John McCain will announce the name of his running mate in Dayton on Friday at Wright State University, named of course for the Wright Brothers. Just miles from the old Wright air field, in the atom-bomb basket of America, amidst the oldest monuments of prehistoric North American civilization, the choice of location is rich in symbolism and foreshadowing.
Every indication is that the pick will be native son Rob Portman, former southwest Ohio congressman, Bush Budget Director, and liar extraordinaire. The choice may fly or it may bomb.
This is installment #4 in my exploration of Mr. Portman's grooming to be the number two man in America, and eventually number one. Please consult the first three parts for background, here (1), here (2), and here (3)
Just southwest of Dayton, is the Mound Laboratory site, in the literal shadow of one of the largest prehistoric burial mounds in North America. Once a suburban movie theater, the building was made into a secret Manhattan Project lab that later sprawled into a complex for the manufacture of triggers for hydrogen bombs.
Mound is now closed, its cleanup and civilian conversion botched by the Bush Administration, a national disgrace in terms of environmental protection, jobs, and the lost opportunity to make the facilities into an R&D center for renewable energy.
Southwest of the Mound site was the Fernald atomic metallurgical plant, where old machines from Cincinnati's lead industry were employed to forge parts for nuclear warheads, from uranium and other metals. Fernald was closed in 1989 after revelations that many hundreds of thousands of pounds of uranium and thorium were emitted into the air and water of the surrounding unsuspecting community. Though remediation is considered complete, groundwater at the site will be contaminated for at least a hundred years.
Two hours due east of Fernald, in the Appalachian doldrums of Mr. Portman's old congressional district, is the much bigger Piketon site, where the largest uranium enrichment plant in the world operated until 2001. When the plant first opened in 1954, it used 125% of the electricity consumed by New York City, making Piketon, by far, the most energy-hungry municipality on earth. After 1954, all of the weapons-grade uranium outside Russia and China was enriched at Piketon.
Piketon is a much greater embarrassment for this administration, because three successive proposals to redevelop the site for new nuclear fuels production have failed. It is now the largest federal cleanup project in the nation, estimated to be in cleanup status for at least thirty years, at more than a quarter billion dollars in costs per year, just to start.
Even more than Mound Laboratory, the Piketon site sits among the remains of prehistoric splendor, atop a crucial aquifer that has attracted successive civilizations with its springs. Adjacent to and underneath the site is probably the oldest large geometric earthwork complex in the Ohio Valley -- actually larger in extent than the uranium enrichment plant. Of the seven largest prehistoric burial mounds known in the Ohio Valley, three were in alignment next to the old Piketon plant (only one survives). The other four lay roughly at the cardinal compass points -- including the one to the east, adjacent to Mound Laboratory.
Why was the Piketon site located at such an environmentally and archaeologically sensitive spot? That turns out to be an extremely relevant question.
In the winter and spring of 1952, the immoderate Republicans and conservative Copperhead Democrats of southern Ohio conspired together to defeat two presidential candidates from their respective parties. President Truman had bowed out of the race, and the Democrats nominated a young intellectual orator and Senator from Illinois -- the Barack Obama of his generation. His name was Adlai Stevenson, he had to be stopped, and south Ohio was the place to stop him.
Meanwhile, a moderate Republican war hero from the east, Powellesque in character, was shooting for the Republican nomination. The Ohioans might have suppported Dwight Eisenhower, did they not have a candidate of their own, a native son and son of a U.S. President and Supreme Court Justice -- Senator Robert Taft.
Taft, who had been hurled into national politics by his influence-peddling partners at the firm now known as Graydon, Head & Ritchey, had already tried for the Presidency in 1944 and 1948. To better wield his Buckeye power, which was even more awesome then than today (it had gotten Taft's father elected), Robert forged the Conservative Coalition, binding corrupt Democrats and Republicans together into one cohesive force -- the original Ohio-based PUMA organization. (You think it's accidental that Democrats for McCain sprung up from Columbus, Ohio? Oh no, it was fore-ordained.)
And now to the point. A principal tool of leverage for winning the 1952 election for Taft -- beating Eisenhower in the primary, then Stevenson in the general election -- was supposed to be the siting of the Piketon plant, at the geographic center of the key swing region of the key swing state. The A-Plant, as it still is called, would bring over ten thousand construction jobs to the desperately impoverished area. The housing alone for all those workers continues to comprise the principal housing stock in Pike County, today.
John Bricker, Ohio's other Senator and a fervent Taft man, gained a seat on the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, in charge of the siting decision. At the same time, Cincinnati Republican Charles Elston occupied one of the House seats on the JCAE. They teamed up with Democratic lieutenant governor George D. Nye ("if you get caught, D. Nye it"), who came from Pike County, and whose father, George B. Nye, was one of the most notorious election-stealers in Ohio history. The Piketon A-Plant was thus located on a piece of former Nye family property. Nye used his personal influence to stop the Atomic Energy Commission from allowing archaeologists to monitor construction, to prevent any delays past the critical deadline of Election Day.
(In Ohio, you see, either the Nyes have it, or the Neys have it. It's all the same.)
Piketon never stopped being at the heart of Ohio political machinations. Every four years since 1952, aspiring Democrats and Repblicans have fallen all over themselves and each other to see who could come up with more ludicrously wasteful or fraudulent promises of jobs.
In the 1970s and 80s, more than a billion dollars was spent to upgrade the Piketon Plant, just before the decision was made to close it. Operations at the plant were "privatized" by the Clinton Administration in 1998 -- shamelessly a way to close the plant without paying a political cost. That bogus privatization decision has wound up costing taxpayers billions.
In the year 2000 redistricting, Republicans took the Piketon political cash cow away from Democratic Congressman (now Governor) Ted Strickland, and moved it into OH-02, then represented by Rob Portman. Like Robert Taft, Portman had been urged into national politics by his partners at the very same law firm -- Graydon, Head & Ritchey -- perhaps to fulfill the unrequited dreams of Robert Taft.
Once Piketon was in his district, Portman used his congressional seat to shill for USEC, Inc., the company created by the Piketon privatization. USEC needed trade barriers erected, to keep out cheaper foreign uranium -- pure protectionism on behalf of a government-subsidized corporation in charge of a shut-down plant. But Mr. Portman did such an effective job at USEC advocacy, the Bush Administration promoted him to U.S. Trade Representative, in recognition of his skills. As U.S. Trade Rep, Portman did such an effective job of screwing the Russians on USEC's behalf, it became a major issue in the now-obvious crisis in Russo-American relations.
On the principle that no malfeasance should go unrewardsd, Bush then promoted Portman to Director of the OMB, a post he left in June of 2007, effectively so he could coordinate strategy for the Republican Ohio 2008 campaign.
Rob Portman has attended John McCain on nearly every one of his Ohio campaign stops, and clearly Portman was the architect of McCain's maniacal nuclear jobs program promise. After all, that's the way that Portman got reelected, again and again, winning heavily Democratic counties like Pike. Portman's promise to McCain is that he can repeat that feat throughout southern Ohio and southwestern Pennsylvania, as running mate. And if the Obama campaign doesn't get on the ball, Portman might be right.
We've heard not a peep about Piketon from the Obama campaign, which is the south Ohio equivalent of not mentioning the elephant in the playpen. Meanwhile, McCain and Portman have been like the Bobsy Twins around the Piketon site, promising "a large part" of "700,000 jobs" -- but not saying exactly how those jobs would come. There are strong indications that McCain wants to turn Piketon into a central storage and transit hub for spent spent nuclear fuel -- which would be a net jobs loser and which 95% of the community would oppose.
But if the Obama campaign remains silent about it, then none of the voters will know. A large part of 700,000 jobs sounds mighty good to us, countered by no alternative or critique. And so another young intellectual orator from Illinois may go down to defeat.
My father, while a student at Harvard, worked his heart out for Stevenson in 1952. I bear the heartache in my bones.
Meanwhile, Portman's trade manipulations for USEC have caught up with the company. In the fall of 2007, a federal court ruled that the trade barriers erected by Mr. Portman to keep out foreign uranium must come down. USEC and the Bush Administration have appealed the decision, and the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case.
That case could be extremely embarrassing for the McCain-Portman ticket, and could mean that the company, on which Republican jobs promises for Ohio hinge, will cease to exist. So the court -- where Graydon, Head & Ritchie still exert a legacy influence -- has put it off. It is currently scheduled for hearing on November 4. Yes, you read that right -- Election Day.
The Indians who built the earthworks of southern Ohio believed that time moves in grand cycles, and they certainly had a knack for choosing sites of future nuclear importance. There's comfort in the cyclical interpretation of history. After all, Robert Taft never did attain high office. And Susan Eisenhower, whose grandfather defeated Adlai Stevenson twice, now supports Barack Obama.