![]() I first caught a glimpse of that recipe back in the late 1990s when I was Bernie Sanders’ press secretary, watching the self-described socialist bash billionaire greed and rack up votes in Vermont’s conservative Northeast Kingdom. Watching the scene, I can’t help but think Shapiro - my old Junior Jewish Basketball League buddy from the Philly suburbs - may have found the recipe I’ve spent a quarter century hunting for: the one that channels working-class rage away from culture wars and into populist economics, rather than insisting the rage is deplorable or pretending it doesn’t exist. Giving me a tour of the building’s ancient duckpin bowling lanes, Cro Club owner Jim Brandemarte confides that he’s a practicing Catholic but likes that Shapiro “had the guts to go after the priests” - a reference to the biggest case Shapiro ever brought as the state’s top law enforcement official. One old timer tells me Shapiro’s barrage of lawsuits against health care and fracking companies shows “he’s the only one who seems like he’s doing anything in Harrisburg.” He exudes a mix of Huey Long populism and Ted Lasso can-do-ness, rousing the crowd with jeremiads against “student loan companies that rip off our students” and “the greed of pharmaceutical company board rooms” that sowed the opioid epidemic in Appalachia.Īlready being mentioned as a future Democratic presidential contender, Shapiro, 49, is campaigning in Republican territory in the final days of the gubernatorial race for his so-called “Big Fights Bus Tour” - and the battles he has waged as Pennsylvania’s attorney general are top of mind among the cheering crowd. But instead of emanating an outsider’s off-putting, John-Kerry-asking-for-Swiss-on-a-cheesesteak vibe, Shapiro somehow fits in. ![]() This short, clean-shaven, bespectacled Jewish pol from a leafy suburb on the other side of the state should be a fish out of water in this West Virginia-ish part of Pennsylvania long written off by the national Democratic Party. ![]()
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