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As I mentioned briefly in my response to Ed’s last note, I spent much of last week on a 13-hour road trip from New York City to Chicago in order to drop my daughter at college (good news, only two Covid-19 cases detected in the almost 1,000 students tested at the last count). Much of that time was spent driving through Pennsylvania, which has arguably become the most important swing state in the nation.
Pennsylvania is, as Southern liberal politico James Carville once put it, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between. Philly is home to the University of Pennsylvania, which boasts some of the world’s most cutting-edge cancer research, and Pittsburgh (home to one of the favourite football teams of my youth, the Steelers) is one of the many rustbelt cities that is successfully reinventing…