[Edited and updated]
I only have time and energy for a quick blurb tonight.
Howard Fineman just a bit ago on Hardball got so excited by Chris Matthews' praising him for being "so good," he erupted with a declaration as bold as it was erroneous. He said that if the late Jack Murtha's congressional district - which includes old rust belt town Johnstown, Pennsylvania - goes to the Republican candidate, this means the Democrats are "done" in November.
Chris Matthews enthusiastically agreed, spitting that if a historically Democratic, pork-dollar-loving district such as Johnstown's flips to the Republicans, this signals some kind of quantum shift in national attitudes toward "New Deal"-type domestic government spending and, therefore, the Democratic Party as a whole. I grew up in Johnstown, and I can say with confidence that this is utter nonsense.
Johnstown's hunger for the pork that Murtha delivered so well and for so long was never - at least not in my lifetime - ideological in any way. The hunger is, at its core, practical and self-serving, as such things often are on a constituent, district-level basis. Johnstown was an old steel town, and as the industry died over the years - a death that hastened during the 90s - people looked more and more to federal spending to prop up the local economy, which was getting devastated. Yes, the town is a classically New Deal-type town, with the "ethnic," working-class, culturally conservative Democrats that make Chris Matthews drool, but it has been trending to the right for much, much longer than the year-and-a-half since Obama was elected.
As Matthews and Fineman both acknowledged, Murtha's district was the only congressional district in the country to vote for Kerry but against Obama, but they dismissed this as irrelevant to the meaning of the seat itself switching to the GOP in this special election. That's not analysis, that's steamrolling over facts with a pre-fabricated narrative. The only thing that kept Johnstown's district in the Democratic column through the present was Jack Murtha; the man was an absolute god to that region. Obama's candidacy in 2008 merely brought the ongoing rightward trend to fruition on the presidential level, and the fact that the district voted against Obama during that tidal wave of Democratic ascendancy is highly instructive.
But of course the media will look for any excuse to extrapolate lazy national meaning from whatever happens in this special election. If the Republican wins, it's proof of a massive shift in the national mood "against Obama and big-government Democratic policy," and if the Democrat manages to win, the fact that it was a contest at all will be seen as evidence of the exact same.
This blogger knows better, because this blogger knows Johnstown. The place probably has more devoted Fox News viewers per capita than Oklahoma. Johnstown is known for its floods - especially the one in 1889 in which the disastrously designed South Fork Dam broke after long, torrential rains. If the district flips, it won't be because the entire country suddenly hates Democrats and their spending in the new era of Obama, it will be because the dam that was Jack Murtha finally broke, unleashing the massive waters of many years of trending to the right.
UPDATE:
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette provides further support for this interpretation:
While Mr. Murtha had a secure hold on the district for a generation, it has been trending Republican in presidential and statewide elections. Sen John Kerry won it by only about 8,000 votes; President Barack Obama lost by just over 1,000.
UPDATE II:
The Democrat, Mark Critz, decisively won. That's the cue for the media to ignore the results.