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Reflections from the
Election
Posted 11-5-2004
The Westmoreland
County vote totals show many Democrats were splitting their tickets. Bob
Casey received 105,00 votes and his opponent about 58,000. His opponent's
votes came most likely from people voting straight Republican. Yet George
Bush received 98,000 and John Kerry only 76,000. It was Democrats that gave
George Bush his margin, not Republicans.
Ticket splitting became
apparent as you went down the ballot. In areas where Allen Kukovich lost,
Jim Casorio, Tom Tangretti, and Joe Petrarca were still getting large
margins to win their races easily. Of course, each of their races operated
almost below the political radar screen while Allen had to battle not only
the hundreds of thousands of dollars of Republican money from around
Pennsylvania, but the shameless partisanship of the Tribune Review.
The Tribune Review was so
eager to sue Allen Kukovich, their high-priced lawyers didn't even sue the
correct party. Allen never placed any advertisements, his committee did, and
even a non-attorney like myself recognized that the minute I looked at the
lawsuit. Do you think they were working with the Regola campaign? By the
time the lawsuit was filed, his campaign was running radio advertisements
about it. Now I don't know much about advertising, but it takes time to at
least record an advertisement and deliver it to radio stations. And the
lawsuit wasn't filed until 3:30 p.m. the Friday before the election.
The political landscape
always changes to some degree, but residents of not only the 39th Senatorial
District, but all of Pennsylvania lost a truly virtuous public official in
Allen Kukovich. His work to develop the Children's Health Insurance Program
(CHIP) will dwarf anything Bob Regola will ever get accomplished; I don't
care how long he's in Harrisburg. Also, his work to develop and expand the
PACE program will be hard to match. We'll see what Regola's newfound
"conservative" values do in areas like economic development and
transportation.
From a practical standpoint,
why should Governor Rendell spend a penny in our county? The newspaper
trashes him regularly, Bob Regola, the only township supervisor in
Pennsylvania that he did a fundraiser for has betrayed him, and he won his
election without Westmoreland County in 2002. While Tom Ceraso, Tom
Tangretti, Ted Harhai, John Pallone, and myself will work hard to get the
money here, Rendell has very little to gain politically by helping us. I
hope he isn't as cold-hearted as the Republicans that trashed Allen Kukovich
or we are going to be hurting.
Why did Republicans counties
in southeastern Pennsylvania, like Montgomery, Delaware, and Lehigh vote big
for John Kerry and counties our here, like Westmoreland, Greene, and Cambria
go for Bush? Will someone explain that to me?
What happened to poor Scott
Conner? He was the one that was supposed to get all the Republican money
from Harrisburg that went to Regola. I guess Scott's dear friend Kim Ward
must have double-crossed him. Conner was left to fend for himself, and he
lost convincingly to Tom Tangretti.
No matter who won the
presidency, the cultural and social divisions in this country are as
dramatic as any time since the Civil War. And, I don't have the solutions on
how to repair those divisions. While Bush won the popular vote by three
million votes, if John Kerry had won Ohio, he'd be president. I wonder how
much the Republicans would support the use of the electoral college then?
And finally, we had a 69%
turnout in Westmoreland County, up about 4% from 2000, but where were the
other 31% that didn't vote? If this election didn't motivate you enough to
get out and vote, what will?
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