My Interview with Melissa Hart

He can't be serious, you're saying. There's no way HE could be be chatting with HER, you're yelling between knashings of your teeth. Something must be dreadfully wrong with The Universe in order for that to happen, you're screaming while pulling out what remains of your hair.

Nope. It's all true, The proof is right there. On the right. Get it? It's a pun.

Earlier this election year, I interviewed two prospective candidates for Tim Murphy's House Seat; Wayne Dudding and Steve O'Donnell. I thought it only fair to extend the same invitation to one who's looking to reacquire Jason Altmire's House seat. And the rest, as they say, is history. Well, recent history.

Sitting in a bright corner of Mitchell's Fish Market downtown, me with a ginger ale, Hart with an alcohol-free Seabreeze and Alicia, Hart's Campaign Manager, with a diet Pepsi, we had a very nice chat about her campaign. I started the ball rolling by asking her why she wanted to run again.

After devouring at the orange slice that came with the Seabreeze, she answered that she had a lot of reasons to run. She said she's looking to finish some projects she was working on when she left Congress - some highway projects in order to bring economic development to the area, for instance.

Every now and then throughout our chat, her well manicured fingers tapped at the table for emphasis.

Her main point, and one I'm guessing she's relying on for her campaign, is that she feels she's a "better fit" for the voters in PA-4. While Democrats constitute 57% of the district, she says, the voters there don't fall into an Republican vs Democrat choice. The voters, she said, want lower taxes, less regulation and so forth. Assuming a leftward shift in the Democratic Party (and, unfortunately, she did use the incorrect "Democrat Party" a few times), she said that given the current political climate John F Kennedy would be a Republican these days. PA-4 voters, though, are closer to JFK than they are to Nancy Pelosi, she said.

Obviously she's thinking she'll win in November, when asked about the three recent special elections (the ones where Democrats beat the Republicans in highly "red" districts) she side-stepped a bit. As they were special elections, they shouldn't be used as a model for all the elections to come.

When asked about the overwhelming advantage money Congressman Altmire has at the present time (at last count, he has $1.3 million on hand to her $393,000, with little possible help from the NRCC) she said, "We'll have what we need."

Given her high conservative ratings from the National Journal, she scored an 83 on economic policy (higher than Orrin Hatch) and an 89 on foreign policy (higher even than Rick Santorum), I wondered how she close of a match she could be.

I wondered, as well, how she would explain how she, if she indeed was a "better fit" for the district, was voted out of office in 2006. She explained that that year was an anomaly. The voters were sending a message. They were mad about the war, they had reason to be angry and they took it out on the Republicans.

Now however, the situation in Iraq is getting better, she said and Bush is not an issue in this campaign and so on. My guess is that the voters will decide whether either of those are indeed the case.

I had to ask about her appearance on Pintek's show from a few weeks ago. She was on and said that the Chinese were drilling off the coast of Cuba. This urban myth has since been debunked and even the office of the Vice President has said it wasn't true.

She agreed. The Chinese weren't drilling. They were relying on this old NYTimes article and this recent column by George Will. They said they'd heard it from so many places they figured it was probably true. It seemed true and in fact the Cubans did make a deal with the Chinese.

She did add, however, that they may be drilling now.

Transcript to follow.