First lady visits Philly as part of fall campaign
PHILADELPHIA — Michelle Obama told a crowd Wednesday in the Democratic Party stronghold of Philadelphia to come out in big numbers for gubernatorial hopeful Tom Wolf, saying the president’s agenda will be helped by a Wolf victory.
The well-traveled first lady told hundreds gathered at the Dorothy Emanuel Recreation Center in northwest Philadelphia that the first-time candidate will refuse to accept crumbling classrooms and teacher shortages, a shot at school funding cuts under Republican Gov. Tom Corbett.
She also gave a defense of her husband’s record in office — by almost every economic measure, people are better off today, she said. Having people like Wolf in public office — who understand “what’s really going on in people’s lives,” she said — could help President Barack Obama advance an agenda that includes fighting for an increase in the minimum wage and equal pay for women.
“If we truly want to finish what we started, then we need to elect Tom Wolf as governor of Pennsylvania,” the first lady told the crowd.
She also warned against another drop-off in Democratic Party votes in the midterm election, saying that too many people who helped elect her husband to the White House in 2008 “tuned out” in the 2010 midterm election.
“And that’s what folks on the other side are counting on right now,” she told the crowd. “Because when we stay home, they win.”
“They’re hoping and praying that we’re not organized and energized, but only we can prove them wrong,” the first lady said.
Wolf is leading Corbett in independent polls as the Democrat tries to break a four-decade tradition of Pennsylvania governors winning a second term.
Corbett is Pennsylvania’s former two-term attorney general from the Pittsburgh area. Wolf ran his family’s York-based building products distribution business for much of the last three decades. Spending in the campaign is threatening to break Pennsylvania’s record of nearly $70 million, thanks in part to the $10 million that Wolf gave his campaign.
The Corbett campaign, meanwhile, is hammering Wolf in the same way that Democrats attacked GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney in 2012 — painting him as a millionaire without morals who profited by slashing jobs — and is accusing him of planning a massive middle-class tax increase.
The first lady is making stops this month for Democratic candidates for governor or U.S. Senate in Florida, Massachusetts, Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin and Illinois. The White House says President Obama will come to Pennsylvania to campaign for Wolf before the Nov. 4 election as part of a seven-state swing.
To a large degree, the gubernatorial election will be won or lost in Philadelphia and its four suburban counties: Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery. Pennsylvania has nearly 8.3 million registered voters, and one in three lives in Philadelphia or its suburban counties.
