After crisscrossing the state for the last 16 months, Republican primary candidate for governor Paul Mango said he will bring optimism back to Pennsylvanians who have been overtaken with a malaise spurred by an uncertain economy, fleeing young people and the devastating opioid epidemic.
“Pennsylvanians don’t always feel like winners,” Mango, 59, told The Times editorial board in a Monday endorsement meeting, “and they want to be winners again.”
A Pine Township resident, Mango is a former consulting firm executive who graduated from the United States Military Academy (West Point) in 1981 and served as a paratrooper in the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division.
In 1988, he earned a master’s in business from Harvard Business School before joining McKinsey & Co., where he spearheaded health-care initiatives.
Mango, who has been endorsed by Beaver County Republican Commissioners Dan Camp and Sandie Egley, is running in the GOP gubernatorial primary against Ohio Township litigation attorney Laura Ellsworth and state Sen. Scott Wagner of York County. The winner of the May 15 primary will challenge Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf in the general election.
Neither of his parents had college degrees and his family did not have much, but Mango said he and his four siblings were instilled with “a great sense of optimism about the future,” which is reflected in his campaign’s theme of “Restore the Dream” to return hope to disenchanted Pennsylvanians.
“There’s no one else in the race that has a set of leadership training and experiences, no one else that has the relevant business training and experiences to do it, but I do,” said Mango, who also said he would bring integrity and high character to the office.
Promising to bring “change leadership” to Harrisburg, Mango said a governor needs a vision and a plan to ensure that government and residents buy into it, which he said Wolf has not done. A key to succeeding is listening and respecting different views, and relying on facts to reach agreement.
“You have to listen to everyone’s point of view without compromising your own principles,” he said.
The campaign has turned particularly bitter between Mango and Wagner with both running negative TV ads targeting the other. While Wagner told The Times last week that he is simply defending himself from unfair allegations, Mango said Wagner fired the first shot with charges that he backed Obamacare, outsourced jobs and received a no-bid contract from the Wolf administration.
Mango said they asked Wagner’s campaign to take down the ads on March 12 and gave him two weeks to respond.
“We gave him an opportunity,” Mango said. “He didn’t take down his misleading ads, and we fired back.”
Wolf, Mango said, has presided over a “very slow-growth economy” and failed to properly promote the state to businesses. Economic growth would alleviate job losses and help keep young people in the state, he said.
Mango said there is “a lack of transparency” in the budgeting process and “no one’s leading by example,” pointing to rising legislative and government costs.
When it comes to a severance tax on natural gas drilling, Mango opposes one. Levying a tax in addition to the current impact fee would discourage the industry’s growth in Pennsylvania, he said.
Mango said it would be “immoral” to rip away pensions from those already in the state system. As governor, he would support a lump-sum retirement offer and efforts to stop voluntary overtime that increases pensions.
Also, the state government, with its 73,000 workers, is not as technologically updated as it could be and the employment rolls could be reduced through attrition and buyouts in conjunction with more automation. Paying for Medicaid expansion is also an approaching issue that needs to be addressed, he said.
Spending on the Legislature is out of control, Mango said, but he does not support downsizing because it might hurt Pennsylvanians in rural counties who could have even less access to their legislators. Instead, he would back legislators meeting in session less or serving part time.
On opioids, Mango said the answers lie with those on the front lines in the battle, such as coroners, police, emergency medical technicians, pharmacists, and parents and families of overdose victims. Those people know where drugs are being dealt, which doctors are over-prescribing pills and where overdoses are happening all the time, he said.
“What we need to do is harness the power of that knowledge because Harrisburg doesn’t have that knowledge,” Mango said. “A one-size-fits-all mandate cannot solve that problem.”
The state’s role is to provide local communities with the resources to pursue their efforts and track what programs are working in each of the state’s 67 counties and share that information with other counties.
Mango said he would focus on prevention rather than treatment because recovery is unsuccessful all too frequently. Children need to be given an unvarnished picture of addiction and its consequences, he said.
Independent commissions to draw electoral maps are not a good idea, Mango said, because citizens already are involved by electing legislators who are constitutionally tasked with drawing maps.
“The (state) Supreme Court overstepped its bounds,” he said of the ruling that led to the court implementing its own congressional districts map in February.
All threats to children when it comes to guns must be assessed, said Mango, a Second Amendment supporter. Suicides, he said, far outpace the number of students killed in schools, and he would tell districts to assess the threats particular to each one.
“What I’d want to see is a rigorous assessment of those threats and a plan that’s designed by the local school district to address those threats,” he said.
But, the state would not mandate responses, he said, because local officials would know what they need to do better than Harrisburg.
Mango, a married father of five daughters, said he would have signed the 20-week abortion limit bill that Wolf vetoed last year. He would “certainly” support exceptions for the life of the mother but would not necessarily back exceptions when the viability of the fetus is in question.
“Science has changed,” he said, arguing that medical advances now allow for very premature babies to survive outside the womb.