Romney, Obama zero in on Ohio, a GOP must-win

CHARLES BABINGTON

KASIE HUNT

Asso­ci­ated Press

VANDALIA — Ohio has emerged as the pres­i­den­tial race’s undis­puted focus. Barack Obama and Mitt Rom­ney are mak­ing mul­ti­ple stops this week alone in a state that’s trend­ing toward the pres­i­dent, endan­ger­ing Romney’s White House hopes.

The pop­u­lar­ity of Obama’s auto indus­try bailout, and a better-than-average local econ­omy, are under­min­ing Romney’s call for Ohioans to return to their GOP-leaning ways, which were cru­cial to George W. Bush’s two elec­tions. Ohio has 18 elec­toral votes, sev­enth most in the nation, and no Repub­li­can has won the White House with­out car­ry­ing it.

Rom­ney is scram­bling to reverse the polls that show Obama ahead. On Tues­day, he made the first of his four planned Ohio stops this week, join­ing his run­ning mate, Rep. Paul Ryan, for a rally near Day­ton. On Wednes­day, Obama will visit the col­lege towns of Kent and Bowl­ing Green, and Romney’s bus tour will stop in the Colum­bus, Cleve­land and Toledo areas.

“If this pres­i­dent per­sists on the road of mak­ing it harder and harder for small busi­nesses to grow and thrive, he’s going to slowly but surely weaken our econ­omy and turn us into Greece,” Rom­ney told sup­port­ers Tues­day in Van­dalia. He said the Obama admin­is­tra­tion has put gov­ern­ment between patients and their doc­tors, and is pick­ing win­ners and losers in pri­vate business.

“That is not the Amer­ica that built Ohio!” Rom­ney declared.

His tone was urgent, but the points were stan­dard cam­paign lan­guage from Rom­ney. His allies hope they will start res­onat­ing in this cru­cial state.

Not even Florida has seen as many pres­i­den­tial TV cam­paign ads as Ohio, and nei­ther nom­i­nee goes very long with­out vis­it­ing or talk­ing about the state. When Obama touted his “deci­sion to save the auto indus­try” on CBS’ “60 Min­utes” on Sun­day, he men­tioned not the major car-making state of Michi­gan but Ohio, which focuses more on car parts. “One in eight jobs in Ohio is depen­dent on the auto indus­try,” Obama said.

Four new polls under­score Romney’s seri­ous prob­lems in Ohio. Sur­veys by NBC and Fox News found Obama ahead by 7 per­cent­age points. A poll by a group of Ohio news­pa­pers showed him lead­ing by 5. And a Wash­ing­ton Post poll released Tues­day found the pres­i­dent lead­ing Rom­ney by 8 points. All of Obama’s leads were out­side the polls’ mar­gins of error.

One prob­lem for Rom­ney is that Ohio’s 7.2 per­cent unem­ploy­ment rate is below the national aver­age, as the Repub­li­can gov­er­nor, John Kasich, often reminds residents.

“We are up 122,000 jobs,” Kasich told a panel dur­ing the Repub­li­can con­ven­tion last month. “The auto indus­try job growth is 1,200,” he said, per­haps try­ing to play down that sector’s role.

Kasich says he sup­ports Rom­ney and Ohio would do even bet­ter if Obama were replaced. But the governor’s under­stand­able pride in the state’s job growth runs counter to Romney’s mes­sage that Obama is an eco­nomic failure.

House Speaker John Boehner, from the Cincin­nati area, told reporters last week in Wash­ing­ton: “One of the things that prob­a­bly works against Rom­ney in Ohio is the fact that Gov. Kasich has done such a good job of fix­ing gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tions in the state, attract­ing new busi­nesses to the state.”

“Peo­ple are still con­cerned about jobs in Ohio,” Boehner said, “but it cer­tainly isn’t like you see in some other states.”

Still, the Fox News poll sug­gests there’s room for Rom­ney to advance. Nearly one in three Ohio vot­ers said they are “not at all sat­is­fied” with the way things are going in the coun­try, and an addi­tional 26 per­cent are “not very sat­is­fied.” Only 7 per­cent are “very sat­is­fied,” and 34 per­cent are “some­what satisfied.”

Rom­ney is try­ing to tap that dis­con­tent. But he’s hav­ing mixed suc­cess with his chief tar­get: white, work­ing class vot­ers who are socially con­ser­v­a­tive and often have union back­grounds. A gen­er­a­tion ago they were called “Rea­gan Democrats.”

In 2009, Obama’s admin­is­tra­tion used bil­lions of tax­payer dol­lars to keep Gen­eral Motors and Chrysler afloat while they reor­ga­nized through bank­ruptcy. Rom­ney said the com­pa­nies should have been allowed to enter bank­ruptcy with­out gov­ern­ment help. But an array of offi­cials at the time said the automak­ers would have gone under with­out it.

GM still owes the gov­ern­ment about $25 bil­lion. But many work­ers in Ohio and else­where con­sider the auto bailout a success.

It affected thou­sands of busi­nesses, some of them fairly small, that make an array of prod­ucts that go into vehi­cles, new and used. Jeff Gase, a UAW union mem­ber who intro­duced Obama at a Colum­bus rally last week, cred­ited the pres­i­dent with sav­ing the paint com­pany where he works. “Mom and pop body shops” buy the paint, Gase said, and now his plant is run­ning “full steam ahead.”

Rom­ney notes that many Ohio car deal­er­ships went out of busi­ness dur­ing the indus­try reorganization.

But he is hav­ing trou­ble con­nect­ing with mid­dle class Ohioans, said Tony Teno­rio, who hears polit­i­cal con­ver­sa­tions in his job as an Applebee’s restau­rant man­ager. In June, when he worked in Elyria, Teno­rio said many Ohio res­i­dents seemed ready to bail on Obama. Now, work­ing at an Applebee’s in the more afflu­ent town of West Lake, Teno­rio says those same peo­ple seem unmoved by Romney.

Still, the Repub­li­can is push­ing hard. Rom­ney has forced Obama to run ads in Ohio defend­ing the administration’s han­dling of China trade and the U.S. coal indus­try. Romney’s ads say gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tions are sti­fling the energy indus­try and Obama hasn’t been tough enough on China’s pro­tec­tion of its exporters, two claims the admin­is­tra­tion rejects.

Ohio, mean­while, appears to be the only state this week where Obama’s cam­paign is still air­ing a 60-second ad called “The Ques­tion,” which dis­putes Romney’s claim that Amer­i­cans are worse off than they were four years ago.

Rom­ney polit­i­cal direc­tor Rich Bee­son told reporters Tues­day that Obama’s cam­paign is pre­ma­turely “spik­ing the ball at the 30-yard line.” He said Rom­ney is within strik­ing dis­tance in Ohio.

Posted by AP News on Sep 25 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.