As it happened...

From the White House Situation Room...

Watching the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound in real-time...

(h/t: Salena Zito)

A story for Christmas...

During this past year, I have been fortunate - no, make that blessed - to have met many new people who I have now come to call "friend."

Because many of these people are reporters for/colleagues from the radio show I'm involved with, I've never met them face-to-face. They are sometimes in far-off corners of the globe covering wars, foreign intrigues and events that will one day occupy places of importance in history books (and in legends parents pass down to their children).

One of these people, Salena Zito (who writes for The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review), is someone I have gotten to know quite well during 2010. Salena possesses a quick wit, a sharp eye and a well-tuned ear. She also works harder and writes smarter than most journos I've had the pleasure of knowing in my career.

All this to say, when I first read this piece by Salena, I was touched. This lady writes like nobody's business when it comes to the world of hardscrabble politics in the rough-and-tumble Rustbelt of America. More importantly, though, she can write a story that not only makes you think but also makes you feel.

And those are the kinds of stories that matter.

So with that, I wish you and yours a Merry Christmas.

Almost home By Salena Zito TRIBUNE-REVIEW Reprinted from Sunday, December 21, 2008 (used with author's permission) Three weeks ago, I felt certain that this year that wouldn't feel a lot like Christmas. After 18 months of political road trips, press buses, press planes, hotels, motels, bad food, good food, two back-to-back conventions and the constant, sometimes desperate search for an electrical outlet to juice up my laptop computer, nothing thrilled me more than finally being back home. Call it fate, an act of God or really old electrical wiring, but "being home" wasn't in the cards. The day after the election, I made one more road trip: a 10-hour drive from Pittsburgh to St. Louis to watch my daughter in the Atlantic Ten playoffs, her final college soccer game. This is the kid I've watched tear up the field since she was 2 (I fudged her age so she could play on the 3-year-olds' team). Even though she was the runt, I knew I was on to something when she pushed and shoved her way downfield, knocking over all the boys and scoring the game's only goal. Twenty years, hundreds of games, one state high school championship, four regional cup championships, 14 states, two Europe trips and a scholarship to a Division I university later, I was not about to miss her final game. What I returned home to was a house choking in smoke, on the verge of going up in flames. I can still see my practical-engineer father's horrified look when I bought the century-old place. The windows were original and rattled, the hardwood floors covered with a ghastly black varnish, tacky wallpaper splashed every room, the kitchen was an obscene green and yellow, and the entire house had an odd slant to it. I don't remember seeing any of that. Instead, I saw potential. It was where I taught Shannon and Glenn how to hit a baseball, kick a soccer ball, throw a football - and broke countless windows learning to do all three. (I remember a hockey puck sailing through the front door's stained-glass window when the kids were playing roller-hockey in the driveway.) It was where the entire girl's high school soccer team came before practice because pasta was always waiting for them. It is where my son's football teammates inhaled boxes of pizza and watched the movie "Braveheart" after three-a-days. It was the place to sleep-over after homecoming dances and proms. And it was where my extended family celebrated the Italian Christmas tradition of eating seven different fish for good luck in the next year. And now, it would never be the same. In the hours and days following the fire, I didn't say much but I did cry - a lot. Not bawling-like-a-baby crying, but random tears just fell when a memory crossed my mind. What saddened me most was that Christmas was coming fast, and gone were all of our ornaments, many that the kids made over the years and many that were my grandfather's. No live tree, no decorating the mantle, no placing candles in all 32 windows, no luminaries dotting the driveway. The week after Thanksgiving was particularly tough. Sitting in the loft apartment rented for me by the insurance company (State Farm really is there when you need it) with the kids still away at college, I indulged in feeling really bad for me. Never mind that no one was hurt, not even the cats, and that the house eventually will be restored to better-than-before: I still wasn't home. Then an email from an old high school classmate popped up, letting me know that he had heard about the fire and asking if he could help. I thanked him and said that unless he had a magical way to bring Christmas to my house, I would be OK. Apparently, he took me literally: 12 hours later, Damon Blankenship, a buddy from high-school, and Lorraine "Ray-Ray" Gumble dropped off a huge Christmas tree with lights and ornaments, a snowglobe, and a dozen Christmas candles. And, just like that, I realized all the things I thought were missing never really were gone in the first place. Home may where things happen, but home also is the space within you. It is who you are, how you treat people, what you give with no thought of getting something in return. Home is a state of mind and, just like Christmas, you never really lose it - unless you never really had it to begin with.

Salena Zito
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Tribune-Review Political Reporter

Which party does he belong to?

Oh, that's right...Democratic.

West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin (right) has a problem (left)...(photo: Charleston Gazette)

West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin (D), who looked like a cinch to capture the U.S. Senate seat that used to be part of the living fossil that was Robert Byrd, is now in for the political fight of his life.

While he is overwhelmingly beloved as governor, President Barack Obama seems to be moving toward a nearly impossible-to-believe single-digit approval ratings among West Virginia voters. And therein lies the problem.

West Virginians want Joe to stay with them. They feel like he's doing a fine job as the state's chief executive. "If Joe goes to Washington and gets sucked into the Obama mess, he and the state could be screwed," his constituents seem to be saying.

GOP challenger John Raese has managed to come on strong, shaking off a double-digit deficit to move to a lead in the polls which now have him beyond the margin of error.

You've got to hand it to Manchin: he's no quitter. During the last week, he's filed suit against the Obama Administration's EPA for its efforts to quash certain coal mining techniques (which really irks the coal mining-dependent state's citizens). And to top it off, Manchin goes over the top with the ad (below), which is designed to further distance him from the leader of his own party.

Another omen of things to come this November 2.

Bonus: In one campaign ad, the candidate shoots down Cap and Trade, ObamaCare, the EPA - and he does it with a rifle (and the NRA's endorsement). Can you imagine what would have happened if a Republican did all that?

Late add: John Batchelor also blogs on the West Virginia coal mine canary...

"Connected by disconnect"

After I read the following piece by a colleague of mine from the John Batchelor Show, Salena Zito, I knew I had to share it. Salena has a gift - several, actually - when it comes to observing and writing on American politics.

This article, from today's edition of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, should be required reading for pundits and pols alike. If Democrats want to know why they're hurting in the polls, this piece does a better job of explaining the situation than $1,000 per hour consultants, focus groups or the chattering class ever can. For Republicans, it's a clarion call...a heads-up: if you take over after the mid-terms and screw-up again, the electorate is going throw you out, too.

Connected by disconnect

By Salena Zito
PITTSBURGH TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Sunday, October 3, 2010

INDEPENDENCE PASS, Colo.

A perilously narrow road, open only during summer, leads to the Continental Divide at 12,095 feet and a breathtaking peak.

Nearly 2,000 miles east stands a different, equally symbolic peak at the heart of America's democracy: At just more than 555 feet, the Washington Monument honors the first president and Revolutionary War commander who gave up life as a gentleman farmer to lead a band of "scrabble" to win liberty and independence.

More than distance and altitude separate "Main Street" Americans from those who govern them. The disconnect is so deep, so wide, that filling it is hard to imagine.

In Weirton, W.Va., Milan Ralich, who works in a paint store, says, "Here, our vision of the American dream looks far different than it does in Washington."

Wearing a crisp blue shirt embroidered with the Sherwin-Williams logo and his name, Ralich points to Weirton's massive steel mill.

"Thirty-eight years were spent in that plant, and you worked hard every day," he says. "It provided a good life."

Once employing 14,000, the mill is down to a few hundred. Ralich works at the paint store part time to make ends meet because of a scaled-back pension.

From the Rockies to small Massachusetts fishing towns and all points in between, Americans finally may get the "change election" they sought in 2008.

In less than a year, this columnist has traveled 6,609 miles, interviewed 432 people registered as or identifying with Democrats in 17 states, and written about scores of races for U.S. Senate and House seats and governors' mansions.

In the process, I lost my car's transmission, wore out four new tires (and promptly flattened two replacements), cracked a windshield, broke a passenger window, had emergency surgery, was chased by a funnel cloud on the Great Plains, staggered through two blizzards, was pelted by hail, wilted in record heat and even saw a lot of locusts (although a farmer assured me it wasn't a swarm).

All along "blue highways," Americans spoke about their disappointment in the change they so proudly supported in 2008 -- some whispering for fear of being labeled racist, some shouting at tea party rallies.

In coffee shops, on streetcorners and farms, at factories, the narrative was always the same: How could such great promise have let the country down so much, so quickly?

Beltway pundits talk of how angry America is. They seem incredulous that Americans somehow find this historic president's administration anything but exceptional.

What's exceptional is the blame coming from Washington, which only deepens the divide between the elite and Main Street.

The pundits blame Republicans -- or, when they feel particularly vicious, "teabaggers."

President Obama blames everyone but himself, shaking a finger at Republicans and tea partyers for stirring up the anger. Last week, he and Vice President Biden started blaming their own supporters, insisting they need to "buck up" and vote.

"Why should we?" wonders Canton, Ohio, native Cheryl Guy as she and husband Rudy visit Fort Necessity in Western Pennsylvania. A Democrat and registered nurse who is very disappointed with Obama, she has no intention of supporting Democrats in the coming midterm election; neither does her husband.

Americans voted for change in 2008 in record numbers. Voters of every age, color, shape and size, in red states and blue ones, registered as Republicans, Democrats or independents, then voted for something different. They bought into the dream that Obama was not elite; he was for the middle class and would champion reform.

What they got was no different from the guy they voted against in 2004: John Kerry.

Obama is no less out of touch than the Kerry whom America watched windsurf before the 2004 election -- the same man who said last week that one reason Democrats will lose this year is that "we have an electorate that doesn't always pay that much attention to what's going on, so people are influenced by a simple slogan rather than the facts or the truth or what's happening."

Here's where Kerry and Obama are both wrong: The electorate that was influenced by a simple slogan -- "Yes, we can" -- in 2008 actually is very well-informed.

This time, that electorate isn't voting for a dream, but for its pocketbook.

And if Republicans are lucky enough to win, they'd best remember that those voters will hold them accountable.

Salena Zito can be reached at szito@tribweb.com or 412-320-7879.

The listening post...

Here are the podcast links from last night's stint on the John Batchelor Show:

Wednesday, 08/18/10 - Batchelor 9pm

GUESTS: Co-hosts Gordon Chang and Jeff Bliss, The Bliss Index; David Goodman, WABC; Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA); Salena Zito, The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Listen or Download this show

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA)...

Wednesday, 08/18/10 - Batchelor 10pm

GUESTS: Co-hosts Gordon Chang, Forbes.com and Jeff Bliss, The Bliss Index; David Welch, Bloomberg; Mary Kissel, AWSJ

Listen or Download this show