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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
The John Kerry campaign offices may still be dark in this key battleground state, but an invisible tidal wave is growing here against the president.
Jun 4, 2004 | The road-rage Republicans are out early this year in Ohio.
It's only June, but already the John Kerry bumper sticker on my car gets me cut off on I-71 by obese white males in their pickups and Camaros who upon seeing my Kerry sticker, roar past, swerve into my lane, and flip me the bird out their window.
Such folks form the backbone of the George W. Bush "Amway"-model campaign detailed recently in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. Prospecting the prefab suburban wilderness for votes, the Bush machine's efforts in Ohio raise the obvious question: What are Democrats doing in response?
A Democrat looking for solace in the obvious places will find little encouragement. Walking into a Democratic Party office anywhere in this key presidential battleground state is like walking into a morgue. The Cleveland party office, the epicenter of the most important region of the state for Democrats, is a deserted storefront that until last week didn't have a single Kerry for President sign. Locked doors greet potential volunteers who peer into the emptiness inside.
Dying of dry rot for more than 10 years, the Ohio Democratic operation's only significant victory since Bill Clinton won Ohio in 1992 was when Bill Clinton won the state again in 1996. That's it. Taking full advantage of this political vacuum, Republicans have established one-party rule at the state level, a legislative cabal so right wing they are known as the "caveman caucus."
Like a desperate and bedraggled street-corner supplicant, the state Democratic Party has been begging talk-show host Jerry Springer for divine deliverance for more than two years. Springer probably can't believe his luck; his sights set on the governor's mansion in 2006, he has stumbled on the biggest bargain fixer-upper political party in the United States Sprinkling his pennies from heaven all over the state gained Springer the "Ohio Democrat of the Year Award" this May, as well as an at-large delegate appointment to the party's presidential convention in Boston, despite having lived out of state for almost 20 years.
Doesn't look good for Kerry in Ohio, does it?
Not so fast.
During primary season, I dragged my apolitical friend Lori from Meetup to Meetup all over Cleveland, the two of us shopping around for a new president on snowy winter nights that would keep normal people huddled indoors. The Meetup groups we encountered were nonpolitical types from various economic, racial, and educational backgrounds whose average was 40-ish. People who looked way outside their comfort zone at a political meeting. People like Lori herself, who was unimpressed with the turnouts, which totaled 20 to 30 people as a rule. "Seems pretty low," she kept saying. "What do you think?"
Having grown up in Ohio politics, working with every presidential election in the state since 1988, and acutely aware of the cobwebs, crickets and tumbleweed of the Ohio Democratic Party, I had a very different perspective.
"Are you kidding me?" I shot back. "I've never seen anything like this in my life."
Wesley Clark's Cleveland Meetup the night before Super Tuesday was particularly eye-opening. The organizers were prepared with lists of phone numbers in Oklahoma, which had a primary the next day. Ten attendees used their cellphones to call Oklahoma for an hour.
Do the math. If each of those 10 people talked to 10 others, that's 100 contacts from the downtown Cleveland Meetup. There were 10 Meetups in Cleveland that night, adding up to 1,000 contacts from Cleveland. There are 10 major counties in Ohio. If each had made 1,000 contacts, that's 10,000 cross-state voter contacts made the night before Oklahoma's election -- which Clark won, in his only victory of the primary season, by less than 1,500 votes.
