US MIDTERM ELECTIONS:PRESIDENT BARACK Obama couldn't help looking up at the empty top tier of the auditorium at Cleveland State University on Sunday afternoon.
The hall where the US leader held his last rally has a capacity of 13,000, but only 8,000 people showed for an event that was intended to ratchet up voter turnout. For Democrats, those 5,000 empty seats were a bad omen for today’s midterm elections.
Ohio Democrats boast they have the third largest party organisation in the country. As one activist put it, they “whistled past the graveyard”, manning phone banks and knocking on doors. Their task was complicated by a corruption scandal in which 33 local Democratic officials were indicted.
Republican Rob Portman, who was George W Bush’s trade representative and budget director, looks certain to win Ohio’s Senate race. And Democrats could lose up to five seats in the House of Representatives. GOP pollster Glenn Bolger has predicted that the rust belt region will be “a killing field” for Democrats.
But Ohio Dems nonetheless cling to the hope of re-electing Governor Ted Strickland. The White House, according to the New York Times, considers Ohio the most politically important state in America, and Obama came to Ohio four times to campaign for Strickland, who is running a neck-and-neck race against the former Republican congressman John Kasich.
Only once in the last 100 years has Ohio failed to vote for the winner of the presidential election. “Ohio mirrors the country,” says former Democratic congressman Dennis Eckert.
Coverage has concentrated on the angry voters of the Tea Party. “But the swing voter who makes the difference is the anxious voter,” Eckert continues. “Their home has been foreclosed. Their brother has been laid off. They’ve lost hours at work. They are nervous about what Obamacare means. They’re not angry. They’re not screaming and holding signs. That anxious voter is the swing voter who went with Obama and the Democrats in 2008. He’s the one who’s turning Republican in 2010.”
The candidates in the gubernatorial race personify the two parties. Strickland (68) is from the Appalachian corner of Ohio. His father was a steelworker, and he grew up in such poverty that his family briefly lived in a chicken coop after their house was damaged in a fire. Strickland is close to the labour unions, and prides himself on having won billions of dollars in stimulus money for his state. To alleviate Ohio’s continuing woes, he promises: “I’m going to be asking for more federal assistance.”
Kasich (58) was a nine-term congressman before becoming a Fox News commentator and a managing director at Lehman Brothers, whose 2008 collapse triggered the financial crisis. He has pledged to abolish state income tax, which Strickland says accounts for 46 per cent of the state’s budget. And he wants to send back $400 million that the Obama administration offered for a railroad linking Ohio’s main cities. The train is too slow, Kasich argues.
John Frolik, the chief editorial writer at the Plain Dealer, Ohio’s largest newspaper, faults Strickland for moving slowly and having an insufficient sense of urgency – a reproach often levelled at the Obama administration. “Kasich is more abrasive, hyperactive,” Frolik says. “If you could combine the two, you would get a good governor.”
Strickland was a Methodist minister and prison psychologist before he went into politics, and there’s something pastoral about him when we meet at Sokolowski’s, a popular restaurant and political hang-out at the upper end of “The Flats”, Cleveland’s industrial zone.
Since Strickland became governor four years ago, Kasich never stops saying, 400,000 jobs have been lost in Ohio. “I didn’t cause the recession,” Strickland says as he devours his lunch between campaign appearances. “Ohio didn’t cause the recession, and quite frankly, Ohio is doing better than many other states.” Forty-four other states are worse off, Strickland claims. “Things would be far worse without us” has been the White House refrain, and it hasn’t worked.
Strickland says his promotion of wind and solar energy and biofuels is creating investment and jobs in Ohio. “Ohio will have the largest solar farm east of the Rocky Mountains. That will create 600 jobs,” he says hopefully.
Kasich dismisses alternative energy as “a small industry right now”. Before Strickland arrived at Sokolowski’s, I talked to Steve and Marie Engstrom, both 60. He’s an engineer, she a librarian. They still consider themselves Democrats. Both supported Obama in 2008, but voted for a mixed batch of Republicans and Democrats when they filled out their early ballots. “I voted for Republicans for all the financial positions (such as treasurer, comptroller),” Marie explained. “Personally, I think Jesus Christ would be a Democrat, but sometimes we need that pendulum to swing. The Democrats want to take care of everybody, and the Republicans want to put the fiscal house in order and help business.” That tension between money and social justice is at the heart of the midterm elections. Eckert, the former congressman, quoted Abraham Lincoln to me: “America’s is the only campaign process where you ask the rich for their money and the poor for their votes and promise to take care of them both.”
It’s hard to believe that Cleveland was the home of the Rockefeller fortune, that in 1896 85 per cent of the wealthiest people in America lived on Euclid Avenue, where high-rise buildings stand empty and gutted today. In Ohio, the recession arguably started 30 years ago. “We’re old, poor and under-educated,” says Frolik of the Plain Dealer. “We’re Ireland before the boom, and we stayed there. We export our young.” John Kilbane, the business manager of the Laborers’ International Union of North America, Local 310, emigrated from Achill Island, Co Mayo (which is twinned with Cleveland) 36 years ago. “There were 15 operating blast furnaces. Today there are two, and one is down most of the time,” Kilbane says. Two years ago, 80 of his union members dismantled a steel rolling mill and sent it to China. What is left of the industry is owned by the Indian tycoon Lakshmi Mittal.
But Kilbane is relatively optimistic. After dropping from a peak of three million annual man hours in 1999 to an average of 1.9 million over the past decade, the Local 310’s members should reach 2.5 million hours over the next five years, thanks mainly to work on a new convention centre and medical mart.
But Kilbane fears that if Kasich wins the governor’s mansion, he’ll make Ohio a “right to work” state, undermining the unions and driving wages down. He’s trying to persuade his men to vote today. “They are angry. They are disappointed. We all had such great expectations when Barack Obama was elected and the Democrats took the House and Senate. All that excitement was nullified by the terrible economy. It’s difficult for our members to understand.”
“It will be unbelievable if Americans put the Republicans back in power,” sighs John Myers, an attorney and Democratic activist. “People are so frustrated that they don’t know what to do. They’re just rolling the dice. The eternal optimism of Americans has been damaged. We don’t know what is going to happen in the next few years, if this is the rapids before Niagara Falls. For the first time, we’re feeling a little less sure of ourselves.”