DV Journal

Embattled Democrat U.S. Rep. Susan Wild appeared to insult the intelligence of her own constituents with a comment about the need to “school” Carbon County voters. It was a misstep that quickly inspired comparisons to Hillary Clinton’s infamous “basket of deplorables” rhetoric believed to contribute to her loss to Donald Trump in 2016.

Wild, considered one of the most vulnerable Democrats in Congress, was participating in a virtual meet and greet on July 18 when she made problematic comments. “Carbon County has many attributes, but it is a county that – although it was once an Obama county – it since has become a Trump county,” Wild said.

“I’m not quite sure what was in their heads because the people of Carbon County are exactly the kind of people who should not be voting for a Donald Trump, but I guess I might have to school them on that a little bit.”

In 2020, Trump won Carbon County with more than 65 percent of the vote. This year’s redistricting put Carbon County in Wild’s district — making her race more competitive. Wild’s seat has already been labeled “lean Republican” by the non-partisan Cook Political Report.

Republican challenger Lisa Scheller was raised in Tamaqua — not far from the Carbon County line. She took issue with Wild’s remarks on Twitter.

“You are talking down on the type of people I grew up with,” Scheller said. “I am sorry the people of Carbon County can’t afford your liberal agenda that gave us record gas prices and inflation.”

In 2020, Scheller ran against Wild and lost by 3.8 percent. However, Scheller overperformed President Donald Trump by 1.1 points in 2020, according to Samantha Bullock, spokeswoman for the National Republican Committee.

“If Scheller mirrored Trump’s 2020 performance in Carbon County, she would have defeated Wild in 2020 due to her performance in Northampton and Lehigh Counties,” Bullock said.

Approximately 65,000 people live in Carbon County, according to the United States Census Bureau. Of adults older than 25, 17.9 percent have a bachelor’s degree and the county’s median income is $6,000 below the state’s average.

Wild’s snark about Carbon County voters did not sit well with Michael J. Sofranko, mayor of Jim Thorpe, Pa.

“I‘ve never defined myself by who I vote for, and I don’t think most of the voters in Carbon County do that,” Sofranko said. “They vote for who they think can do the best job at the time.”

The borough of Jim Thorpe, sometimes called the “Gateway to the Poconos,” is suffering the same challenges as the rest of Pennsylvania, Sofranko said.

“Most people travel out of Carbon County to work, so when you’re paying high gas prices, that hurts everyone in Carbon County,” said Sofranko.

Democrats have struggled to attract white, blue-collar voters in recent years. President Joe Biden, who Democrats nominated in part for his ability to win the support of those voters, has seen his approval among White men without college degrees drop to 20 percent.

Political pundits attribute it to the perception they look down on these voters. During the 2008 campaign, candidate Barack Obama was widely criticized for comments made at an upscale San Francisco fundraiser about the people living in “small towns in Pennsylvania.”

“The jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them,” Obama said. “And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Eight years later, Hillary Clinton put Trump voters into “what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?” Clinton said. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it.”

Wild’s comments in the same vein are unlikely to help her in November.

When it comes to the town of Jim Thorpe, Sofranki said the people are not defined by the red or blue of politics, but instead,  by their faith, their family, and their friends.

“What I mean by faith is that, we’ve always been the kind of county where everyone might see darkness, but there’s a light at the end of the tunnel,” Sofranko said. “Keep working and you’ll get there. Family values are very strong in Carbon County — whatever that family may be, and they’ll always be there for each other. I don’t know where Susan Wild gets off saying she wants to ‘school’ Carbon County.”

Wild declined to respond to a request for comment.

Please follow DVJournal on social media: Twitter@DVJournal or Facebook.com/DelawareValleyJournal

All this week, Delaware Valley Journal will be publishing stories about the impact of Watergate on American politics and culture, leading up to the 50th anniversary of the break-in on Friday, June 17th.

June 17 marks the 50th anniversary of the night when D.C. police arrested five men breaking into the Watergate hotel/office/apartment complex. The burglars were operatives of President Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign. Their mission: to tap phones and steal documents from the Democratic National Committee, which had its headquarters in the Watergate.

The operation was planned and supervised by G. Gordon Liddy, a former FBI agent who was the general counsel of the president’s campaign. He financed the caper with campaign funds. Liddy and the burglars were criminally charged and convicted. Others who participated in the subsequent cover-up orchestrated by the White House, including John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s adviser for domestic affairs.

The investigation of the attempted Watergate break-in by a select committee chaired by Sen. Sam Ervin of North Carolina eventually led to the White House audiotapes, the infamous 18-minute gap, and House Judiciary Committee approval of three articles of impeachment. Nixon resigned August 8, 1974, to avoid a vote by the House and a potential impeachment trial in the Senate.

A month later, President Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon, saying his action was intended to end a “long national nightmare” and a disruptive scandal that had polarized the public. He feared that potential litigation against the former president would arouse “ugly passions” and challenge the “credibility of our free institutions of government … at home and abroad.”

So, have things gotten better since then? Liddy and his fellow co-conspirators were driven by political objectives — to find out everything they could about what the Democratic Party was doing and to get information that they could use to sabotage George McGovern’s presidential campaign. But they got caught because of their ineptness.

Compare that to what we now know happened in the 2016 presidential campaign. The Hillary Clinton presidential campaign — using campaign lawyers, an opposition research firm and allies in the press — orchestrated a smear campaign against Donald Trump. The concocted hoax about his supposed collusion with the Russian government continued well into his presidency.

The Clinton campaign didn’t have to engage bumbling burglars for a risky wiretapping scheme. Instead, as the special counsel, the Justice Department’s inspector general, and the John Durham investigation have revealed, they created a salacious “dossier” rife with phony claims. They also enlisted the help of a technology executive and university researchers with government cybersecurity contracts to secretly scoop up internet communications data from Trump both during the campaign and from the White House itself after he became president. The sophistication of this conspiracy makes Gordon Liddy look like an amateur.

Even the FBI got entangled in this dirty political trick, leading the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency to abuse its authority under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to spy on people connected to the opposition presidential campaign. This, in turn, led to the expensive, unjustified two-year investigation by Special Counsel Bob Mueller that baselessly hampered Trump (and his advisers) in carrying out his presidential duties.

In 1972, Nixon’s dirty trick failed, and Liddy and his co-conspirators all went to prison. The Clinton campaign’s dirty trick failed to win the election. Still, it succeeded in hobbling the Trump presidency and corrupting the Justice Department. Yet no one has gone to prison as a result of what happened in 2016. The cover-up was so successful that we didn’t even know about the illegal spying and politicization of Justice until well after it occurred and the dirty deed was done.

So, what have we learned in the 50 years since Watergate? Dirty tricksters in politics have become more adept at hiding what they are doing, abusing advances in technology to further their dishonest ends, weaponizing federal law enforcement agencies against their political opponents, and using their friends in the media to ensure they are successful.

Americans deserve better. And unfortunately, the dirty tricks in the last presidential campaign have done precisely what Gerald Ford feared: raised “ugly passions,” polarized the electorate, and damaged the “credibility of our free institutions of government … at home and abroad.”

Please follow DVJournal on social media: Twitter@DVJournal or Facebook.com/DelawareValleyJournal