The McCain campaign may be a dead dinosaur, but its spiked tail is still thrashing around.
In November of 2007, exactly one year prior to the election, eleven county newspapers in the critical swing region of southeast Ohio were sold by Brown Publishing to American Consolidated Media, a Texas-based, Republican-controlled conglomerate. ACM is itself owned by a right-wing Australian company called Macquarie Media Group. http://dallas.bizjournals.com/...
Macquarie had ties to the Giuliani consulting firm, and the Ohio newspaper buy was clearly intended to give Giuliani, then the presumptive nominee, an October surprise in what was expected to be the critical region of the critical state.
Now, despite the many changes in circumstance, those plans are being hatched. The Republican Party in Ohio is having its Macquarie Moment, so to speak.
Details below the fold.
Two of the sold papers are the principal papers of Athens and Pike counties -- relevant because those are the two most reliably Democratic counties in south Ohio, though they both swing wildly. They are very different, indeed opposite counties. Athens is home to Ohio University and probably has the youngest electorate in the state. Pike is a remote agrarian county with the oldest electorate in the state. In both, however, Independents predominate, and that is part of what makes them kings of swing. In Pike, Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than two to one, but G.W. Bush won the county handily twice, as Bill Clinton did before him.
During the spring and summer, area papers reflected -- in news slant, commentary, and choice of published letters -- a general area sense that McCain would win big in south Ohio, and that would hand him the national election. Historically, we are "the Decider," after all. (Most area newspapers, by tradition, do not issue endorsements, but the paper's preferences emerge clearly in other ways.)
After the financial crisis hit in September, the mood shifted dramatically to Obama, with a flurry of Republican-bashing on economic issues.
But now, with just over a week to go -- whoa! It's as if the papers had been holding a vast reservoir of anti-Obama and pro-McCain distortions, and now the dam has burst.
Take today's issue of the Pike County News Watchman, as a case in point. Most of the "news section" is filled by six letters, four of them very long (over a thousand words each). Here are the subjects of those six letters:
- One, by a self-described "retired teacher," is devoted to "connecting the dots," alleging Obama's Muslim associations, principally an alleged connection to Farrakhan and the "hatred for America and 'whites' expressed by the Million-Man March. Castro is invoked (because he allegedly spoke to Farrakhan's congregation), and Obama is excoriated for having "praised Chavez." The Chavez whom was actually praised was CAESAR Chavez, the American farm worker organizer, but the implication is that Obama had praised HUGO Chavez, the dictator of Venezuela.
- A second letter takes up the "slow drift toward socialism" theme, camparing this election to that of 1860, "when the issue was state succession" [sic]. We stand now at a "proverbial fork in the road," according to this writer -- the left fork leads to "loss of state's rights [wait, wasn't that the Confederate complaint?], socialism, and other evils not even on the horizon." The "right fork" is that of "John McCain and Sarah Palin's quest to reform Washington."
- A third letter never mentions Obama or McCain, but reminds us that women's "right to choose" applies only to "if, when, where, how, and with whom they will copulate" and not to any products of that copulation within women's bodies.
- A fourth letter also invokes the figure of Abraham Lincoln without naming the current candidates. It extols the virtues of the "reborn" Republican Party, which has revived the values of Lincoln and Reagan.
- The other two letters from public figures do not address the national election, but take different positions on construction of a new county jail. At a recent candidates night, we were startled when told that there are 5,000 individuals "on probation," out of a total county population of 27,000. I cannot verify the figure, but as a county with one of the highest poverty rates in the nation, and as a known pasture for ex-cons unwelcome in other communities, the figure is plausible. The prison industry is about the only growth industry left to counties like Pike, in the view of pragmatists.
Is there any actual news in the paper? Well, yeah. The lead story, "McCain Writes Piketon, GNEP," concerns an Oct. 21 letter from McCain to George Voinovich, promising to flood south Ohio with "thousands of jobs" from new nuclear development of various sorts. The article fails to mention that GNEP, a hare-brained idea of the Bush administration, has been mostly defunded by Congress, and is expected to die formally following the election.
(I've separately diaried the McCain letter at http://www.dailykos.com/...
So are we just a big bunch of hicks who'll swallow any bigoted slander, who'll buy any misapplied analogy to Abraham Lincoln, and who only dream of jobs in new nuke plants and big prisons?
That's what today's paper would have you believe, but it isn't true. When Barack Obama came earlier this month to Portsmouth and Chillicothe, he drew huge and adoring crowds. There is a new southern Ohio being born, and it harkens back to this community's authentic roots.
Even the Pike County News Watchman has its own proud history. In 1873, when it was called the The Pike County Republican (in a Lincoln mold), the paper broke the story of the true paternity of Sally Heming's children, in two interviews with county residents. One was Madison Hemings, the biracial child of Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, and the other was Israel Jefferson, another former Jefferson slave who sought refuge in the tolerant hills of Pike County. Those published interviews represented the most strident and radical attack on American racism ever to grace the pages of a middle-American newspaper. (Both interviews are reproduced in Virginia Brodie's biography of Thomas Jefferson.)
What's become of the paper now is disgraceful. There is a solution, for any Democratic strategists with access to resources after this election: Buy the sucker, along with the other ten papers of the former Brown group.
Ohio won't swing this election. But our time as the Decider will roll around again, and the newspapers of Appalachian Ohio will play a determining role.
NOTE: The website of the News Watchman is www.NewsWatchman.com, but only subscribers can access most content, so please don't ask for links. Today's issue of the paper may be an extreme, rather than representative example of what's happening across the region, but I do perceive that it's happening at other area papers, too.
UPDATE: Today the Cincinnati Enquirer endorsed John McCain. This was expected, as the Enquirer is a staunchly Republican paper. Counsel to the Enquirer is the Graydon, Head & Ritchey law firm, the firm that produced U.S. Senator Robert Taft, his grandson Governor Bob Taft, and Congressman Rob Portman -- all Republicans.