One fun thing about October in an election year in Ohio is that the newspapers become so entertaining. No need to buy the Weekly World or even Workers World (I always confuse the two) for prurient or proletarian excitement. Just take Friday's Columbus Dispatch, for example.
Lead story: The Garfield Heights district office of the Ohio Department of Transportation has "dished out" $11 million in contracts in exchange for arranged kickbacks that included "fishing trips, Las Vegas hotel rooms, and sex with strippers." Some of the latter occured in state vehicles at ODOT facilities.
In some cases, the contracted work was never performed, but the vendors "showered the ODOT officials with gifts, trips, strippers, and ham," according to the inspector general.
Ham? Showered with ham? You could say that we Ohioans don't know our pork from our loins. In any case, this doesn't sound kosher to me. More about the political implications, below the fold.
You can get more juicy details (whether that's a reference to the strippers or the ham I will leave to your imagination) from the story itself at http://www.dispatchpolitics.com/...
Now about the politics. The story breaking at this particular time is about as coincidental as if Bin Laden were apprehended on November 1. Though the ODOT officials involved are all 20-year or more employees, clearly it's intended to embarrass the Democrats in charge of Ohio state government, and anyone associated with them. (That decision to merge the Ohio Obama campaign with the Ohio Democratic Party, made back in July, is looking mighty bad right about now.)
And embarrass them it certainly does. Remember that Governor Strickland went along without a fight and signed a Republican-authored bill in 2007 that barred all "touching between unrelated adults" at adult establishments like strip clubs in the state of Ohio. If you want to get to the goods in the pursuit of happiness in the state of Ohio, you've got to be an appointed government employee.
For those behind on the news, this follows a long string of similarly lurid scandals, mostly involving Ohio Democrats, since the cuplpable Republicans were ousted in the 2006 election. In Waverly, the police chief (a Democrat now running for county sheriff) supervised a program to let DUI arrestees off without charges if they made $1,000 "contributions" to the city fund. Protestors recently chained themselves to construction cranes in Columbus to demand Strickland act to end corruption in the family courts. And let's not even start to discuss the sex and corruption scandal at the Ohio AG's office -- you can google and ogle at your leisure.
My point is not to belabor the issue -- the Dispatch is doing plenty of that on its own. My point is to explain that curious thing about the presidential polls in Ohio this year. It always stays even. Every time Obama or McCain achieve some marginal advantage in the polling, it swings back to even. That's not a polling artifact -- it's a fact of voter preference.
Confronted with continuing evidence that Dem apples are just as rotten as Rep apples, Ohio voters are determined to ensure that neither party attains hegemonic power. So those Ohio undecideds are hearing the polls, and going with the underdog du jour. Over and over, I hear from my neighbors that they'll vote for anyone, as long as he or she isn't a Democrat or a Republican. Which is why in my congressional district, OH-02, an Independent is making a very serious bid to take the seat of Jean Schmidt.
Like many around here, my friend Bob (I'll call him Bob even though that's his real name) typically votes for local Democrats and national Republicans. But this year he'll reverse that pattern, and vote for "the terrorist" (his words, said with a smile) and the local Republican slate. He's totally fed up with Republican philosophy, he explains, and that Sarah Palin "has a brain that's dumber than a hog's hind end." However, the local Democratic slate is too corrupt to stomach.
I asked him why he's more tolerant of the local politicians whose philosophy he renounces. "Because they're easier to find for a whippin'," he says.
That's my analytical formulation for why Obama's margin is trending more than ten points behind in Ohio compared to Pennsylvania and Michigan -- otherwise similar states. I'm pleased as punch that Obama will be elected without Ohio this year, because I expect Ohio to be too close to call down to the wire.
Whatever does happen in Ohio this year, it should be a wake-up call to Democrats with integrity throughout the land. We got problems in Ohio. Big, friggin, stripper-lovin, fish-fryin, ham-holdin problems. They aren't going to go away by pretending we're all one big blue happy family, because we aren't.
Will there be more scandals revealed before November 4? Bet on it. And after the election, there's going to be hell to pay, and work to be done.