CLEVELAND ― Hillary Clinton’s camp is focusing on Tom Vilsack as a potential running mate, but not because he is the former governor of Iowa or the longest-serving secretary of agriculture in half a century.
It’s because Vilsack, in his own mind, remains a son of the place of his birth and upbringing ― Pittsburgh. He maintains close ties there, and is a typically impassioned member of the Pittsburgh diaspora of emigrants created by the collapse of the local steel-based economy in the 1970s.
An orphan who was left almost literally on the doorstep of the Sister of Charity’s Roselia Foundling Home in 1950, Vilsack was educated in local schools and steeped in Pittsburgh culture before leaving the city for good after graduating from Hamilton College.
A Roman Catholic whose father was of Eastern European stock ― the staple of working-class white Pittsburgh ― Vilsack grew up an ardent fan of the Pirates and the Steelers and remains focused on them with the kind of emotion and obsessive detail that only the locals fully understand and appreciate.
As a fellow Pittsburgher, I know all this: Vilsack and I talk Steelers all the time.
Why does any of this matter?
Because Republican nominee Donald Trump almost certainly can’t beat Clinton in November without winning Iowa and Pennsylvania.
As the local newspapers in and around Pittsburgh have been noting with pride, Vilsack has “Pittsburgh roots,” a crucial calling card in a city and region where demographic change has been slow and most residents tend to be from families with long local ties.
Trump is targeting the white working class in the industrial arch that stretches from Michigan in the west to the old coal fields and docks of the Philadelphia and Scranton areas in the east.
“Those areas are going to be very strong for us,” Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort told me here the other day, and he is probably right.
Indeed, old semi-rural industrial areas around Cleveland, I found, are thick with pro-Trump voters, and they are heavily motivated.
An orphan, an Eastern European, a Catholic and a Steelers fan, Vilsack can talk the cultural language of those voters in the old mill towns of Western Pennsylvania and Eastern and Southeastern Ohio.
The local papers in the region are following the Clinton selection process closely.
Iowa is a crucial swing state as well, and the main news about Vilsack, if he is chosen, will come from downtown Des Moines.
But if he is actually chosen, it will be in good measure because he will be a screaming headline in print and online at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.