black voters.

Percentage-wise, Philadelphia has more of all of these.

Neither of the state's big metropolitan areas - Philadelphia ranks fourth nationally; Pittsburgh, 21st - is anywhere near the most youthful, the trendiest, or the fastest-growing.

But compared at least with Pittsburgh, the Philadelphia area, including its four suburban counties, is young and booming.

"You have a big pool of younger voters in Philadelphia," said Brabender, who is involved in two Philadelphia-area campaigns for Congress and has had experience in local Democratic politics - as a TV ad man for mayoral candidate Marty Weinberg in 1999.

Then there are the ethnic differences.

Dan Onorato, the elected executive of Pittsburgh's Allegheny County, said it was telling that Pittsburgh had a low population of immigrants - just 5.6 percent - compared with 9 percent in Philadelphia.

Pittsburgh's Asian population, according to a U.S. Census estimate, is just 2.7 percent. Philadelphia's is not all that large - 4.5 percent - but it is nearly twice that of its sister city to the west.

The Latino population is 1.3 percent in Pittsburgh, 8.5 percent in Philadelphia.

"Pittsburgh has the same population makeup that it had 30 years ago," Onorato said. "We're still European and African American here."

But Pittsburgh's African American population is also much lower than Philadelphia's - 27 percent, compared with 43 percent.

The greater rootedness of the Pittsburgh area has led to a greater conservatism, even among Democrats.

"Many of the Democrats are probably more Republican than the Republicans in the east," Brabender said.

It was there, in 1980, that the term Reagan Democrat was applied. It referred to mill workers in the hills and hollows around Pittsburgh - many of them Catholics with roots in Eastern Europe - who believed in the liberal economics of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal but were with Ronald Reagan on social issues such as guns and abortion.

"A bunch of pointy-headed liberals - that's how Philadelphia looks to the rest of the state," said Bill Green, a Pittsburgh-area consultant who had worked with both major parties.

"They see Philadelphia as an elitist, white-collar kind of place," Green said.

Philadelphia, in the 1990s, adopted an ordinance that banned assault weapons - a law that was later struck down by the pro-gun state legislature.

Pittsburgh, the analysts said, would never have taken such a stance. "We have the most hunters of any county in the state," Onorato said.

"Some people say Pittsburgh is more Midwest whereas Philadelphia is more East Coast," he said. ". . . The experiences of the two areas are different."

Philadelphians struggling with the loss of jobs in a souring economy might not feel especially lucky compared with anyone anywhere.

But Pittsburgh, which lost the bulk of its steel industry a generation ago, still depends more heavily than Philadelphia on manufacturing.

At a Clinton campaign appearance last week on Pittsburgh's South Side, two of the 400 people in her audience were burly officials from the Alliance for American Manufacturing, a coalition of labor unions and steel companies.

They complained bitterly about the free-trade pact with China that in this decade has opened up the American market to billions of dollars in low-cost Chinese goods - and has led to the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs.

"It's five times worse than NAFTA," said Walter Danna, of Avella, Pa., referring to the North American Free Trade Agreement successfully promoted in the '90s by President Bill Clinton.

Hillary Clinton, during her campaign, has said she opposed NAFTA, although the Obama campaign has pointed to instances in which she seemed to laud it. And in tailoring her campaign to Rust Belt states, she has given voters the impression that "she puts a hard hat by her pillow," in the sarcastic words of Brabender, the Republican consultant .

A Quinnipiac University poll released this week showed Clinton leading Obama in Pennsylvania by a narrowing margin - 50 percent to 44 percent.

What was striking was the difference in the numbers from one big city to the other.

Clinton led, 57-39, in Allegheny County.

Obama led, 55-37, in Philadelphia and 43-42 in the suburbs.

Obama, too, has taken a populist stance by focusing on the high cost of gas and oil-company profits in radio ads that have seemed to run incessantly on both ends of the state.

In Allegheny County, more than in the Philadelphia, the affluent areas are sprinkled among the less affluent. There is no lengthy, well-to-do Main Line.

In Wexford, north of Pittsburgh, which by its demographics ought to be open to Obama's message, a respiratory therapist was drinking a cafe grande and reading the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette one day last week at a Starbucks.

Ed Brinkley said he had not known much about Obama until recently, "but the more I hear about him, the more I like him. I like his openness to ideas."

He agreed that, generally, Pittsburgh-area Democrats are a bit conservative.

"I think, in the Western Pennsylvania area, in general, people are slower to change," the father of two teenage girls said. "In that respect, it makes them more conservative.

"This is a generally Democratic area," he said, "but they don't want the far-left Democrats. They want centrists, which is pretty much why Obama is behind in this area."

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