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Onorato stays on the attack

It’s been almost a week since Republican Tom Corbett made what is now widely considered the first high-profile gaffe of the gubernatorial race when he said that some Pennsylvanians are purposefully remaining jobless to collect unemployment benefits. But Democrat Dan Onorato is showing no sign that he’ll relent from attacking Corbett over the comments.

And with the attorney general’s campaign seemingly struggling to effectively push back against the criticism, the week-long blitz from Onorato is turning into a significant PR coup.

Onorato, the Allegheny County executive, has already hammered Corbett during news conferences in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Harrisburg, winning local press coverage at each stop. He was set to deliver the same message in Allentown and Scranton on Thursday, and in Lancaster on Friday.

At the same time, his campaign has been dogged in pointing out contradictions in the Corbett campaign’s explanations of the remarks, and has noted that he made similarly impolitic comments in March. The campaign distilled its attack into a recent online petition and a Web video released Thursday (embedded at bottom).

“Tom Corbett doesn’t even recognize that there’s a problem, so of course he can’t be part of the solution,” Onorato said in a recent statement. “Our economy is struggling, families in Pennsylvania are hurting, and a Harrisburg insider like Tom Corbett is so out of touch that he’s actually blaming the victims of the recession.”

While Corbett said this week that he didn’t mean to sound “insensitive,” he has hardly made a full retreat from the remarks that started the controversy. Corbett campaign aides did not immediately return phone calls on Thursday. But the campaign’s seeming inability to squelch Onorato’s preferred narrative is palpable, and the contradictions pointed out by Onorato’s campaign are real.

Those discrepancies started from the outset, when Corbett said he was simply relaying what he had heard from a candy company while his campaign spokesman said it was a plumbing company. Since then, the candy company in question has refuted Corbett’s suggestion that it hired European college students because it couldn’t fill full-time positions. As Onorato’s campaign has trotted out unemployed job-seekers to bolster its case, there has been no similar effort so far by the Corbett campaign.

And in building a case that Corbett said exactly what he meant, Onorato’s campaign noted that in March, according to Capitol Ideas, Corbett suggested that an extension of unemployment benefits was leading people to avoid looking for work. “What I see here are people looking for jobs, but that’s only 10 percent [of the unemployed],” Corbett said at the time. “What about the other 80 or 90 percent?”

Asked Thursday just how long the Onorato campaign would stay on the issue, campaign spokesman Brian Herman said: “As long as it keeps getting heard, as long as it’s working.”

July 15, 2010 at 1:13 pm

--Dan Hirschhorn

Tags: Dan Onorato, Tom Corbett

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