There's still time for Corbett to shift course

As he promised the voters four years ago, Gov. Corbett has held the line on taxes and spending. He also deserves praise for delivering the 2012 Marcellus Shale legislation and a $2.3 billion transportation package in 2013.

Yet the Republican appears to be on track to become the first Pennsylvania governor to lose reelection. (If that happens, it would break the 60-year tradition of the two major parties alternating control of the governor's mansion every eight years.) The Los Angeles Times considers Corbett - who languished nearly 17 points behind challenger Tom Wolf in the RealClearPolitics polling average - "the most vulnerable GOP governor in the country."

Why? It's simple: Corbett has painted himself into the same corner that his party has nationally. Like other GOP governors, Corbett has neglected the very middle-income voters who once provided the foundation of GOP center-right majorities.

His case may be the most severe, but Corbett's reelection woes are not entirely unique to him or Pennsylvania. Granted, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a gifted politician in a Republican-leaning state, is up by 8 points, per the RCP average. Yet other Northern incumbents, like Maine's Paul LePage, Michigan's Rick Snyder, and Wisconsin's Scott Walker, are in statistical dead heats. With President Obama's sixth-year ratings still plunging, every GOP governor should have a sizable lead.

The electoral malaise reflects a party that has ignored the rapid disintegration of the once-mighty American working middle class. George H.W. Bush may have been a "kinder and gentler" president, but his stare at his watch in the 1992 debate symbolized boredom with the critical task of creating and preserving good jobs. Likewise ignoring the elephant in the room, his firstborn son, George W., preached a "compassionate conservatism" that prioritized subprime mortgages for risky low-income borrowers and billions of dollars for combating diseases in Africa.

Further being tossed to and fro, carried about by every wind of doctrine, the party's Ayn Rand-loving libertarians - indifferent to the country's waning manufacturing capacity - have championed free trade, open borders, and tax breaks for fat-cat investors. No wonder that hordes of blue-collar Reagan Democrats - especially in culturally red Pennsylvania - ditched the elder Bush for Ross Perot and Bill Clinton in 1992, and never returned.

Meanwhile, without national leadership pushing nation-building projects to keep America on the cutting edge of transportation, space exploration, medical cures, and military defense, Republican governors have been forced to play small ball with the government-retrenchment agenda of the American Legislative Exchange Council and conservative think tanks.

Corbett is no exception. Other than incremental energy and transportation moves, he's done little to demonstrate solidarity with Pennsylvania's workers, 73 percent of whom lack college degrees.

Once upon a time in the Lehigh Valley, Bethlehem Steel, General Electric, and Mack Trucks couldn't hire enough young men right out of high school. And thousands of smaller manufacturers throughout the state - before being displaced by unfair foreign competition - offered family-wage employment that lasted until full retirement age.

Under Corbett, full-time job creation remains meager. The state's "U6" unemployment rate, which includes frustrated part-timers who want full-time jobs and older labor-force dropouts who still want to work, is stuck at 11.1 percent.

If sleeping on the job watch weren't enough, the Catholic family man of 42 years has failed to guard even the social foundations of everyman prosperity. In May, a federal judge unilaterally decreed that the state's marriage laws must accommodate not Pennsylvania, but Hollywood values. Even Hillary Clinton acknowledges that flourishing communities require "a critical mass of families that fit the traditional ideal." But fooled by GOP groupthink that Mitt Romney lost because the party isn't inclusive, the former attorney general refused to defend proven social norms via a simple appeal.

It's not too late for Corbett to turn things around. He has eight weeks to persuade voters that he's fighting for the Keystone State against the out-of-touch gentry liberalism of Barack Obama and his sidekick Tom Wolf, as well as the antigovernment narrative on which his party has run aground in the post-Reagan era. While no governor can influence the economy as the president can, Corbett needs to call out Obama for his dereliction of duty: failing to address currency manipulation by our trading partners and allowing the foreign dumping of critical products like steel, actions that continue to whack Pennsylvania hard.

The governor also needs to promise robust job creation with shoot-for-the-moon state efforts rooted in Pennsylvania history. The governor could catapult the commonwealth to national prominence with a pacesetting, smart-tech infrastructure initiative. The turnpike to Pittsburgh remains a nightmare, and he should be all over high-speed rail in the Northeast Corridor and across the Alleghenies. And propose an effort to reinvent Philadelphia, the governor's birthplace, on the Steel City model, including establishing a medical-research enterprise zone focused on finding cures.

The tailwinds that often benefit incumbents as November approaches could still yield the embattled governor an uplift - and an upset. But to coin a phrase, Tom Corbett needs a bold, fresh vision to lead his party out of the wilderness by tending to its middle-class roots here in the woods of William Penn.

Robert W. Patterson served as a welfare policy adviser in the Corbett administration

rwpatterson79@verizon.net