ICYMI: PA GOP Chairman Val DiGiorgio makes Philadelphia-area talk radio appearances in support of recent op-Ed

Following the publication of his op-Ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer over the weekend, Republican Party of Pennsylvania Chairman Val DiGiorgio made a number of Philadelphia-area talk radio appearances Monday to discuss the need for the Republican Party of have a new contract with America.

Here are some of his quotes from his appearance on WPHT 1210 AM’s The Chris Stigall Show:

I think every once in a while, those of who have been involved in politics for a while have to remember why we got into it in the first place because after a while it tends to get very transactional and tends to be just about winning and tends to be just about the next election and I got into politics because I was inspired by people like Jack Kemp. I grew up in the city and I saw what was happening in the cities and I saw what liberalism was doing to cities…I got involved in politics because I thought there was a better way.

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We are the Party born out of true social justice and we don’t talk about that in the Republican Party anymore. We went on after that for the next several decades to pass civil rights legislation. It was the Republican Party that did that and stayed true to our founding documents that all men are created equal.

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It is my experience with elected officials is that they mean very well, they intend to do well. Republicans and Democrats. We have to stop assuming that our friends on the other side of the aisle don’t have the best intentions, and they need to start doing the same thing with us and we have to find common ground.

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There are drugs pouring across our southern border and we’re in an opioid crisis. There is crime pouring across our southern border and not to mention the human trafficking smuggling that’s going on, the human toll having an open border creates…and it becomes a message that we despise immigrants. Of course we don’t despise immigrants. We love immigration. We want people to come here legally.

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You can go back to 1968 and ask the average 18 year old what they thought of the Republican Party and they would have overwhelmingly had bad things to say about the Republican Party, but by 1980 the majority of those folks had elected Ronald Reagan. Once they see what happens to their paychecks, once they see what happens with the effects of liberalism are on our suffering communities, our underserved communities, they come back the Republican Party.

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Later, on 1210AM WPHT’s The Dom Giordano Program, Chairman DiGiorgio hit many of the same themes:

I actually think our message is better. I was inspired by folks like Jack Kemp who thought that the conservative message was a better message for prosperity and opportunity for inner-city America than the left.

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African-Americans, in particular, and Latinos, have fared very well under this President. You talk about it all the time: lowest unemployment for black and Latinos in history; we just signed a criminal justice reform bill that Barack Obama couldn’t get done, but Donald Trump did that on a bipartisan basis; there’s opportunity zones, enterprise zones I just talked about.

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We don’t wrap that up with a message that says “You are in your neighborhoods, you are basically prisoners in your own homes because you can’t go on the streets because there are drug dealers on the corners, your kids are languishing in schools where two-thirds of them can’t read or write and grade level and half will not graduate, crime is rampant in your neighborhoods, there are no jobs there, but you keep voting Democrat over, and over, and over again.”

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We have to be true to our founding documents and the Declaration of Independence in particular: that all men are created equal—all men and women—and we have to show that we care.

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Politics is a game of addition, not subtraction. I hear from conservatives that we have to stay true to our principles, we have to stick to our principles and the rhetoric gets very angry sometimes. I understand that, I feel that too, but we have to reach out. We will not be a governing majority if we do not start to get votes in the cities.

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To check out the op-Ed that ran in the Inquirer, CLICK HERE.

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