Sarah Palin spoke to a chilled crowd in Chillicothe, Ohio, this afternoon, on the very same courthouse steps where Barack Obama addressed a somewhat larger and far more diverse rally, about three weeks ago. Chillicothe has been identified by the Columbus Dispatch as Ohio's most reliable belwether city. Ohio, of course, is the belwether of the nation, so as Chillicothe goes, so goes the USA. Or so we'd like to think.
Last Sunday, the Chillicothe Gazette, which has the distinction of being the oldest newspaper in continuous operation west of the Alleghenies, endorsed Barack Obama.
Five times during all three presidential debates, John McCain taunted Barack Obama over alleged lack of support for "nuclear reprocessing" and "storage of spent nuclear fuel." Those taunts were preparation for Palin's speech today, which was intended to spring an offer of thousands of south Ohio jobs from a McCain Administration nuclear "renaissance."
Yet Sarah Palin did not mention the word 'nuclear' in her speech today. (Or even the word 'nukular,' for you cynics.)
More below the fold.
To be sure, Palin mentioned almost every energy source except for nuclear. A section of her rally speech did address energy, and she listed almost every other major energy source besides nuclear. She said that a McCain Administration would pursue "the traditional energy sources -- oil, natural gas, coal" and "the new alternative sources -- wind, geothermal, biomass, solar, clean coal." Then she said "We will drill here, drill now! Drill, baby, drill! And mine, baby, mine!"
So much for the hard-core pornography, but where was the push for nuclear power?
Chillicothe is only twenty miles north of the expansive nuclear reservation at Piketon, where a gargantuan gaseous diffusion uranium enrichment plant closed in 2001. The Bush Administration launched an abortive attempt to make Piketon the spent nuclear fuel storage center of the world. And USEC, a Republican croney company that calls itself "global" (because it operates a plant in Paducah in addition to its Piketon operations) is asking for $2 billion in federal loan guarantees to finance a dubious new centrifuge enrichment plant on the site.
Thus, the lower Scioto Valley is the atomic heartland of pro-American America, in Palinesque terms. To address the energy situation here without a mention of nuclear power is like discussing favorite bevarages in Milwaukee while forgetting beer, or listing prominent sports teams in New York without a mention of the Yankees.
While some might attribute Palin's nuclear excission to some monumental screw-up, like a lost teleprompter page, there is a much more likely explanation. Just ten days ago, John McCain approved a letter to Senator George Voinovich focused on the promise of a nuclear renaissance in southern Ohio. In that letter, McCain promised a revival of the Bush Administration's ill-fated "GNEP plan," expedited loan guarantees for USEC, and crash construction of 45 nuclear reactors, with all that spare capital that Wall Street has laying around. All this is supposed to bring "a big part" of "700,000 jobs" to south Ohio in general, and Piketon in particular.
That letter was the trial baloon for the planned Palin speech today. A trial baloon that turned out to be lead-lined. Both McCain and Voinovich forgot to check with the locals. At a candidates forum in Pike County just days before the McCain letter, county commissioner candidates of both parties declared GNEP and waste storage at Piketon a dead letter, and expressed more interest in renewable energy at the site.
On October 23, the Chillicothe Gazette covered the story of the McCain-Voinovich letter --
http://chillicothegazette.com/... -- with quotes from yours truly, making it sound as if McCain and Voinovich had collectively lost their nuclear frickin' marbles.
And that is why I think that nuclear power was excised from the Palin speech in Chillicothe today. Not even the fraudulent promise of a gazillion nuclear jobs will save the McCain-Palin campaign now.
The rally today had none of the bitter hate-mongering of recent Palin rallies in northern Ohio. Oh, there were the mumbled epithets, and Palin did repeat the Rashid Khalidi slander, at which point I said, not very loud, that McCain had given funding to the man. A hothead nearby then started verbally assaulting me, accusing me of being "a CNN reporter" (apparently because I had a notepad). So the rhetoric is escalating -- first we're terrorists, then we're socialists, and now we work for CNN. What next?
But in general, the crowd was in a dampened beat-back mood, because they know they're about to lose, and hugely. There was a pathetic quality to the whole event, which peaked when the GOP candidate for Congress in OH-18, Fred Dailey, wearing a trademark black cowboy hat, said he'd like to take his opponent, incumbent Zack Space, and "wrastle him to the ground and put lipstick on him."
I won't attempt to explain that remark -- interpret as you will.
I dozed off along with everyone else during the recitation of stories of Joe the Plumber, Tito the Builder, and Ivan the Terrible. Sarah the Beauty Queen is somehow coming to resemble Fred Harris, the way I remember him at the end of the 1976 primary campaign -- 'When Good Populist Heroes Go Bad.'
I gotta say, it was worth the price of free admission to see two five-year old brunette identical twins dressed identically as Sarah Palin with hair-buns, black Tina Fey glasses and red skirts, with signs that said, "Can you Pick the REAL Sarah Palin?" and "It's about time we had a woman in the White House."
Amen to that, sisters Makalea and Makenna. Let's hope that's the only thing you do remember from this whole sordid McCain-Palin campaign.