Joe Biden, (D) Scranton, PA

Posted by: Jason | August 24th, 2008 · 12:16 PM

Republicans certainly have their talking points, but no one works a tagline like the Democrats work a tagline. And frankly, this new one’s exhausting me.

In watching the Sunday shows this morning, and mind you it’s only 10:30am right now, I’ve already heard the words “Scranton, PA”, or… “scrappy Irish kid from Scranton, PA”, about two dozen times in regard to the life of Senator Joe Biden. He’s apparently not from Delaware anymore.

This is confusing you see, because for as long as I’ve known my US Senator Joe Biden, and I’ve been alive for 32 years (all of which he’s been in office), I’ve known a guy who lived in the ultra-posh section of northern Delaware known as Greenville, just miles outside of Wilmington (and incredibly more upscale than my hometown of Hockessin just miles away).

Greenville’s the kind of place where your average vehicle is a Land Rover or a Jaguar, where your neighbor is more likely to have the last name duPont, not McMillan, and where the average house size is likely 20-times that of your average Scranton, PA home. In fact, couple all of John and Cindy McCain’s various condos together and… well, you get my point.

My dad was a long time representative with the Steelworkers Union, largely dealing with guys from Scranton, PA and the surrounding area. I’ve met many a man from this region, and I can tell you for sure, Joe Biden isn’t one of those guys. So I looked it up, and turns out, Joe Biden did live in Scranton, PA for some time. The trouble is, he hasn’t lived there since 1952. That’s when Dwight Eisenhower was running for president by the way.

I know… the point is politics. It’s not cool to say that Senator Joe Biden is a rich guy with a small compound of land in Greenville, DE (with multiple houses on it). It’s not cool, as Chris Matthews emphasized this morning on his partisan hack show, to suggest that Joe Biden is a “Washington insider”. Nah. After all guys… he commutes back home every night for crying out loud! Give him a break! He’s always been an agent of change. Yeah…

The real point here is that Barack Obama, the guy at the top of the ticket, knows your average Scranton, PA voter wouldn’t pull the lever for a Chicago street organizer if he put a gun to their heads (whether or not they’d be clinging to them at the time is debatable), and thus, needs some mythical Scranton, PA hometown hero to come and save the day.

Well, guys like Obama may think those folks are dumb enough yet, but he’ll soon find out you have to do more than hire some Washington career politician to go in and speak their language. They don’t relate to Harvard law review types, don’t eat spinach or arugala salads, don’t like when folks make fun of their religion and gun culture, and certainly don’t relate to the issues of inner-city Chicago politics.

Barack Obama, and his Democratic friends, will need more than a running mate who spent 10 years as a child there to understand that, and we’ll be here every step of the way to remind them of that.

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