The Pittsburgh Story

Dan Onorato wants to take the Rendell route to Harrisburg.

by Dan Hirschhorn

Mark Stehle SAGA OF THE WESTERN MAN: Democratic front-runner Dan Onorato, pictured here outside Martin Luther King High School in North Philly, is selling Pittsburgh's revitalization as his claim to the governor's mansion.

[ candidates anonymous ]

Dan Onorato is leaning forward, arms on the table, fiddling with the paper wrapping from a straw at a Center City diner. For a guy who's actually in quite a hurry, he hardly seems rushed.

He just came from a fundraiser, and next he's off to talk to Temple University students. On this warm April evening, less than six weeks remain before the Democratic primary for governor — a contest that, by some accounts, Onorato has been working to win since Gov. Ed Rendell was elected to a second term back in 2006.

With little time to spare, Onorato, the Allegheny County executive who hails from Pittsburgh, is crisscrossing the state — especially the Philadelphia region, where most voters don't know him and, importantly, where 40 percent of Democratic primary voters happen to live. "I'm at the point now where all of the fieldwork we put in, all the meet-and-greets, the exposure on TV, it's all coming together," Onorato says, sipping a Coke.

Anyone who's been paying attention — although, according to polling data, not many people are — knows that Onorato is the favorite to win the May 18 primary, insofar as such a thing exists: In a March Franklin & Marshall College poll, only 11 percent of respondents backed him; the other candidates were in single digits and "undecided" claimed 71 percent. He was the favorite two years ago when he began laying the groundwork in earnest. And while candidates have come and gone from the race, Onorato has been like a rock. As much as it's lamented, money matters, and Onorato has a ton of it — he finished March with 10 times the amount of campaign cash that rival Auditor General Jack Wagner has. He's the only candidate with staffed-up field offices throughout the state.

And like the man he's trying to succeed, Onorato has the kind of local, economic revitalization story that voters buy. None other than President Obama gave Onorato the platform to show it off last year, when he chose Pittsburgh to host the G-20 summit, holding it up as a model for how urban areas could adapt and thrive in a 21st-century economy. "He's got a good narrative to tell," says longtime pollster and Franklin & Marshall public affairs professor Terry Madonna. "Rendell told the Philadelphia story, and the Philadelphia story was back from the brink of bankruptcy, all the historical, cultural and economic development that took place. Onorato has a similar story that's very appealing."

The story is one that has been chronicled in depth elsewhere, and there's plenty of legitimate debate about how much credit Onorato deserves. In short, a region that seemed hopelessly tied to old-school industrial manufacturing deftly pivoted to a hub for health care, technology and pharmaceutical dollars, allowing Allegheny County to consistently outperform the state and national unemployment rates (in January, the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate in the county was 7.6 percent, 1.2 percentage points better than the state and 2.1 points better than the country, according to the state Department of Labor and Industry.

That's the story — government streamlined and budgets passed on time — that Onorato is telling as he travels the state. And as this article went to press, the money with which Onorato tells it was already beginning to speak louder than words: The first candidate to air television ads statewide, polls showed that a wide-open, four-way race was beginning to tilt in his favor. A Susquehanna Polling & Research survey released on April 14, after Onorato's ads had been running for a couple weeks, showed him surging to 32 percent of the vote.

"He's put himself in the strongest position by far," longtime Democratic political consultant David Dunphy says.

That doesn't mean Onorato is without critics — far from it. He's a conservative Democrat in the Bob Casey mold, whose positions often don't sit well with Philly liberals. He is a Catholic who personally opposes abortion, but says that he won't allow any changes to state laws governing abortion access under his watch — a position for which he's taken some heat from fellow candidate Montgomery County Commissioner Joe Hoeffel, the race's self-professed true liberal. As a Western Pennsylvania native, Onorato supports those hunters with guns who have so often clashed with Philly's desire to get Uzis off the street. But — as with abortion — he's taken pains to make clear that he supports tougher laws on lost and stolen guns and child-safety locks. Besides, he says, "you have a better chance pushing this with a Democrat from the west."

HALF OFF DEPOT

Why live life at full price?

For a moment, the frustration of a man who has had to explain himself over and over again comes to the surface. "I have some opponents and their supporters who are distorting my positions," he says. "These are very moderate positions."

And there's the other question: Just how much credit should Onorato get for that revival that's become the centerpiece of his TV ads and the national press clips his campaign aides distribute with glee? Bill Green, a Pittsburgh political analyst who has worked for Republicans in the past, says not much at all.

"I don't quite get that economic claim that he talks about," Green says. "This community transitioned itself from the '80s, and it takes 25 years to make that change. We went from steel and industrial to education and pharmaceuticals. But you don't just snap your finger. That transition wasn't necessarily government-driven. It was entrepreneurial-driven."

Allegheny County Council President Richard Fitzgerald, a Democrat and a close Onorato ally, scoffs at talk like that. Onorato deserves "the lion's share of the credit. It's been Dan's vision and it's been Dan's working with the business community that revitalized this county," he says, ticking off examples of companies that came to or stayed in the area under Onorato's watch. "I've seen it firsthand."

Fitzgerald cites U.S. Steel, which had planned to move out of Allegheny County before Onorato promised them their permitting process for a new plant would get a prompt yes or no, rather than staying in the traditional government limbo. Now, they're building an expansion in Clairton, outside of Pittsburgh. Similarly, Allegheny Technologies Incorporated is building another plant in Brackenridge.

"We've got almost $3 billion of new construction," Fitzgerald says. "That's bigger than our stadiums, our convention center and everything downtown, combined. It's not downtown so people don't see it every day, but these are the kind of economic growth initiatives that Dan Onorato deserves credit for."

Onorato, for his part, says he's willing to share the credit — even if he doesn't in his commercials. "I was the county executive during the turnaround," he says. "I was part of that turnaround. I don't think any one person can claim credit for it; it was all of us working together. But I can tell you that if the region had gone the other direction, I certainly would have been blamed for it."

Indeed, politicians almost always get too much credit when a complex, intertwined economy goes up, and too much blame when it goes south — failure is an orphan, success has many fathers. The point is that politics is about narrative, and Onorato has the story and the money to tell it.

Should Onorato prevail next month, however, there is another elephant in the room that Republicans will try and tie him to — and it's not the drink tax Onorato passed that led to something of a working-class revolt. Rather, it's the man still in office, Gov. Ed Rendell.

Everywhere except the Philly region, Rendell is politically toxic, his approval ratings in the toilet with voters tired of 100-day budget standoffs in Harrisburg. And yet, as much as Rendell says he's neutral and Onorato shies away from it, there's simply no denying that Onorato is Rendell's favored candidate. The money machine that catapulted Rendell to office is largely behind Onorato. As Franklin & Marshall's Madonna puts it, "Clearly the governor opened up doors for Dan, and he skirted through."

Whether Onorato will represent a third term for Rendell, as Republicans will surely argue, is a completely different story — politically and stylistically, the two could hardly be more different.

But that doesn't stop his opponents from painting him as Rendell-lite, as Republicans surely plan to do. "We have our own governing styles. I do things my way, he does things his way," Onorato says.

While Onorato shares Rendell's wonkish ability to talk policy, he doesn't share the governor's love for unfiltered political chatter.

"This is nothing but a sideshow," he says.

(editorial@citypaper.net)