RAGGED COATTAILS IN OHIO. Though top-ticket Democrats in Ohio have swept to victory, their coattails may not be long enough to make the gains the party was hoping for in the state’s congressional delegation. Here are the numbers — which we must take on faith from the website of outgoing Secretary of State Ken Blackwell […]
Jim McNeill
Jim McNeill is a former managing editor of In These Times whose writing has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Newsday and The Baffler.
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“READY TO TRAVEL, READY TO SUE.”
“READY TO TRAVEL, READY TO SUE.” Guardedly optimistic news from the land of voter suppression. Here in southwest Ohio�s 2nd congressional district, where late polls showed Democrat Victoria Wulsin with a narrow lead over incumbent �Mean Jean� Schmidt, voting seems to be going fairly smoothly. �It�s going much better than could�ve been expected,� said Michelle […]
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Bringing It All Back Home
In the final days of Ted Strickland’s run for Ohio governor, as his lead over GOP nominee Ken Blackwell has grown to a stunning 36 points in the last Columbus Dispatch poll, his campaign stops have felt less like political rallies than revival meetings. At the Eagles Fraternal Club in rural Putnam County, Strickland tells […]
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Dr. Nice Vs. Mean Jean
Adams County, OH — Just how high will the Democratic tide rise on Tuesday? There may be no better place to gauge the strength of the coming wave than here in southwestern Ohio’s 2nd congressional district. Running a hundred miles along the Ohio River, from humble farming towns in the east to Cincinnati’s well-heeled suburbs […]
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The Test Case Race
The world headquarters of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. is still in Akron, Ohio, but all they make there now are decisions. Except for a few specialty racing tires, Goodyear hasn’t made tires in Akron in years. Industry here is dead, dead, dead, and there is nothing we can do to revive it. Apparently, […]
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Goo-Goo Goes Down
At the end of a gloomy hallway, in the nearly empty Cincinnati office of Reform Ohio Now (RON), David Little waited grimly for someone, anyone, to show up on the Saturday before last week’s election. Little, RON’s Hamilton County field director, was slouched next to a pile of leaflets that urged voters to approve Issues […]
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Out, But Not Down
Not long before Tuesday’s special election for Congress in southwest Ohio, a Republican spokesman in Washington promised that the GOP would “bury” Democratic candidate Paul Hackett, an Iraq War veteran and an uncompromising critic of President Bush. Apparently the GOP buried Hackett in a very shallow grave. Hackett came tantalizingly close to scoring a major […]
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The Model Candidate
It’s Independence Day in Anderson Township, Ohio, a staunchly middle-class suburb of Cincinnati that went more than 2 to 1 for George W. Bush last November. Anderson is the kind of town whose wide streets and sprawling strip malls have for decades seemed incapable of sustaining Democratic life. Watching Anderson’s Fourth of July parade — […]
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Books in Review:
Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago By Eric Klinenberg. The University of Chicago Press, 305 pages, $27.50 Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago By David Naguib Pellow. The MIT Press, 234 pages, $24.95 By many measures, Chicago, the “City That Works,” has been working just fine in recent years. […]