“No one has ever used the word ‘charisma’ when they’re describing Tom Wolf,” says the 47th governor of Pennsylvania. After a slight pause, he laughs and adds, “Feel free to disagree with me.”
It’s a hard thing to disagree with.
If there was one thing you could say about the Jeep-driving, intellectual, liberal, quiet-as-a-church-mouse Democrat who runs the fifth-most populous state in the country, it’s that he knows he does not exude charisma in a profession and culture that demands it. And he is OK with that.
Like most everyone, Wolf is sheltered at his home where he says he has essentially been for the past six weeks, along with his wife, Frances.
There is no dog, nor any kids, they are all up and out.
The couple both share dinner and dishes duties. He explains, “The deal is if I cook, Frances does the dishes, and if she cooks, I do the dishes.”
Most of the day though he is working and communicating with staff, experts, researchers, scientists, medical professionals, members of the General Assembly, and county officials navigating a crisis none of the other 49 governors or the president of the United States has ever navigated before.
During the interview, I can’t see him and he can’t see me. He is sitting at his desk. His wife Frances took a photo of him on the phone during his interview with the Washington Examiner and emailed it.
Despite running a state that the New York Times ranks tenth in the country in terms of coronavirus cases, and the spectacular amount of books he has in his library, if you look at the photo, he looks tired like most of us. He is also anxious to be around others and relieved to be healthy.
It is hours after he has released color-coded charts that outline the different phases of reopening Pennsylvania after the coronavirus; red is the most strident, followed by yellow, then green.
The system is set to begin May 8, nearly two months after he first rolled out closures of counties in the eastern, more populous, corridor of the state and Allegheny County.
To date, all 67 counties are still red and still keeping the nearly 13 million residents of the Keystone State under the stay-at-home order that keeps all non-life-sustaining businesses closed.
The plan is when a region or county averages less than 50 new cases of the virus per 100,000 residents for 14 days, a county will move out from under his statewide lockdown.
For the most part, Wolf has been able to strike a balance in an era that knows no precedent. He admits several times he does not have the most dynamic of personalities and that there have been some bumps along the way, but every poll taken among Pennsylvania residents shows, for the most part, they are OK with his management style during the crisis.
A Fox News poll released Thursday showed 69% approve of his handling of the crisis, with nearly the same amount saying his administration’s stay-at-home order strikes the right balance.
Allegheny County chief executive Rich Fitzgerald attributes Wolf’s high approval ratings to a couple of things; “How he has handled each region and their unique profiles and not diving into strident politics.”
“That’s the way he approaches things, region by region. And the nonpolitical stuff is also a part of his makeup. He’s a very pragmatic type of person. He’s certainly a Democrat. He’s certainly progressive on a whole lot of issues, but he’s also somebody that likes to get things done and is willing to work with anybody that will help him get things done, Democrats or Republicans,” Fitzgerald explained.
Since Wolf first announced the closure of non-life-sustaining businesses in mid-March, he said he has had to always be mindful of the diverse experiences each of the 67 counties have had with the virus. To his right, he explains Philadelphia and it’s collar counties experiences have been similar to New York and New Jersey.
To his left, the center and western county cases have been similar to their Midwestern and Appalachian neighbors of Ohio, West Virginia, and western Maryland. Which is why he says in the beginning he rolled closures in only seven mostly eastern populous counties, and why his open-for-business rollout in the next few weeks will be done regionally and not as one monolithic state.
In the interview, he admits he’s angered his left flank for allowing some fracking to continue under the shutdown, the right for initially shutting down gun shops, the middle for not allowing construction work to continue, the press for limited access in his press conferences, and everyone for shutting down the liquor stores.
“They are open now, Salena,” he deadpans, then laughs.
In the interview, Wolf shares his concerns about the future, addresses his critics, and holds true to his warning before the interview began — he’s just not that exciting.
Washington Examiner: So, I want to start with the polling numbers that have consistently shown you getting very high favorable ratings for your management of the situation. One of the things people credit you with is keeping national politics out of it. Please explain your approach.
Wolf: Well, it wasn’t anything that I planned or was not something that I did by design; it’s just the way I am. And I think I was talking to my brothers and my sister and saying, yeah, I had decided opinions are very competitive. I think when I was in the Peace Corps when I was 19, I dropped out of college, and I realized that if you really want to get things done, and I was this young kid in a village, people that had been doing things the same way for a long period of time, and I was trying to get them to change things: You don’t go in and say, “Hey, I’m just the greatest thing since sliced bread. Let’s do this differently.” You have to work and gain trust. And I think that worked for me in the Peace Corps, worked for me in academia, worked for me in my business career. And that’s just the way I am. I mean, I’m human, so I’m not perfect. But I think just in terms of the way things work has been a very good, good way to work. You can get people, good people, to work around you and they do the really hard stuff, and you get to take credit for it. But it’s not a matter of showboating. It’s a matter of actually working to get things done. I’ve found that it has worked very well throughout my life and I think it’s working here.
Washington Examiner: What would you pinpoint to your managerial style in a crisis? Would you pinpoint it to the Peace Corps or to academia, business owner or to Cabinet positions that you’ve held before, or would you pinpoint it to all of them influencing how you have handled this?
Wolf: Yeah, I think all. I even include growing up with an extended family of 14 kids all about my same age. There’s not a lot of showboating that goes on. You learn pretty quickly what works. And again, part of it is just the way I’m built ethically. No one has ever used the word ‘charisma‘ when they’re describing Tom Wolf.
Feel free to disagree with me. [Laughs.]
My two cousins and I were partners in a business, we worked together to build it into a fairly nice size, then we sold it, and then it was on the verge of bankruptcy. I went back and reserved the title, CEO, and those were some pretty scary moments, and they remind me a lot of what I’m doing now. There were also scary moments when I was in the Peace Corps doing an irrigation project or saying to folks, “Hey, plant this little seed. It’ll increase your crop yield tenfold.” And if the rains didn’t hold, I was really in trouble. So you worry about things, that keeps you awake, but I think those are the times in life you look back on and say, “This was really interesting, and I’m really glad that I was there when these tough decisions had to be made.” So I think part of it is also the academic background. I was a political science guy, but my dissertation was basically history. I take that long look, and it gives me a little more, maybe a sense of perspective that maybe I wouldn’t have otherwise. And that gives me a little bit of calm in crisis situations. That was true, again, in the Peace Corps, it was true in academia, it was true in business, and it’s true in this.
Washington Examiner: You are enjoying an incredibly high approval of your management of this. You’ve also faced some criticisms from the Left for keeping fracking open, from the Right for closing gun stores, from the middle for closing construction, and from Salena Zito for closing liquor stores.
Wolf: They are open now, Salena. (Laughing)
Washington Examiner: In addition, you have also irked the press corps for having staff read their questions rather than questioning you. How do you address the criticisms?
Wolf: I actually just had a press conference this morning. Twice a week, the press comes straight to me. In my preference, I always did a lot of press conferences where the press were actually right there. But we’re in a different situation, and when I do a press conference with them, someone else reads their questions. So to try to reconnect, I do conferences where the press actually ask me questions. Now, it’s still remote because we’re trying to be safe with the virus, but I just did that. It’s about a half an hour, twice a week. And each time, I’m trying to make sure that I’m making myself as accessible as I possibly can, given the constraints we all have. And if there’s some other way that we can do this that you might find is better, I’m all ears. I know the president does this with having social distance and spaced out folks in the audience, but I’m trying to stay home. So I’m trying to do the best I can under the circumstances and make sure I’m not being inconsistent. But I acknowledge that it would be wonderful to go back to the days where we could just have a regular old press conference, people could ask questions, look me in the eye, and same thing with me.
Washington Examiner: There is a common thread talking to people across the political spectrum that did not specify an unhappiness or blame directed at you, but their frustrations, for the most part, were that they were just scared.
Wolf: Hey, and I get that. I don’t think there’s one of that 12.8 million Pennsylvanians who wouldn’t say, “Let me just wave a magic wand or snap my finger to make this all go away so we go back to where we were in January or February.” I want that too. The problem is that our lives now are being governed not by me or by the General Assembly or by Donald Trump or by anybody, but by this coronavirus. And what all of us are doing is trying to figure out in this brand new world we’re in, what is the best way we can navigate through this? We want to stay safe as we can. Yeah, and we want our old lives back. And within the dictates of this virus, what’s the best we can do? Did you ever read H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds? The Martians were not killed by anything the human beings made, they were killed by microbes, and it was a virus or bacteria. At the end, I went away from that thinking — that actually makes a lot of sense. That probably is the Achilles’ heel of humanity, and sure enough, here we are. This has probably devastated our society more than any war we’ve ever fought or anything we’ve ever done. And it’s a little microbe that’s doing it. We’re all frustrated by this situation. We really hate it. And we have different ways of expressing our frustration, but in every single case, we’re all frustrated. I’m frustrated with this, and I really don’t like our common enemy that we’re facing here, and I’m trying to do the best I can, recognize that there might be some disagreement with that, but we’re all trying to do the best we can. And I think that’s ultimately what will allow us to try to fix together and disagreements, but we start from a common point, and that is we’re frustrated. We want to do what’s best for Pennsylvania.
Washington Examiner: Have you considered either once this is over or as the opening is rolling out, getting in your Jeep and driving around the back roads of all of our counties to really get a feel for where we are in this state?
Wolf: Yes. Although I did buy a new Jeep about six months ago. I got the same thing. I got a sport, a stick-shift. Do you know that the Jeep Wrangler is the only car, that I know of, American made car, where a standard transmission is standard? In every other car you buy, if you want standard transmission, you have to upgrade. So still have the old one, it’s a 2005 Jeep.
Washington Examiner: What keeps you up at night when it comes to thinking about this rollout?
Wolf: That is exactly why we’re doing it the way we’re doing it. We’re rolling it out where we think the likelihood of success is greatest, but we’ve also left open. We’re working in, again, uncharted waters as we keep saying. And so if we make a mistake, we need to be able to backtrack. And that’s what this plan does. We have a metric, we want to be objective here, but we recognize some measure of subjectivity to it. And ultimately, if we do everything we can to make the best judgment we can and we’re wrong, we need to be able to say, “OK, we were wrong.” And to say back to that, “Let’s get back to where we were.” In any case, the world that we’re moving into, this infectious disease world, and I don’t think this will be the last of these. We’re all going to have to change our ways. I think we’ve seen a lot more people wear masks, if not everybody, when we go out. I think social distancing will become a lot more prevalent. People will probably travel less. There’ll be a lot of things that are different in this new world that I think people are going to have to just live with. And again, it’s not going to be because anybody, the president, a governor, the General Assembly says this is what you’re going to have to do. It’s going to be because we want to keep our relatives and our neighbors safe, and we’re going to have to change our behavior. We’re going to have to think twice before we get into large crowds, if we ever do that. We’re going to think differently about how we visit people, friends, family in the hospital or long-term care facilities. Life is going to be different, but again, it’s not going to be because of anything the government does, it’s going to be because we’re looking at the lives around us and as we’ve always done, I think to do whatever we can to keep people safe. So that’s the reality that we’re moving into. The thing that keeps me up is, are we doing the right things given what we have? We could have more testing, we could have better testing, and we could have more capacity in our healthcare system. There are all kinds of things that I’m sure weeks from now there will be a lot of looking back and pointing fingers. But going through it, you’re always, and this is exactly the way it was when I was in business trying to turn a company around. There are a lot of ideas and suggestions as to how what you’re doing right now is absolutely positively wrong. And the thing that keeps you up at night is thinking, “I’m doing what I think is right here, but I might be wrong.” And so I think that addition thought, that idea that I’m doing the best I can here, but I might be wrong, that those are the things that always kept me up and they do now.
Washington Examiner: Your thoughts on the technology and the science and the research that have come out of places like the University of Pittsburgh, whether it’s vaccines or modeling or data or medicine or science? What have your impressions been about that aspect in this discovery?
Wolf: I’m impressed. The models, University of Pittsburgh has a good one, University of Washington has a good one, Lehigh Valley has a good one, Carnegie Mellon I think has a good one. The thing that I like is they’re really serious people thinking about these things in very quantifiable and disciplined ways, and I really appreciate it. I think we need to take more advantage of the brain power that exists in Pennsylvania. I think we have so much unused capacity. We have created a portal as the department of community and economic development to ask businesses, for example, to make suggestions as to how they can help with this process. And I think it’s gotten such good response from the business community that I’d like to find a way to maybe do a better job of coordinating it, trying to bring businesses together. Our research institutions, I think we’re second or third in the country in terms of the number of seats in higher education. We have some phenomenal institutions for higher education here, like the University of Pittsburgh, like Carnegie Mellon, Penn State, Penn, and Lehigh. The list goes on and on, and all of them are thinking deeply about what it would take, what it might take to get us through this. I really enjoyed personally that aspect of interacting with these folks. I’m hoping that I’m doing everything I can in that regard. In terms of, again, the research in terms of antibody testing, diagnostic testing, the stuff that is coming out in terms of research I think has yet to be proven. And I keep a watch on that, but so does the department of health. There’s some real experts in Harrisburg and other places extant, we have our state lab, that they are really paying attention to this too. And I think in terms of that aspect of where we are, it’s just a little too early to declare victory. But it’s heartening to see so many different organizations devoting so much effort to finding a solution to the problems that we’re facing right now.
