Payne: Ground Zero, Ohio

Posted by hpayne on October 21, 2012

Columbus, Ohio – A drive across the battleground state of Ohio this weekend revealed a fall political landscape in full bloom – from colorful local races to dark scars of a divisive presidency.

“Lawless for Sheriff” read lawn signs across Pickaway County, Ohio, just south of the Ohio beltway. Of all public offices, Independent Jason Lawless chose sheriff as his goal. He will face a formidable foe in Democrat Robert Radcliffe, the third Radcliffe in line for the sheriff’s occupied by his father and grandfather before him.

Should Jason win his long-shot campaign, Pickaway will be Lawless for the first time.

North and south of Columbus reveal two different Ohios. To the southeast lies coal country where Obama’s anti-global warming fanaticism is decimating mining communities, leaving thousands of unemployed workers across the Ohio Valley from Kentucky and Ohio through West Virginia and south Pennsylvania.

“Obama’s No Jobs Zone” read billboards in this part of the state.

“This has not been Mr. Oil, or Mr. Gas, or Mr. Coal. Talk to the people that are working in those industries,” said an impassioned Romney in the second debate of his visit to an Ohio mine in August. ” I was in coal country. People grabbed my arms and said, ‘Please save my job.’ When the president ran for office, he said if you build a coal plant, you can go ahead, but you’ll go bankrupt.”

This callous disregard for America’s coal workers has played out despite this country’s desperate need for jobs in a slow recovery. Yet a partisan Democratic media largely ignored Romney’s debate comments. Just as it has ignored the tragedy in eastern Ohio.

The Obamadiaa has not ignored Northern Ohio, where Obama’s auto bailout brought a sigh of relief to communities around Chrysler’s massive, sprawling, cornfield-eating Jeep assembly plant outside Toledo (did I say Obama was anti-global warming?). Obama-Biden have basked as saviors here – towing a cheerleading reporters notably silent after Romney’s coal fields visit.

“Romney will raise taxes on the middle class” fibs a giant billboard northeast of Columbus paid for by Obama for America. The sign is fiction – Romney’s plan cuts tax rates by 20 percent on middle class earners and the sign apparently takes its cues from a fringe study that only predicts that Romney will have to raise taxes some day, sometime.

This weekend, the Columbus-Dispatch newspaper endorsed the GOP candidate for president, citing the need for a new sheriff after four years of “economic stagnation” and “record-setting debt.”

Four years ago, the same editorial page eerily predicted the Obama years:

” Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, is a rousing motivational speaker, but his experience and achievements — eight years in the Illinois Legislature and less than four in the U.S. Senate — do not stand comparison with McCain’s,” wrote the Dispatch in 2008. “A resume containing so little evidence of leadership and accomplishment leaves in question Obama’s ability to handle the most responsible and difficult job in the world, especially at a time when the nation faces a combination of problems so large and complex that they would challenge even the most seasoned leader. Nor does it seem likely that a man who has traveled in the left lane of American politics for his entire adult life really is the bipartisan centrist that he claims to be.”

Prescient words indeed. The Buckeye State reflects Obama in full. A master politician with both eyes on the next election, he strategically bailed out Big Auto in order to secure the Big Labor strongholds of southern Michigan and northern Ohio. But this inexperienced and deeply ideological manager has ruined working-class lives in eastern Ohio and beyond, leaving Americans unemployed and deeply divided.

America isn’t lawless, it’s leaderless.

 

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