Guns, Guts and God made America great! is a bumper sticker that wouldn’t raise eyebrows in Western Pennsylvania, but let a politician suggest that those are sentiments held most fervently by life’s losers, and all hell breaks lose.  On the stump in San Francisco last week, Obama said workers in Pennsylvania’s Rust Belt, embittered by unrelieved decades of economic hard times,  "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." Hillary was quick to pounce on this statement, calling it “elitist and divisive,” which it was -- so much so, in fact, that your editor, a Western Pennsylvania native and son of two Pittsburghers, would strongly suggest that Obama lay a wreath at the grave of Roberto Clemente sometime before the Pennsylvania primary.

Seizing the initiative, Hillary told steelworkers on Monday exactly what they wanted to hear – namely, that Pennsylvania deserves its fair share of the subsidies that Congress has been lavishing on other, ostensibly less-deserving, businesses. “I want to take away the subsidies from the oil industry, from the drug companies, from the insurance companies, from Wall Street,” she said “Let's put those subsidies to work for a change here in Pennsylvania putting hard-working Pennsylvanians to work.”

Schenectady Blues

How better to boost the sagging spirits, if not necessarily the efficiency, of Rust Belt workers than to increase the size of the handouts they receive from the Federal Government?  Perhaps with some judicious pruning and re-allocating of pork, Hillary could help transform Sharon, PA, into the Hartford of the Alleghenies. A success there might even inspire her to take a look in her own back yard – at Schenectady, for one. The town has been in decline ever since GE pulled out a generation ago, and it arguably needs subsidies every bit as badly as Pennsylvania’s most beaten-down town steel town.

In the meantime, we won’t hold our breath waiting for further details of how these ubsidies will help America’s steel foundries compete with those in China and South Korea. Not that we don’t think the U.S. can’t find a way to compete – only that, of all possible investors, the U.S. Government is probably least suited to the task of deciding how to do it.