Rural slice of a big state tests Obama

Issues might seem to break toward Mr. Obama. Only two of 38 people interviewed — most in random door-knocking — favored remaining in Iraq. (Mr. Obama advocates a 16-month withdrawal timetable; Mr. McCain vows to stay until the war is won but suggests that he would have troops out by 2013.)

Few want a handout, but fewer want government to abandon them. A simmering hurt suffuses their words, a sense that neither hard work nor their unions could save them.

James Stanford, a retired and still heavily muscled steel worker, stood behind his screen door and spoke of a pension that evaporated. “Obama got one thing right,” Mr. Stanford said. “We are bitter here.”

John Sylvester, 76, remembers when you could not find a parking space in Beaver Falls. You danced Saturday night at the Sons of Italy Club and drank with Dutch Town and River Rat neighborhood boys.

Mr. Sylvester labored in a steel mill for 42 years. Then the mill owner declared bankruptcy. Now he was bent over a chipped fire hydrant, putting down a coat of yellow paint for $7 an hour.

His blue eyes were piercing beneath a white sun visor. “I got a little money in the end but nothing to speak of,” he said.

'He hasn't said a whole lot'
Decades of job losses have created a youthful diaspora — you can knock on many doors without finding anyone under age 45. Declining enrollments forced Raccoon Township to close its elementary and middle schools. Political wisdom holds that such fractures favor the Democrats.

But Mr. Obama does not sound like a sure bet.

“Obama’s very charismatic but if you listen closely, he hasn’t said a whole lot,” Mr. Sylvester said.

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In Raccoon, Kelly Dobbins, a middle-aged factory worker, offered the same. “I’m like a duck in the water — I float there but underneath I’m paddling hard as I can go,” Mr. Dobbins said. “What’s pushing me toward McCain is Obama. Who is he? Where does he stand?”

Such questions hint at a cultural disconnect. Mr. Obama would invest tens of billions of dollars in retooling mills and factories to fashion windmills and solar panels. He notes that Denmark and the Netherlands have grown fat off the new energy economy.

But environmentalism holds little attraction in a county where soot-covered stoops and dirty rivers were accepted as an unfortunate tradeoff of a prosperous industrial age.

“Until people see a factory transformed, they really don’t put much store by this talk,” said the Rev. Henry Knapp of First Presbyterian Church in Beaver.

Still, two-thirds of Pennsylvanians surveyed in the Franklin & Marshall poll ranked the economy as their No. 1 concern.

Hookstown sits surrounded by emerald fields near the West Virginia border. White-haired Art Seckman stepped gingerly off his porch.

Mr. Seckman puts no faith in Mr. McCain. “He looks tired, and he’s gung-ho about war,” Mr. Seckman said. “I was a Hillary guy, but Obama sounds honest and he’s young and he understands the modern economy.”

He paused, and laughed, “Maybe, funny as it sounds, it’s time for a black man to fix this mess.”

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