Hey Obama and Perry: Are You Men Enough for My Town?

October 10, 2011 | 10:45 PM |

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The side of Pittsburgh that most visitors see -- the one the Chamber of Commerce understandably prefers to highlight -- is the one you glimpsed Sunday if you caught my Steelers play on TV. The overhead shot from was breathtaking: Against a crystalline blue fall sky (the sort seldom seen when I was a kid and the mills were running three shifts), the downtown sparkled, a collection of handsome skyscrapers nestled closely together at the famous confluence of the three rivers.

But the "Golden Triangle" is a Potemkin village. To see what lies behind the facade, the blimp or the politicians only need to go just a few miles upriver along the Monongehela There they'd find a sea of boarded up homes and businesses, the detrius of the steel industry that collapsed into near-nothingness beginning in the 1970s.

Pittsburgh is one city with two compelling tales. The most often-told is about the Renaissance City, which shook off its sooty past and remade itself into a sparkling yuppie paradise with high-end shopping malls and waterfront bike trails where steel mills used to be and medical researchers and university professors taking the place of the blue-collar workers who gave the football team its name.

The other, sadder story is about places like Wilkinsburg, a once vibrant middle-class borough that I drive through almost every day when I'm visiting my dad. Vacant buildings have become crack houses and once-bustling streets have become shooting galleries where ambition long ago was swallowed up by despair.

It's this story that makes Pittsburgh the perfect place for the president or his rivals to talk about jobs. Pittsburgh encapsulates the challenges facing post-industrial America, a place where some people are doing better than ever but many others feel they are on the edge of a precipice, if they have not already been swallowed up by the chasm.

But they are challenges our leaders have been avoiding for decades.

Back when I was a cub reporter for The Pittsburgh Press (an afternoon newspaper that, like everything else associated with a lifestyle oriented around the early factory shifts, has disappeared), Republican economists shrugged off steel companies' complaints about foreign competitors undercutting them with cut-rate labor and government subsidies. Who cared, as long as Americans could get cheaper goods, went the thinking. We were going to offshore the dirty work and all be middle managers. Democrats weren't much more sympathetic to the plight of the blue collar workers who had been their loyal constituents. Just before he joined newly-elected president Bill Clinton's Cabinet in 1993, Robert Reich penned a book called Work of Nations that wrote off manufacturing in favor of a brave new working world in which the real money would be made by highly specialized service workers.

It's true that there are people like that in Pittsburgh today making big money: The doctor who used robotic surgery to replace both of my dad's hips, for instance.

But that sort of work only keeps so many households afloat. Which is why Pittsburgh's population is about half of what it was growing up there sucking in particulates from the steel mills. And, I suspect, it's why, when the president shows up in town tomorrow, he'll be touting legislation that will put people to work fixing roads and building bridges -- just the sort of dirty work that economists of both parties once argued was part of the past.

Obama, who started his career as a community organizer in a Chicago neighborhood that had a hole where its steel mill used to be, talked a lot about the need to revive the nation's manufacturing sector on the campaign trail. Easier said than done in a world where corporations can move to where labor is cheap and occupational health and safety standards, never mind environmental protections, are non-existent. Am I the only one who thinks the real Solyndra scandal is not the penny-ante self-dealing of some mid-level administration official, but the Chinese-government subsidies that made the company's solar panels uncompetitive?

This is exactly the same sort of complaint that steelmakers used to make about their competition before the industry disappeared almost completely from the place we Pittsburghers used to call the Steel Valley.

Politicians of both parties don't want to tackle these kinds of problems head on because its not popular to interfere in the "free" market. But unless and until the president and all the Republicans who want his job are willing to do so, they'd be better off putting a Primanti sandwich in their mouths. It tastes better than the empty promises.