Puttin’ Out the Bone

Remember Edgar Allen Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum? That huge, weighted arm swinging back and forth, and with each passage the lowering blade threatens the main character as he’s strapped to a table.

Politics is like that. With occasional exceptions, centrist “swing voters” — those who usually decide elections — chose their leaders with shifting affections, at least as party is concerned. The pendulum swings this way and then, if you stick around long enough, it swings that way.

Ohio is about to have a swing of the political pendulum that, if it had a razor-sharp blade attached, it would sever the Republican Party. Do I mean bloody dead forever? No. In time, as always, the pendulum will swing back the other way and Republicans will live again.

Think about it. For 16 years of the 1960s and ’70s, Republican Jim Rhodes was a popular governor and other Republican office holders were entrenched in the state around him.

Then the winds changed and along came Democrat Gov. Dick Celeste. He helped shepherd in Democrats in every statewide office, including control of both houses of the state legislature, numerous members of the U.S. House and both U.S. Senators. Democrats had Ohio locked up.

Then the arm’s weight hit its apex and Republicans replaced all those people. And I mean all. At present Republicans have total control of Ohio.

Of course, Republicans would give you the lie that their philosophy has won, their conservatism was chosen consciously and permanently and at the core, Ohioans are now Republicans. Yeah, right.

Looking at pure economics, Ohio should be a Democrat state, not Republican. It’s a state of working people and farmers, not the upper middle class. If the Democrats’ sleeping giant of a vote ever woke up, no state Republican would ever win.

But even accepting the Ohio electorate as it is, the heavy pendulum is about to swing, cutting through Republicans and putting Democrats in key offices.

It’s partially because those swing voters just don’t like politicians to think they can kick back and take life for granted. It’s also because those same voters don’t have a set political doctrine. But it’s also because Republicans have grown fat with victory and totally screwed up Ohio.

I mean, do you know anyone in Ohio boasting that the state is in good shape? Of course not. Gov. Bob Taft seems to sleepwalk. He lied to voters two years ago about Ohio’s economic health just to get elected.

You’ve got Republican officeholders charging each other with crimes. Jobs are racing from the state. Young people are moving away faster than in any other state in the nation. Republicans think that elected offices get filled every four years by merely switching nameplates on doors in Columbus. C’mon. Ohio is a mess, and we all know it.

In fact, in a recent article in The Columbus Dispatch, Bob Bennett, the head of the Ohio Republican Party, admitted the political scandals brewing among his state party officials. In fact, he said his party had better put in political fund-raising legislation or face large losses in 2006.

In the same article, Republican Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, who’s planning a run for governor in 2006, is quoted as saying he worries his party’s state scandals will hurt President George W. Bush’s chances this November.

Then another gubernatorial hopeful, State Auditor Betty Montgomery, has also been quoted saying if her Republicans don’t clean up their own mess, they’ll all pay at the polls.

So even Republicans are pushing the pendulum in the other direction, knowing it will spill their own blood from Cincinnati to Youngstown.

For the first time in years, big-name Democrats are eying the big chair. Usually you’d have to nearly offer those 50 virgins the terrorists die for in order to get someone to stick his or her neck out for a statewide office run.

But this time, heavyweights are stepping up, such as Mayor Donald Plusquellic of Akron, Mayor Michael Coleman of Columbus, Congressman Ted Strickland from Southeast Ohio and former Cincinnati Mayor Jerry Springer — and that’s with several years to go. Others are said to be good prospects for statewide offices, including Cincinnati Mayor Charlie Luken and Vice Mayor Alicia Reece. Republican blood is in the water and lots of people know it.

2006 will be the year swing voters are going to pay back Republicans for their mess. But is a political storm forming even for the 2004 election?

For example, could anti-Republican anger get aimed at Bush for the huge job losses in Ohio during his term? Thousands of manufacturing jobs have moved not only out of Ohio but out of America altogether. Talk to people in Canton, Dayton, Youngstown or Toledo. There is very little good economic news in Ohio.

Just the other day, the June job figures for Ohio came out and the unemployment rate went up again, as well as the total number of people unsuccessfully searching for jobs. Then add to that the poll-verified uneasiness people have about the war in Iraq.

So will such voter anger sweep John Kerry to victory in Ohio? Could it be profound enough to pull in challengers for Ohio Congressional seats? Because then newbie candidates such as Capri Cafaro, Jeff Seemann, Ben Konop, Jane Mitakides, even Greg Harris in Cincinnati’s 1st District are potential winners this fall.

To the average Ohio swing voter, politics is a medium priority. That’s why that political pendulum swings about every decade.

You’d be advised to stand back.

This article appears in Jul 21-27, 2004.