Nutritionally speaking, Thursday’s debate between U.S. Rep. Rob Bresnahan and Scranton Mayor Paige Cognetti was mostly a “baloney” sandwich with no mustard.
Their bases in the bag, both candidates sought to win the middle slice of the electorate that ultimately decides elections, capping a spicy race with a strategically bland last course palatable to the precious few voters who didn’t pick their preferred candidate months ago.
In a mean season of candidate debates marked by finger-pointing and fiery exchanges, the lone Bresnahan/Cognetti “showdown” played out like a polite dispute over a parking space between a pair of moderate Republicans.
“Purple Paige” appealed to the mounting buyer’s remorse of Republicans, “MAGAcrats” and independents who voted for Trump and his spineless Congressional enablers.
“Moderate Rob” ran away from his record of voting for Trump’s cruelest, costliest policies and the insider stock trading the first-term congressman theatrically denounced while banking the benefits.
Purple Paige praised police, pledged support for voter ID, acknowledged that the Biden administration “failed” to secure our borders and allowed cities to be “overrun by illegal immigrants” and shared the fun she had shootin’ guns with her cousins in Montana.
Moderate Rob said Trump’s war of choice on Iran has “gone on far too long” and that immigration law should be “a big fence with a wide gate.” He branded Trump’s pal Putin a “violent, horrible dictator,” pledged support for Ukraine and said ensuring guns don’t fall into the wrong hands is “absolutely necessary.”
Bresnahan also stood up for soft-drink safety, saying “you can turn a Snapple bottle into a weapon if it falls into the wrong person’s hands.”
I am not making that up.
Both candidates maintained their composure throughout the debate, which was expertly hosted by our friends at WVIA News. Moderator Tracey Matisak implored the audience to refrain from applause or outbursts until the end of the debate. The request proved unnecessary. The crowd was stunned into silence by the civility and centrist postures of the candidates.
Halfway through the program, the expressions on many dazed faces in the crowd suggested some were internally asking, “Are we at the right debate?”
Both candidates are incumbents, but Moderate Rob has the job and the baggage that comes with it. Bresnahan is up against three opponents — Cognetti, his own voting record and Trump, who is a raving, half-ton monkey on the backs of every Republican running in the midterms.
Apparently aware that the economic and social consequences of his disastrous decisions are driving even diehard MAGAs to flee his cult, the Oaf of Office has been stumping for imperiled Republicans in deep-red states like Mississippi. At every stop, Trump makes every Republican candidate’s pitch sound like overpriced “baloney.”
OK Kelly, what’s with the “baloney” shtick? I got it from the Bresnahan campaign. Possibly influenced by the powerful Cold Cuts Lobby, several Bresnahan ads featured actual bologna as props. The gag is that Paige is full of “baloney.” Get it?
(Also, I grew up in Southwestern Pennsylvania, where a “fried jumbo” sandwich is a delicacy. I love bologna. “Baloney,” not so much.)
Cheesy as they were, the “baloney” ads were among the least stomach-churning of the race. The worst, most nauseating spots were produced by dark money PACs, courtesy of the Supreme Court selling out our democracy to billionaire sociopaths like Elon Musk via the Citizens United decision.
Independent advocates for both candidates ran negative ads that ranged from mildly misleading to grossly false. Voters who choose candidates based on such ads are key contributors to the corruption, cronyism and institutional incompetence they complain about ad nauseum. We get what we vote for.
Questions in Thursday’s debate addressed immigration, healthcare, the Iran war, voter ID, Ukraine, guns and crime, and the most urgent, politically volatile and bipartisan issue in recent memory — the AI hyperscale data center invasion targeting small towns and rural areas across the country, state and nation. For the details of the debate, read Sunday Times Staff Writer Jeff Horvath’s comprehensive account. Watch the video of the debate at wvia.org.
Purple Paige and Moderate Rob agreed that “local control” over data center development must be preserved and protected, but accused each other of waffling on data centers and worse. Cognetti accused Bresnahan of “inviting” developers to pave over the 8th District with data centers and power plants, pointing to the congressman’s early cheerleading for the industry.
Bresnahan countered that Scranton data center regulations proposed by the mayor’s administration have languished unadopted since March. He said Cognetti’s proposal would leave up to 7% of the city open to data center development. Bresnahan noted he was the first member of Congress to pen a local-control bill, the “Local Control Protection Act,” which opened the door for Cognetti to mock the bill for what it is — an entirely performative charade that never made it out of committee and will never become law.
Either candidate could have won this race months ago by supporting a moratorium on data center development like the three-year pause proposed by state Sen. Katie Muth, D-44. Neither did. Purple Paige took the position that data centers can “work” when sited on land zoned for heavy industry, but attended several public hearings in which she joined the opposition to outrageously inappropriate projects like the Wildcat Ridge Data Center Campus recently rejected by Archbald Borough Council.
To my knowledge, Moderate Rob has never attended a hearing or meeting on data centers in Archbald or anywhere else in the Midvalley. He did, however, use the people who live there in a political ad in which he bizarrely claimed “Archbald fought back and won” weeks before the Wildcat Ridge proposal was rejected.
The ad inflamed the resistance throughout the Midvalley. A subsequent Bresnahan Facebook post congratulating Archbald on the Wildcat Ridge victory only reminded voters there that Moderate Rob made no contribution to the win.
While Purple Paige and Moderate Rob civilly sliced centrist baloney on a soundstage, Sunday Times Staff Writer Frank Wilkes Lesnefsky was at his keyboard tapping out a pair of bombshell scoops every voter should read before going to the polls Tuesday.
First, Frank broke the news that a law firm representing Cornell Reality Management LLC, the Brooklyn-based developers behind the Wildcat Ridge debacle, is targeting Lackawanna County Commissioner Bill Gaughan, Controller Gary DiBileo and Valley View school directors Thomas “Bear” Owen and Joseph Farrell in a prelude to potential litigation against Archbald and its council.
Owen is married to Archbald Councilwoman Erin Owen. If only Bear had known all those years ago that Erin would one day vote against a spectacularly bad data center proposal, he could have broken off the engagement and avoided all this Wildcat Ridge hassle.
In a thuggish, desperate attempt at intimidation, New York law firm Reed Smith sent letters demanding each of the officials preserve “hard copy, tangible, or electronically-stored information relating to the subject matter of the prospective Litigations, including but not limited to all communications related to the Litigations, the Application, and data centers generally.”
In the Wildcat Ridge crew’s typically incompetent fashion, the firm ordered some recipients to preserve documents pertaining to official boards they never sat on. It’s like asking me to provide the minutes of a meeting of the Invasive Hyperscale Data Centers Appreciation Society.
In a written statement, Gaughan reacted to the ham-handed threat accordingly.
“Apparently, when a community stands up to a billion-dollar industry and wins, the next step is to send in the lawyers,” the commissioner wrote. “Let’s call this what it looks like: an attempt to intimidate me and send a chilling message to anyone who dares stand in the way of the data center industry’s ambitions.”
Incredibly, Frank’s second scoop of the week is even more infuriating. Olyphant Borough Council plans to sell out its citizens, their Midvalley neighbors and all of Lackawanna County to settle a lawsuit with a data center developer.
ERCOR Triboro LLC sued the borough to bypass the conditional use process for plans to build seven data centers and a substation across 470-plus acres of industrially zoned land off Marshwood Road. In exchange for settling the suit and surrendering its citizens’ right to present evidence and witness testimony on the project, the borough will receive $101 million over 15 years.
The lone opportunity for citizens to address council before it votes to sell out its constituents will come Thursday at 6 p.m. at the Regal Room, 214 Lackawanna Ave. Citizens have at least 101 million reasons to be there. God knows Frank and I will be.
Voters have every reason we need to vote Tuesday. If you’re sick and tired of billionaires and their elected benefactors and bootlickers feeding us “baloney” while stuffing their pockets at our eternal expense, use the civil remedy enshrined in the Constitution — while we still can.
CHRIS KELLY, the Times-Tribune columnist, prefers mayo on his bologna sandwich. Contact the writer: ckelly@scrantontimes.com; @cjkink on X; Chris Kelly, The Times-Tribune on Facebook; and @chriskellyink on Bluesky