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Wednesday, October 30, 2002

By Ann Belser, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

If dollars turn out to be the deciding factor in the race for the 4th Congressional District, Republican incumbent Melissa Hart will win.

If the contest is decided by the number of registered voters in each party, Democratic challenger Stevan Drobac Jr. will take the seat.

With more than a $1 million raised as of Sept. 30, Hart's campaign has financially dwarfed her opponent's. Drobac, who has raised $50,668, is hoping he can get his message out without the blanket of advertising that has been paid for by the Hart campaign.

If he wins, Drobac said, "it will prove that it doesn't take money to win an election, it takes votes to win an election. It should be interesting."

Hart said she's not taking any chances. She's keeping a full campaign schedule and sending her message through radio and television advertisements and personal campaign appearances.

For Hart, this campaign has a different flavor than the last. The district has been reconfigured, making it much larger. It takes in northern Allegheny County, all of Beaver and Lawrence and parts of Butler, Mercer and Westmoreland counties.

In addition, Hart's opponent this time is a furloughed flight attendant instead of another politician.

Drobac, 50, of Center, Beaver County, has an associate degree in criminal justice from Beaver County Community College. He worked for the Center police department for 25 years, serving as an officer, a detective and, at times, acting chief. After he retired, he worked for US Airways as a flight attendant but took a furlough in December when the airline announced it would lay off flight attendants.

Hart, 40, of Bradford Woods, was elected to Congress in 2000 after serving 10 years in the state Senate. She is a graduate of Washington and Jefferson College and the law school at the University of Pittsburgh.

Drobac said he is not daunted by his opponent's academic degrees. "She has a law degree, but she uses that law degree to vote for the big corporations," he said.

"That's the kind of thing I get," Hart said of this campaign. "It's not the high level of discourse I had the last time."

Two years ago, Hart was running to fill the seat left vacant by Ron Klink, who was making his own unsuccessful bid for the U.S. Senate. Her opponent was Terry Van Horne, a state representative from Westmoreland County, against whom she waged a bitter campaign.

Hart said the candidates focused more on issues in that campaign.

She said her tenure in Congress has made her a more practical politician. For instance, she said, she now supports providing loans to low-income residents through the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development to promote home ownership. Helping people get into homes "they actually own will help build communities," she said. If she had stuck strictly to a conservative ideology, she said, she still would oppose that program.

It's Hart's ideology that has Drobac fired up about the race, he said. Her support for privatizing Social Security is one that he argues vehemently about. Drobac pointed to the steel workers whose retirement plans were nearly wiped out when J&L Steel Corp. went bankrupt. He said the workers walked away with the money they had contributed to their 401(k) plans for years, but they didn't get the company matches or the interest on their funds.

He said he doesn't want people's Social Security put at the same sort of risk.

The money for Drobac's campaign has come mostly from individuals. Of his $50,668, $6,250 has come from political committees, including political action committees. Hart's $1 million is nearly split between individual contributors, who have given the incumbent $535,000, and political action committees that have sent $506,000 to her campaign fund.

Hart said she is raising as much as she can because she wants to make sure voters hear her message as she makes her way throughout the district.