Jobs, Baby, Jobs

Pittsburgh, PA -- "Jobs, baby, jobs" was United Steelworkers President Leo Gerard's riposte to the McCain-Palin ticket on a raucous, almost revival-style, three-hour radio celebration of the opportunity to revive the economy, rebuild the American middle class, and repower America with clean, green, energy investments.

The program, hosted at Steelworkers headquarters here, was part of Ed Schultz's "Voices of American" radio tour, which you can hear on podcast. It featured Gerard and me, Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, U.S. Senator Bob Casey, Pennsylvania House members Jason Altmire and Mike Doyle, and Dave Foster, head of the Blue Green Alliance. What was remarkable was how common the vision and language were -- a real picture is emerging of how green energy can create jobs, help the middle class, and solve global warming, and it's becoming more and more a central theme for this election.

But even as this exciting new dialogue grows and swells, some things never change. Earlier in the day, in Manchester, New Hampshire, stumping for Jeanne Shaheen in her race for the Senate, I heard that Republican operatives in the state were using exactly the same voter-suppression tactics I'd had to counter four year ago in that state: telling college students that if they exercise their right to make New Hampshire their residence and register to vote there, they will become ineligible for college scholarships.

New Hampshire offers same-day registration, so college students who want to vote there should ignore these absurd scare tactics and get the facts about their rights from the state's website.

Paid for by Sierra Club Political Committee, www.sierraclub.org, and not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.