Corbett is product of traditional town

SHALER, Pa. - Tom Corbett's hometown near Pittsburgh seems a time capsule of the suburban 1960s, when the handsome lawyer's son was mascot for Shaler High's football Huskies and starred in the senior play,

Our Hearts Were Young and Gay

.

Church steeples, brick homes, stately trees. Solid, respectable, moderate. That's the sort of place Shaler is, and the sort of politician Shaler produces, Township Manager Timothy J. Rogers said.

"The board is split, four Republicans and three Democrats. We all have to get along," Rogers said. "The extremes don't do well here."

Corbett, 61, still fits the Shaler mold as the Republican candidate for governor. Democrats oppose him, but don't fear him the way they'd fear a tea partyer. Yet in what some see as a calculated move, he has shifted somewhat to the right during the campaign.

He lives in the house where he grew up, and was greeted with long applause by 80 local people when he staged a campaign rally the Friday before last in an upstairs room at the Shaler North Hills Library.

Crowned with brilliant white hair, Corbett marveled aloud at how far he had come - assistant Allegheny County district attorney, U.S. attorney for Western Pennsylvania, state attorney general, and, now, his party's nominee for governor.

With a slight smile, he said: "I think, if you talk to any of my friends here, if I had said in high school I would run for governor, they would have said, 'What are you smoking?' "

Ah, yes, the '60s. Always good for a laugh.

Corbett would be the oldest new governor since James H. Duff - also a Pittsburgh-area Republican and attorney general - who was elected at 63 in 1946.

As a career prosecutor, Corbett long has had to be nonideological. "Follow the evidence where it leads." That has been his mantra.

His biggest claim to success as attorney general has been his so-called Bonusgate investigation of Harrisburg corruption, in which he has obtained convictions of 10 elected officials and other state employees.

It has not endeared him to state House leaders, including some members of his own party he'll have to work with if he wins Nov. 2. He sees that as his badge of political courage.

Defense lawyers and some defendants have accused Corbett of using the investigation to advance his gubernatorial ambitions. Corbett's probe hasn't yet touched the state Senate, where the GOP is dominant.

As a candidate, he has struggled to find his footing in dealing with the many complex issues that come with a $28 billion bureaucracy: pensions, education, energy, labor, the environment.

Expecting to see the moderate Shaler approach, some old-school Republicans were distressed when Corbett tacked to the right in the spring while fending off a conservative challenger during the primary. Many said, Oh, well, he'll swing back to center in the November campaign.

But Corbett has stayed to the right of recent Republican governors, including his mentor, Tom Ridge, who appointed him in 1995 to fill a two-year vacancy in the Attorney General's Office.

Early on in his gubernatorial run, Corbett signed the no-tax-hike pledge pushed by Americans for Tax Reform - the 2010 equivalent of 1994's Contract With America, seen in some quarters as a marker of true conservatives.

Some moderates questioned whether Corbett was wise to lock himself into the no-tax pledge when the state faces a deficit of as much as $3 billion to $5 billion just in pension obligations over the next few years.

Corbett's opponent, Democrat Dan Onorato, has labeled him "extreme" in his opposition to any severance tax on natural gas extracted from Pennsylvania's lucrative Marcellus Shale - the kind of tax every other gas-producing state imposes.

Corbett has further established his conservative credentials by joining other Republican attorneys general in suing to overturn the national health-care legislation. He joined, too, in a brief supporting the Arizona law that gives police broad authority to stop and question anyone suspected of being an illegal immigrant.

In July, he got into political hot water by saying some jobless workers would rather collect unemployment benefits than look for work. (He has said he was merely repeating what some Pennsylvania employers told him.) While Onorato has used the comment against him in TV ads, it won him quiet praise from some conservatives.

To be sure, Corbett remains moderate on many issues.

Although he promises to cut the state budget "across the board," he supports beefing up the Department of Environmental Protection and would provide more funding for prekindergarten education - issues dear to Democrats.

Corbett leads Onorato in polls, but the gap has narrowed in recent weeks. With Corbett far ahead over the summer, some Democrats said privately that they were reconciled to the fact that he might win. He had considerable labor support in his attorney general races, and some Democrats in positions of power see him as a man they could work with if they had to.

Many Republicans, meanwhile, concede that Onorato was more up to speed on state issues in the three campaign debates. Onorato has had seven years of dealing with similar issues, albeit on a smaller scale, as Allegheny County executive.

But Republicans say Corbett - like John F. Kennedy in his 1960 debates with Richard Nixon - may have exuded more personal appeal to viewers.

"Tom Corbett comes through on the television screen looking more gubernatorial than Dan Onorato," said veteran GOP fund-raiser Charles Kopp, legal counsel to the Corbett campaign. "Some people have that quality that makes them likable."

Linda Rummel and her husband, Dale, Shaler Democrats who attended Corbett's rally, said they instinctively trusted him and would rely on him to make the right budget cuts as governor.

"He's got to make cuts. He has to," said Linda Rummel, a librarian. "The more you pay taxes, the less you get."

Dale Rummel, a retired police officer, said got to know the nominee when Corbett was prosecuting lawbreakers in the 1970s.

"You always felt he was on your side," he said.

Corbett espouses a Reaganesque belief that budget cuts and low taxes are the cure to the states' fiscal woes.

He promises to dump the pork-barrel accounts that legislators use to fund projects in their districts. He says he will rein in state-owned car fleets and require government departments to submit "zero-based budgets" justifying every dollar they want.

State Rep. Sam Rohrer (R., Berks), Corbett's foe in the primary, said this sounded good on the stump - but wouldn't save the billions the state needed to reduce deficits and fund public employee and teacher pensions.

To save "real money," he said, a governor would have to slash areas where the state spent the most: education, prisons, Medicaid. And trying to do that could bring on battles a governor might not win.

Corbett's reply? "Just watch me."

An Onorato TV ad says: "Warning to seniors: Tom Corbett's budget plan might negatively impact you." It goes on to suggest that Corbett would make cuts to home health-care services, Alzheimer's research, even Meals on Wheels.

But he has not said he'd do any of that. He has said only that he would cut "across the board." He accuses Onorato of trying to twist his words to scare elderly voters.

Onorato has been no more specific than Corbett in saying how he'd balance budgets. But Corbett has not challenged him on that, preferring to cast Onorato as a tax-happy, spend-happy copy of Gov. Rendell.

Bill Ward, a Pittsburgh lawyer who has known Corbett for 30 years, said: "I think one of his greatest strengths is his ability to evaluate a problem, listen to all sides, analyze the problem, and effectively make a decision - and to implement that decision."

A Corbett adviser, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Corbett sets a philosophy and tone but doesn't gorge on detail. In that regard, he's more of a Bush or Reagan type than a Clinton or an Obama.

But Corbett can be impulsive. His wife, Susan, says so.

The couple, who have two adult children, met as students at Lebanon Valley College and started their marriage in 1972 when Corbett was in law school at St. Mary's University in Texas.

Like a lot of young men vulnerable to the Vietnam-era draft, he joined the National Guard. Unlike most, he stayed in for 14 years and rose from private to captain.

Susan Corbett told the Shaler audience how her husband had failed to tell her when he first decided to run for public office, a seat on the Shaler Board of Commissioners in 1987. She first heard about it from her dentist - who'd heard it from a patient.

That night, she said, she ambushed him at home. He'd been out collecting voter signatures on the petitions he had to file to become a candidate.

"I met him at the door, and I challenged him. Being Irish Catholic," she said, he impulsively "took out one of his petitions and ripped it up into little pieces and threw it on the floor."

That night, filled with regret over their fight, the two sat on the floor with glasses of wine - and Scotch-taped the petition back together.

Corbett won that race, and served in 1988 and 1989 as a commissioner, voting to raise local property taxes by 20 percent - an act that has come back to haunt him in Onorato TV ads.

He didn't run for office again until 2004, when he was elected to the first of two terms as attorney general. In the interim, he earned political credits as a campaign insider.

In 1988, while a lawyer in private practice, he worked on George H.W. Bush's presidential campaign. "Basically, I ran the western half of the state for the campaign as a volunteer," he has said.

After Bush won, he rewarded Corbett with a prestigious post as U.S. attorney, making him chief federal prosecutor in Western Pennsylvania.

In 1994, back in private practice, Corbett worked as a campaign aide to Ridge. When Ridge became governor, he named Corbett attorney general.

Though still working to master state issues, Corbett is a veteran campaigner.

Mingling with tailgaters before the Eagles game last Sunday outside Lincoln Financial Field, he was spotted by Wendy Rothstein, a Philadelphia lawyer. The two chatted briefly as football fans stood waiting to shake Corbett's hand and maybe get a photo taken with him.

"He has a natural presence about him," Rothstein said. "Maybe it's the hair. He's got a lot of charisma."

Don Villone couldn't see it. He is a Delaware County carpenter, and his wife is a public schoolteacher. He grilled Corbett on his vow to end traditional pension plans for teachers.

Corbett assured him that while new teachers might have to get 401(k)-type savings plans, teachers already vested in the system would be able to keep their defined-benefit plans intact. He said his campaign's legal advisers had told him that he could not change that.

Villone asked, "Can I hold you to that when you're elected?"

"Absolutely," Corbett replied.

Villone seemed satisfied.

"He seems like a nice guy," he said. "Of course, they're all nice guys before the election. It's what they do after that counts."