Barack Obama & Bob Casey in Paoli on April 19

The word I least expected to hear at the Democratic Convention in Denver this week was the name of my home town, Paoli, PA, population 5425. Paoli is but one portion of Tredyffrin township¹, which in its 300 year history, has elected exactly one Democrat to the local council. But there was Bob Casey, Pennsylvania’s conservative Democratic senator, on the dais Tuesday night, proclaiming that he supported Barack Obama because he knew Barack Obama, partly because he had traveled with him “from Pittsburgh to Paoli” during the Pennsylvania primary.

Our one Dem, Paul Drucker, won a couple of years back &served mostly to wake the slumbering GOP, which promptly organized and made him a one-term pheenom. But the demographics of these here ‘burbs are changing, and Paul has a decent shot at the state house of representatives this coming November. Ironically, it’s been the Republican impulse to approve every new real estate development deal that has made the area affordable for folks moving out either from Philly or one of the inner suburbs. Right now both a steel mill and a golf course have been plowed over for new town home communities in the immediate vicinity. Thirteen years ago, when we moved here, this was the border between the suburbs and Pennsylvania ’s farmland. Now you have to drive at least 30 miles west to find that divide. A little more development & the GOP won’t be the majority party in Paoli or Tredyffrin.

 

¹ Townships are an odd governmental unit that I’d not come across until we moved to Pennsylvania. They aggregate multiple towns &/or parts of them – Wayne, the town David Brooks has memorialized in two books as “Paradise,” is partly in Tredyffrin here in Chester County, but also partly in Montgomery & Delaware counties as well. Paoli’s two real institutions are a post office and a volunteer fire department. Tredyffrin includes the local government, police & parks, but the school district combines Tredyffrin & a neighboring township.