At the End of the Line, We Need Someone to Fight for Us

HARRISBURG, Penn.—Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) stepped off the train in Harrisburg on April 19, for his fifth and final whistle stop stump speech. Nearly 10,000 South Central Pennsylvanians crowded into a gated space in front of the state capitol to catch a glimpse of Sen. Robert P. Casey, Jr. (D-Penn.) and Obama as they swept down the capitol steps. Wearing matching black pants and white collared shirts with the sleeves rolled up, the junior senator from Pennsylvania and the junior senator from Illinois looked like brothers—one white, one black.

Obama's speech, however, sounded tired, long on generalities and short on specifics. The mixed urban, suburban, and rural crowd wanted more than the same rhetoric of hope. We wanted details about how Obama plans to give health insurance to millions of uninsured Americans. We wanted details about how Obama plans to prevent gasoline price gouging. We wanted details about how Obama plans to end the Iraq War without leaving Iraq worse off than it was when President George W. Bush first ordered American soldiers to invade Baghdad in 2003.

In short, Pennsylvanians need more than the rhetoric of hope. We need the rhetoric of change.

The Harrisburg Patriot-News endorsed Obama on Wednesday in a lengthy masthead editorial remarkable for its complete lack of detail and reasons why Obama would make a better nominee than Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.). Noting that Clinton is "the first female candidate to have a serious chance to win the presidency," the editorial board proceeded to criticize the former first lady for being "the candidate of the past." Calling Obama "the candidate of the future," the editorial board praised the rising star for having "won over young people ... on a scale that may be unprecedented."

As a young graduate student who has publicly supported Obama since before he announced his candidacy, I would be the last person to speak ill of a campaign that has generated more enthusiasm among young people of all political persuasions than any campaign in the last three decades. But winning over people like me will not be enough to win the presidency. For Obama to be successful in Pennsylvania—both on Tuesday and in November—he will have to prove that he is the candidate of hope with the practical solutions that will create lasting change, especially for blue-collar workers and struggling farmers.

In a humorous and telling moment at the whistle stop rally at the intersection of Third and State streets on Saturday evening, someone in the crowd responded to Obama's frustrations at the lack of progress our nation has made on issues like health care by yelling, "That's why we're bitter!"

"I'm not going to touch that," Obama said, and he and Casey chuckled.

This small, unscripted moment amid a tightly choreographed event involving dozens of organizers, hundreds of police and Secret Service officers, and thousands of regional residents, underscored Obama's failure to fight back. The Obama email listservs were flooded all weekend with instructions for supporters to call ABC News executives and to express their anger at the unfair and dastardly attacks against Obama by Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos during Wednesday's debate in Philadelphia. But the candidate himself has yet to stand up and call out the professional pundits for rehashing divisive and distracting non-issues.

If Obama will not stand up and put an end to the mudslinging and pettiness that Clinton and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) seem intent on pursuing through November, how can we be sure that he will put his foot down once he is elected president?

Rich Lewis, a local columnist for the Carlisle Sentinel, put it bluntly when he wrote that while brushing off attacks is often important, "a president also has to be forceful, demanding and hard on occasion—or risk being steamrolled by those who are." Lewis speaks for many in the mid-state who are concerned that Obama has not yet demonstrated that he can decisively bury his opponents in their inadequacies in order to overcome all that is wrong with our political process.

Having reached Harrisburg, the end of the line, Obama must assert his moral leadership into a war of words which threatens to demolish the Democratic Party's chances of taking back the White House in the fall. Obama can win on Tuesday, and he will win in November, if he can convince Pennsylvanians that he has both the courage to remain cool under fire and the strength to stand up and hold the line when it counts.

Obama must also hammer out the details of his policy proposals and present those solutions to the teachers, laborers, and truck drivers who need to know that their candidate will do whatever it takes to make sure that their voices are heard in Washington. The rhetoric of hope will only carry Obama so far in South Central Pennsylvania and other areas that are really hurting from Bush's bad economy.

But we need the rhetoric of change—and more importantly we need change—more than ever.