In a state that’s known to swing, troubled economy is holding sway
For Ohio voters, the choice isn’t an easy one
AKRON, Ohio — An epic campaign that began in the bitter cold of Iowa 22 months ago will culminate Tuesday within the privacy of voting booths across America, where people like George Pounders will decide who should be president.
It’s not easy for guys like Pounders — here in a state that’s lost a quarter of its factory jobs in this decade — whether in the voting booth or anywhere else.
Pounders, who retired from Goodyear at 60, knows Ohio isn’t what it once was. But at first it wasn’t all about the economy for Pounders, who looked at Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama and saw a choice between two evils.
“John McCain looks like he is bought and paid for,” Pounders said after a Michelle Obama rally in a high school gym here earlier this month. “Eight years ago he seemed to be decent, but now all of a sudden, if anybody gives him money, he changes his stance.”
Then again, Pounders looks at Obama and sees a Harvard-educated lawyer who talks in fancy words that don’t necessarily resonate with the guys on the factory floor.
“We’re basically blue-collar Democrats here, and it doesn’t seem like he’s for us,” Pounders said. “He doesn’t relate to the working man, to the union man. He never got his hands dirty once in his life.”
If you believe the polls, John McCain had better hope that there are countless undecided voters out there, along with countless others who tell pollsters they back Obama but might ultimately vote for the Republican.
Obama enjoys a 6.8 percentage point lead in the RealClearPolitics.com national polling average and commanding leads in several states that voted for President Bush in 2004. That means McCain must count on grabbing
the vast majority of “undecideds” like Pounders in order to win the presidency.
The trouble is, according to Saturday’s RealClearPolitics.com polling average, undecideds make up just 6.5 percent of the electorate.
Picking the winner
If you’re wondering why the race seems to have turned in Obama’s favor, there’s no better place to go than Ohio, the swing state that swung the presidency to Bush in 2004 and has voted with the winner in 25 of the last 27 elections.
Here, Obama is up by 5.8 percent in an average of recent polls — and pundits say it’s all because, in the end, blue-collar voters are swinging to the Democrat.
“The Obama campaign has worried for months about winning Ohio’s white working-class voters, including those who had been with Sen. Hillary Clinton in the primary,” said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. “Obama’s ability to be competitive with that group is why he is ahead.”
Last week’s Quinnipiac poll showed Obama was just 2 points behind McCain among whites without college degrees. In other words, blue-collar whites have begun lining up behind the man who would be America’s first black president.
Many trace that movement to Sept. 15, the Monday after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and the day that the depth of America’s financial crisis began to become apparent.
That was the day that McCain said: “The fundamentals of the economy are strong.”
Don’t tell that to people like Philip Lemon Sr. 39, a licensed practical nurse from Youngstown, which has been hit as hard as any place by America’s great industrial devolution of the last three decades.
Lemon came home after serving in the Army in Iraq only to find bleak prospects even for someone in his much-in-demand profession. He’ll soon be leaving for a job in Cleveland, 75 miles away.
“We need a change, and that’s what Barack offers versus McCain, who’s linked to Bush and all his ways,” Lemon said.
Then again, McCain remains competitive here in Ohio and other industrial heartland states like Indiana and West Virginia, largely because of voters like Brett Bennett.
A construction worker from Green, Ohio, who’s been unemployed for two months, Bennett proudly made his way to a McCain-Palin rally in the Akron suburb earlier this month.
“Obama is going to hit the big companies with taxes, and it’s going to go right down to the small guy,” said Bennett, 45.
That’s the argument McCain has been making in his intensive barnstorming through Ohio in recent days. He spells out an economic plan that extends Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy, bails out troubled homeowners, cuts wasteful federal spending and encourages free trade.
A question of wealth
Again and again, McCain cites “Joe the plumber,” aka Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, the guy who stopped Obama in Toledo recently and elicited a vow from the Democrat to “spread the wealth around.”
“Sen. Obama is running to be Redistributionist in Chief. I’m running to be Commander in Chief,” McCain said in Columbus on Friday. “Sen. Obama is running to spread the wealth. I’m running to create more wealth. Sen. Obama is running to punish the successful. I’m running to make everyone successful.”
But to Obama, McCain is simply running for more of the same.
“Sen. McCain still has not been able to tell the American people a single major thing he’d do differently from George Bush when it comes to the economy,” Obama said in Canton last Monday. “The biggest gamble we can take is embracing the same old Bush-McCain policies that have failed us for the last eight years.”
Obama is running on a vastly different economic platform, one that raises taxes for those making more than $250,000 while cutting them for everyone else. In addition, Obama promises big-ticket federal investments on infrastructure, a moratorium on housing foreclosures and possible changes to free-trade deals like the North America Free Trade Agreement.
A resonant message
It’s all music to the ears of voters like Gwendolyn Culver, 50, of Akron, who lost her job at a produce store a few months ago and hasn’t had any luck finding a new one.
“Barack is wonderful,” she said. “He’s serious. He understands what’s going on.”
Then again, McCain’s Joe-the- plumber message resonates with small businessmen like Mike Kovach, 53, president of City Machine Technologies of Youngstown.
He’s leery of all sorts of plans he hears from Obama, including extending federally mandated family and medical leave — which he derides as “a joke” and “paid time off” — and a possible return of the inheritance tax.
“Why should my kids have to pay taxes on a company they helped build over 20 years?” he asked.
Plenty of Ohio businesspeople share Kovach’s pro- McCain sentiments, said John Colm, the president of WIRE-Net, a Cleveland-based organization that works to boost manufacturing in Ohio.
But Colm, a University at Buffalo graduate, said business conditions in Ohio are far from ideal.
“I think there’s a lot of uncertainty. The ramifications of the financial crisis have not fully emerged,” said Colm, who added that Ohio “never really emerged from the last recession.”
Free trade is one big reason why, said Bruce Cain, owner of Xcel Mold of North Canton. His company now employs 38, down from 70 a decade ago. And it’s all because companies like Hoover are now using cheaper suppliers in China for their plastic molds.
“I’m for Obama because McCain says he’s the biggest free-trader there ever was,” said Cain, once a loyal Republican. “I have to look out for my people here.”
In addition to feeling pressure from foreign competition, parts of Ohio have been devastated by the housing foreclosure crisis. And if that wasn’t bad enough news for McCain, the economic downturn is not just limited to the Rust Belt: Key swing states like Nevada and Florida report unemployment rates about the same as Ohio’s.
Paying a price
It’s all a frustration to McCain supporters like Sharon Papes, 53, of Hudson, Ohio.
“To blame everything that’s happened all on Bush is hogwash,” she said. “We lived beyond our means. Now we’re paying the price for it.”
McCain seems to be paying the price, too. Four years ago, Bush’s efforts to turn out evangelical Christians in Ohio through a focus on abortion and gay marriage paid huge dividends for him, but that’s not the case for McCain.
“There’s been a total absence of that,” said William Angel, a political scientist at the Ohio State University in Lima. “I’ve heard nothing about that agenda. Everyone is focused on the economy, and that’s it.”
Well, almost everybody. Saturday afternoon, Pounders went to his early voting site in Akron and cast his ballot.
He said he voted mostly for Democrats — but left the choice for president blank.
