By Alex Roarty
PoliticsPA
roarty@politicspa.com

SCRANTON — Joe Sestak, tied down in Washington to cast a vote extending federal funding to states, wasn’t able to attend his own rally here Tuesday afternoon.

The crowd of several hundred inside a local high school gym didn’t seem to mind. They were more than happy to listen to former President Bill Clinton.

The nation’s 42nd chief executive, who has become the party’s go-to surrogate in Pennsylvania of late, told the gathered audience that Democrats remain the best candidates to turn around the country’s economic fortunes despite continued hard times felt since President Obama’s inauguration. Clinton, in a speech that sometimes felt more like an economic lecture than inspirational call-to-arms, also blasted Republicans for seeking to re-institute policies he says led the country to financial ruin while squeezing the middle class.

“Republicans are saying they had a year-and-a-half to fix the mess we left them, so put us back in charge,” Clinton said. “That’s basically their argument.”

Sestak, who faces Republican Pat Toomey in November, made an appearance only via a brief video. He was in Washington to support a bill that would extend Medicaid aid to states and boost education funding, a vote that was unexpectedly pushed from the morning to afternoon and prevented him from attending the rally.

The Democratic U.S. Senate nominee, in fact, was only sparingly mentioned throughout by Clinton, who stayed away almost entirely from the specifics of the Pennsylvania statewide race (Toomey was never mentioned by name) and focused instead on combating the national perception that Democratic ecnomic recovery policies have been ineffective.

When the former president did mention Sestak, he referenced his work as a military adviser to Clinton while he was in the White House. The former Navy admiral learned how to solve problems regardless of ideology during his time in the military, Clinton said, an argument Sestak’s campaign has made continuously this summer.

“I think one of the big reasons he made it all the way to the top of the Navy was he was a problem solver,” said the former president. “He could analyze whether the problems were and do something to solve them.”

For the first time since 2004, political headwinds appear to heavily favor Republicans, a fact Clinton acknowledged and said was a result of many people feeling as though the country is not in a better place now than it was when President Obama took office.

But that’s an unfair assessment, he said. Democrats haven’t turned the economy around yet but they have stopped conditions from getting worse thanks in part to the federal stimulus bill, he said.

The first thing someone should do if they’ve dug themselves into a hole is stop digging, Clinton told the crowd, and Democrats have done that. Republicans, he said, want to pick the shovel back up.

“If you vote for these people who are running against guys like Joe Sestak, they’ll go up there and take the oath of office,” Clinton said. “They’ll have one hand on the bible and they got a shovel in the other hand. They want to start digging again.”

Clinton and U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, who also attended, sought to frame the election as a battle of the Democratic president’s economic policies and those of former President George W. Bush.

But Nachama Soloveichik, Toomey spokeswoman, said that argument doesn’t hold water because Clinton worked with Republican majorities in Congress.

“When President Clinton teamed up with Republican majorities in Congress, we had a balanced budget,” she said. “When President Obama teamed up with Nancy Pelosi and Joe Sestak, we got the largest deficits in American history. The clear solution is to send Pat Toomey to the Senate to provide a check and balance against the massive overspending by the liberal leadership in Washington.”