From pandemic to partisanship, Gov. Tom Wolf had a hard 8 years in office. He loved it all

Sitting in his ornate office in the state Capitol, under the gaze of portraits of governors past, Tom Wolf pondered the day that his portrait will join them.

"It'll probably be in the hallway by the bathroom," he joked, deadpan.

The York County Democrat was, in the words of his alma mater's journal, "the unlikely governor."

His path to the governor's office, and how he governed, was unconventional.

He is a wealthy man — living in a town named for one of his ancestors — but is described by friends as down to earth. He turned down a chance to teach at Harvard to run a family-owned hardware store. He worked in the family building supply business, starting out as a forklift driver in the warehouse.

He had never run for elected office before running for governor but ran what many described as a masterful campaign, unseating an incumbent.

And when he took office he declined to reside in the governor's mansion, choosing instead to commute from his home in Mount Wolf in his 2008 Jeep, a vehicle that became a symbol of his campaign and was so popular that it had its own Twitter account.

His time in office could be described as difficult.

He spent his eight years in office battling with a Republican-dominated legislature, vetoing more bills than any governor in recent history. In his first year, he fought with the Legislature over the budget, leading to a 267-day standoff, the longest such stalemate in state history.

His cautious response to the COVID-19 pandemic, coming midway through his second term, prompted protests at his home in Mount Wolf and at the Capitol, where some protesters paraded around the building in a pickup truck armed with semi-automatic weapons. Several Republican members of the Legislature called him a "tyrant" and worse. One compared his administration to Nazi Germany and the former Soviet Union.

Wolf, though, relished it.

“I loved every minute of it.” he said. “I’ve enjoyed this job.”

What’s with this guy?

‘Not a politician’

The thing to understand about Tom Wolf, said Mount Wolf Mayor Maureen Starner, is “Tom is not a politician.”

For someone who is not a politician, he has been pretty successful at politics.

When he announced he was running for governor in 2014 — his first foray into electoral politics — he was a long shot, running against some established political figures. He ran a campaign that focused on his business and life experiences, financing it it largely from his own wealth.

He won the Democratic nomination then went on to upset incumbent Republican Gov. Tom Corbett, marking the first time a challenger beat a sitting governor since 1968.

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When Wolf first mentioned his interest in running for governor, some who had known him for years believed he had lost his mind. Why would he want to put himself and his family through the kind of nastiness into which our politics had become, a discourse that had devolved into slash-and-burn personal attacks?

But those who knew him best believed he would be successful.

“I was one of the first people — other than his family — that he talked to about it when he first considered it in 2010,” said Bobby Simpson, the longtime director of the Crispus Attucks Community Center and a friend of Wolf’s for four decades. “I encouraged him to do it. He’s an intellectual genius, and he’s very compassionate. He cares a lot about people.”

Another friend, Bob Pullo, former president of York Federal Savings & Loan, who has known Wolf since 1975, also believed Wolf would bring distinct talents to the governor’s office. “Tom’s a very unique guy,” Pullo said. “He’s brilliant. But he’s also very genuine and down to earth.”

Considering the political atmosphere, particularly after 2018 and the election of another businessman and political neophyte to the highest office in the land — Donald Trump — Pullo said, “I would not have wanted his job.”

‘What really unites us’

When he took office in 2015, the state was looking at a $1.9 billion budget deficit. His last budget — which passed nearly unanimously and held sharp increases in education and environmental protection funding — included a $5 billion surplus.

In 2015, Pennsylvania ranked 45^th in job creation. As of this year, the state has added or retained nearly 200,000 jobs, ranking the state 19^th in job creation. His administration increased access to health care to thousands of Pennsylvanians by expanding Medicare and Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.

How was he able to do that in the current political climate?

“We all have to ultimately work together if we want to get things done,” Wolf said. “Most everybody in this building actually wants to get something done. They want to serve the people who elected them to come here. That is what really unites us.”

Wolf views politics as a Venn diagram with one circle representing his interests and the other, overlapping circle representing the opposition. “You have a choice,” he said, “and that choice is, do you want to focus on those things that make you different or do you want to focus on things that intersect, the things you agree on?

“When I first got here, maybe we were choosing to focus on areas where we disagreed more than we should have. Over time, we have both come to understand what do you want to do to get things done.”

He said, “We may disagree on how to get there. But we recognize that we ultimately have to do something so you just can’t sit there and throw stones at each other. I’ve been able to get some good things done over the past eight years, and we can look at where Pennsylvania is now, and I think we can all agree that we’re in a much better place than we were eight years ago.”

Republican criticism ran deep

Not everybody thinks Wolf did a good job as governor, even his neighbors. After decades as one of York County's most generous philanthropists, it had to sting that his own overwhelmingly Republican county voted against him — twice.

Charlie Gerow, a conservative strategist and former Republican gubernatorial candidate, had a lot of problems with how Wolf governed, starting with his response to the pandemic. “To say he overreached is pretty understated,” Gerow said.

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A number of conservative Republicans felt the same way. State Rep. Daryl Metcalfe, a Butler County Republican, twice introduced impeachment articles against Wolf, claiming the governor unconstitutionally overstepped his executive authority, depriving "citizens of their most basic rights," according to the proposed bill. The impeachment efforts died in committee.

Gerow said, “I think the most disappointing thing was his inability to work with the Republican Legislature.”

Gerow pointed out that Wolf may hold the record for vetoing bills passed by the Legislature, something he believes thwarted the will of the people who elected their representatives. “That says a lot,” he said. (Wolf vetoed more bills than any governor in recent history, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.)

George Hodges, Wolf's cousin-in-law and business partner for 28 years, said, “The thing people don’t see so much from the outside is that Tom is competitive. When he fixes his mind to do something, he wants to get it done. He gives you that calm exterior, but he’s a results-oriented individual. When he decides something needs to be done, he works his ass off to get it done.”

And that may explain why he had such a contentious relationship with the Legislature.

Still, his critics don’t really hold that against him. Gerow said, “I think he’s a well-intentioned, nice man. My disagreements with Gov. Wolf have always been on a policy level. I think he’s a very decent man. His vision of how the state should work is just different than mine.”

‘Charisma overload’

It didn’t surprise Pullo that his old friend was successful.

“Tom is very good at working a room,” Pullo said. “He’s very good at making small talk. He’s very comfortable with just chatting with people and listening to them.”

That’s just who Wolf is. When he was running his business, he would wander around the warehouse, asking workers how they were doing and just talking.

As governor, he would walk through the Capitol’s corridors and drop in on legislators, just to chat, covering subjects that could range from Wilt Chamberlain’s basketball prowess to Seamus Heaney’s translation of “Beowulf.”

For instance, a profile of Wolf in his alma mater’s journal described Wolf stopping by a Republican legislator’s office and, noticing the legislator’s collection of the writings of John Locke, launching into a conversation about the 17th century political philosopher.

And Wolf is very calm. Those who have known him for years say they have never seen him lose his temper. “He doesn’t get angry or offended,” Pullo said. “He talks things through.”

Simpson compared Wolf’s demeanor to that of a pastor. “He can convince people and minister to them at the same time,” Simpson said. “I don’t know how he does it, but God knows, he makes it work.”

Wolf is not a fiery speaker. He’s not one of those politicians who bloviates or makes grand gestures or pounds the podium, relying more on presenting his ideas and finding common ground than scorching the earth with incendiary rhetoric.

In 2014, Wolf was campaigning in Philadelphia with Democratic U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, another politician known for his low-key style. As they prepared to address a crowd at a restaurant in North Philadelphia, Wolf quipped, in his self-deprecating style, “Get ready for charisma overload.”

In his office, Wolf said, “The glad-handing and the golfing and that kind of stuff, I was never really into that. That’s who I’ve always been."

Turning down Harvard to manage a hardware store

To understand who Wolf is and how he has governed, you must start in Mount Wolf, the small town founded by his great-great-grandfather, George H. Wolf, who established a store and warehouse along the railroad tracks that passed through the valley.

“The things that shaped me most was growing up in a small town,” he said, “and being in business in a place like York, Pennsylvania.”

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Wolf grew up in privilege. He attended a private boarding school. He graduated from Dartmouth College, an Ivy League school.

After a two-year stint in the Peace Corps — serving in India, “a volunteer trying to convince people to go with high-yield rice crops,” he said — he went to the University of London, earning a master’s degree in philosophy. From there, he enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and completed his doctoral dissertation while working as a forklift operator in the family’s building supply business.

His 603-page dissertation outlined the evolution of Congress from 1878 to 1921, a period of intense partisan disagreement. He theorized that despite that rancor, “people in democracies can make things work.” The paper was named the best in the country in 1981 by the American Political Science Association.

He thought about a career in academia. He interviewed for a job at the University of Chicago and “blew it,” he said. Then, on New Year’s Eve in 1980, Harvard called, asking him to come to Cambridge to interview for a tenure-track position.

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Wolf told the caller, “I’m not in a position to actually take this.”

The caller asked, “Well, then, where will you be teaching?”

Wolf said, “I’m actually not going to be teaching.”

The caller responded, “You’re going to be doing research then?”

Wolf said, “No, I’m going to manage the True Value Hardware store in Manchester, Pennsylvania.”

Recalling the story, Wolf said, “It’s like dead silence. He’s thinking that maybe he had the wrong number.”

Later, his professors at MIT heard about him turning down Harvard. “They had someone come visit the store to check out whether I was still in possession of my faculties,” he said. “But it was the right decision.”

Leaving the state in a better place

Managing the family-owned hardware store, Wolf said, was “the hardest job I’ve ever had.” Harder than being governor of a politically divided state? “That was so much harder,” he said. The job meant spending longs days on your feet, he said, and he would become frustrated when customers didn't buy what he was selling.

He went into business because he wanted to build something. And in 1985, he and two cousins, Bill Zimmerman and George Hodges, put together some loans to buy the family business at market value. “My family didn’t believe in inheritance,” Wolf once said.

They expanded the business and instituted profit-sharing and guaranteed pensions for their employees. By 2006, the business was worth millions, and since none of the principals’ children wanted to take it over, they sold it to a private equity firm.

In 2007, Wolf went to work for Gov. Ed Rendell, serving as Treasury secretary. That sparked his interest in running for governor. He left the Rendell administration in 2008 to prepare for a 2010 campaign.

But in 2009, his family's business was collapsing, a victim of the recession in the wake of 2008’s financial crisis. Wolf dropped his political plans to save the business.

By 2013, the business was back on its feet and Wolf turned his attention back to politics. And now, nine years later, much like his experience with saving his family business, he believes he is leaving the state of Pennsylvania in better condition than when he arrived in Harrisburg.

‘We were in new territory’

Wolf’s time in office, though, was marred by the COVID-19 pandemic. “Tom must realize, as I realize, he could have been much more successful without COVID,” Pullo said.

When COVID hit, Wolf said, “We were all in new territory.”

“I was resolved to do what was best, in my mind, for the public health for the people of Pennsylvania," he said. "I wasn’t going to play politics, and I think that’s what comforted me when the yelling was at its loudest. I was just trying to do what I thought was the right thing and recognizing that when you do that, sometimes people agree with you, sometimes they don’t.”

His response to the pandemic — closing the state and restricting businesses — not only drew comparisons to Nazi Germany. It also spawned the career of freshman state Sen. Doug Mastriano, a Franklin County Republican who rode his opposition to Wolf's COVID response to run for governor in 2022. (Mastriano, who also gained celebrity by leading efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, lost to incoming governor Josh Shapiro by nearly 15 percentage points.)

Hodges, his former business partner, said he recalled seeing the “vile and nasty signs” posted in yards in Mount Wolf and felt terrible for Wolf. “That would have to affect you,” he said. “But Tom believes in the democratic process and the First Amendment and believes people had the right to express that.”

Asked about the name-calling and protests his response to the pandemic sparked, Wolf said, “That’s their right to do that. That’s what I thought. I mean, I grew up here, and I think we’re decent people, but sometimes we express our emotions in different ways.”

‘I really have enjoyed it’

Wolf never left Mount Wolf. He didn’t move into the governor’s mansion, choosing to live in his family home — just a block north of the Eagle Fire Company — and commute to Harrisburg in his Jeep. (He still drives the Jeep, but recently, he said, it was in the shop, something Jeep owners can empathize with.)

And now that he’s leaving office, “I don’t think anything’s going to change,” Mayor Starner said. Townsfolk will still run into him at the Giant supermarket in Manchester or at the Manchester Café or on the streets of the small town.

Starner recalled that in January 2022, an 8-year-old boy battling cancer was granted a wish by the Make-A-Wish Foundation, to be a police officer and firefighter. He spent a day with the police department and was sworn in as an officer. The town threw him a parade with police cars and fire trucks.

The Make-A-Wish people thought they’d like to have Wolf be part of it and contacted his office. Nothing was coming from it, Starner said. So, the mayor called Wolf’s wife, Frances, and asked her to mention it to him. She did, and as the parade passed by Wolf’s home, the governor and his wife greeted the child and talked to him. “I knew who to talk to, his wife, not his office,” Starner said.

Wolf’s post-gubernatorial plans are simple. “Reading, eating, sleeping and spending time with my grandchildren,” said Wolf, now 74. He and Frances may do some traveling. “She has been a really great partner,” Wolf said. “I can’t believe this has been easy for her. She’s done a lot for the commonwealth, for free. And this wasn’t her dream. It was mine. I really have enjoyed it.”

Columnist/reporter Mike Argento has been a York Daily Record staffer since 1982. Reach him at mike@ydr.com.

This article originally appeared on York Daily Record: PA Gov. Tom Wolf reflects on governing in divisive times