As kos alluded to yesterday, southwest Ohio is a veritable incubator for concentrated strains of wingnuttery. The Cincitucky metro area has loosed upon the world, among other atrocities, the likes of the Creation Museum, Ken Blackwell, and Big Butter Jesus. So let me begin this diary by simply saying that I’m sorry. I suppose we’re just special around here. We can’t help it.
Given that, it likely comes as no surprise to anyone that canvassing in Butler County would be an uphill battle. I mean this is the real Uhmurrica, BABY, where Sarahcuda definitely jumpstarts a heart or twelve and global warming is all a hoax perpetrated by Al Gore to sell enough cap-n-trade credits to buy every Sizzler franchise in the bible belt! The Obama campaign might as well enact a political quarantine around every single crazy living in this corner of the state – right?
Well, not so much.
I’m in OH-8, Fairfield, Ohio. Yes, THAT Fairfield, Ohio, the one that gave Washington a Boner.. err, Boehner. But having pounded the pavement in the neighborhoods surrounding my very own, I can truthfully tell all of you that this area’s festering, beet-red pustule of ‘publican support is rapidly popping all over the bathroom mirror, meaning Barack Obama is about to oxyclean Johnny McSame’s clock in the fight for Ohio.
I’ve taken on the role of canvass coordinator in the same group where Gator is the team leader, which he has written about here and here. We’ve been smashing our door-to-door goals every weekend and this past Friday the campaign informed me that our motley crew was even responsible for this region posting the highest number of volunteer shifts in the state, surpassing even urban areas in Cuyahoga and Hamilton counties. Just yesterday, Gator and I knocked on about a hundred doors apiece. I know because I was there to cut the turfs and the walklists were the size of a novella.
We are doing more than just holding down the fort, guys and gals. We’ve gone on offense.
The response has been overwhelmingly positive, if only because the situation for us average folk on the ground has taken a nosedive into the abyss. Citizens are hurting. The poor are getting poorer and more desperate. The middle class is struggling to maintain their standard of living. Even the well-to-do have been rocked to a degree into a general malaise. And people are sick of it. They’re sick of the lies, they’re sick of the failures, they’re sick of the disconnect between their real-life concerns and their representatives’ agendas, and most of all, they’re sick of the POLITICS, if we understand politics to be less Aristotelian and more Entertainment Tonight.
Sure, Repukelickin support remains in the district – some people will always be willing to lap up whatever gruel the Fundievangelists and fatcat robber barons choose to feed them – but that support has definitely waned from its high water mark.
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I had a conversation with a dude named Abercrombie (Fitch was out of the office, apparently) about the finer points of trickle-down economics. Abercrombie wasn’t buying what Johnny Walnuts has been selling and he acknowledged that Obama has made a lot of excellent points, but as a lifelong Repub he had some innate duty maintain a slavish adherence to his ideology of choice. Essentially, his argument amounted to "trickle-down would’ve worked, BUT..." But what? It doesn’t work. It didn’t under Reagan, it hasn’t under Shrub, and it wouldn’t under McCain. A functional, 21st century government cannot reign in spending to the extent necessary; the highly-touted Laugher (sic) Curve is easily-dispelled pseudoscience; there is no financial incentive to share the wealth downwards when the beancounters have already determined you can turn even bigger profits at the top with the same number of jobs at the same payrate; etc., etc. Abercrombie, being a small business owner, of course pivoted onto the standard fare of taxes, protectionism, and the like, and ended up conceding to my every rebuttal. Yet he maintained his loyalty to trickle-down.
"It could’ve worked, except for circumstances."
"No, Abercrombie, we don’t make excuses for empirical results. In a pure utopia, devoid of human greed and laziness, Marxism works. But we don’t say ‘communism could’ve worked, except for Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh and Castro.’ It was implemented, core principles perverted as they may have been, and it failed, thus relegating it to the dustbin of history. Game over. At some point, you have to allow for an unfortunate possibility: the corruption just might be part and parcel with the real-world application of this particular theory."
Abercrombie has voted a straight Republican ticket since forever. I don’t know if I earned his vote for Obama or if I ever could, but I know that I left a lifelong winger standing on his front porch, staring longingly into the distance.
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A little later I happened upon an entire house of Obamacans. Honestly, I thought this was a much rarer breed – that most R’s had the same fatalistic dogmatism as Abercrombie. But sure enough, this family recognized which candidate was offering real solutions to problems economic and military alike. However, the best part of this encounter wasn’t hearing about their support for Obama, but instead hearing the father, John, tell me about his neighbor.
Apparently the neighbor had worked at DHL in Wilmington, Ohio, for years. Incidentally, so has my brother-in-law, as a plane mechanic. He’ll be job hunting in January.
If you’re not familiar with John McCain’s DHL problem, the dustup occurred about two months ago over Ohio losing 8,000 jobs with the closure of the facilities out there – mostly, how Rick Davis lobbied for the DHL buyout of Airborne Express and McSame did jack shit to stop it. Now, truth be told, the Obama ads went a bit too far in blaming McCain for directly causing the jobs to be lost. Airborne had already shed about 2,000 jobs and someone did need to buy the company, just not DHL with Rick Davis on their gravy train. Why not DHL? Because DHL is based in Germany. Airborne ran its own planes and in the event of national emergencies, the U.S. military retains the right to "commandeer" commercial aircraft. Well even indicted, pork barrel bloatbag Ted "tubes" Stevens could see the problem with American forces being flown around on foreign-controlled aircraft. He moved to pass an amendment that would prohibit such a scenario, which would in turn make the buyout far less palatable for DHL... an amendment that John McCain opposed and helped to defeat on the grounds that he apparently thinks our military being at the mercy of another country for transportation is worth the cut-rate airfare. So the buyout goes down as-is, and then lo and behold, DHL decides a couple years later that it’s cheaper for them to subcontract flights to UPS out of Louisville instead. Adios to 8,000 Ohio jobs, and bon voyage to about 6,000 domestic jobs period, after accounting for the ones moving to Kentucky. Rick Davis, professional lying asshole, claims he had no idea takeovers lead to job losses. As for John McCain, he didn’t kill these jobs personally, but as with many of his follies, it was his shortsightedness, ambivalence, and lack of leadership that let the buyout happen.
So back to canvassing. John tells me about his neighbor, who isn’t home for me to meet. I tell him about my brother-in-law and how he’s still struggling with where to go next. I ask where the neighbor is working currently. Keep in mind, this dude is a mechanic of some sort as well, so it’s not unskilled labor that he’s been doing. John doesn’t say anything, instead grabbing a lime green flyer that’s been rolled up and stuck in his front door handle, and he hands it to me.
You just can’t make shit like this up.
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I talk to lots of people about their concerns and it isn’t outlandish what they want from their government. A couple weeks ago, my wife and I were canvassing together and we spoke with a lady in her late 50s about healthcare, social security, and her children’s futures. Her son was a physicist, just like me. Her daughter was a social worker, just like my wife. And preserving the golden years for which she’d worked so hard all of her life was one of many factors driving her into the Obama column – just as it had for my mother, who is now a team leader for the campaign in Warren County.
We’re all pretty much the same when it comes to our dreams and our fears. I decided to get involved in the campaign rather than armchair quarterbacking because I agree with Obama on most policy positions and because I was eager to see McThuselah have his withered ass kicked above his shoulders for being so mind-bogglingly wrong all the time. But I haven’t thought about my own goals and aspirations for weeks. I haven’t had to; out there fighting for what the people I meet want – what they NEED – I realize that I’m already taken care of.
So Gator and I WILL be at Panera Bread, by Cincinnati Mills mall, in Fairfield, Ohio, at 11am, this Saturday, and every Saturday until this election is finished, building the infrastructure and forming the networks that will help us push for progressive candidates and policies for years to come. It’s dead red Butler County, but there’s no surrender.
And anyone who’s willing is welcome to join the effort.
punch and pie.