What Obama lacked in Ohio Clinton can deliver with United Campaign Coalition

COLUMBUS, OHIO: As New York Sen. Hillary Clinton told her primary supporters Saturday in her home state that they should work their hearts out to elect Illinois Sen. Barack Obama the next president as she intended to, it is clear that forging a coalition campaign between the these two former opponents is essential to winning Ohio’s 20 Electoral College votes and the prize that generally flows from it – the White House.

In her address to a throng of supporters and advisers pressed cheek to jowl in the National Building Museum that marked the end of her primary campaign quest to become the first women to carry the flag of the Democratic Party in the fall for the highest office in the land and possibly the most powerful job on the planet, Clinton extended her sincere and strong congratulations to Obama for the campaign he ran and the victory he won. “I extend my congratulations to Senator Obama and my support for his candidacy. This has been a long and hard-fought campaign, but as I have always said, my differences with Senator Obama are small compared to the differences we have with Senator McCain and the Republicans...Life is too short, time is too precious, and the stakes are too high to dwell on what might have been. We have to work together for what still can be. And that is why I will work my heart out to make sure that Senator Obama is our next president.” [Speech Transcript]

Congratulating Clinton on the historic campaign she ran that he said “shattered barriers on behalf of my daughters and women everywhere,” Obama then put it all in perspective this way: “Our party and our country are stronger because of the work she has done throughout her life, and I’m a better candidate for having had the privilege of competing with her in this campaign. No one knows better than Senator Clinton how desperately America and the American people need change, and I know she will continue to be in the forefront of that battle this fall and for years to come.”

OHIO DEAD HEAT BETWEEN OBAMA AND McCAIN

The importance of winning Ohio in the fall cannot be understated, as professional prognosticators size up the states and which candidate is likely to capture which one of them on Election Day this fall, based on previous elections, the current split in support by Ohioans between the two presumptive nominees of their party – Sen. Obama for Democrats and Arizona Sen. John McCain for Republicans – the addition of Sen. Clinton to the Obama campaign would shore up Obama’s weaknesses in the rusty belt state that’s fallen on hard times, specifically among men and non-Hispanic whites, enough to put the Ohio in Obama’s win column and give him extra breathing room on his way to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave as the nation’s 44th president. In a Gallup Poll run in The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer Friday tracking the candidates and the issues of the 08 campaign season, the contest among 25,512 Ohioans during the month of May showed a dead heat of 45 percent between Obama and McCain.

McCain wins the support of men by six percentage points while Obama wins the support of women by the same figure. For Non-Hispanic whites, McCain beats Obama by 15 percentage points (53-38) while among Non-Hispanic blacks, Obama clobbers McCain 90-4 percent. Among Hispanics, Obama socks it to McCain by a wide margin of 62-29 percent. McCain out distances Obama in support from weekly church attendees (55-36%) while Obama has a similar margin of support (53-37%) over McCain from people who seldom or never attend church.

When Clinton beat Obama in the Ohio primary in early March (54.29% to 44%), her support from female voters (58% - 40%) and from blue-collar working white men who cast their vote for her based on several issues, one of which was the result of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement which served as a rally cry for Ohio workers whose manufacturing jobs have been lost by the hundreds of thousands over the past seven years and longer, propelled her to a win despite the charge Obama made in the week prior to the primary that was fueled to a large measure by his support from African Americans who have clamored to his side throughout the primary election season.

Clinton also won Ohio because she had the support of Gov. Ted Strickland and the Ohio Democratic Party at her back. But now that Obama has bested her in the delegate category, former Clinton supporter like Strickland have quickly said they are rallying around Obama. In one example reported The New York Times that is a demonstration of the coalition of these hitherto combative campaigns, Sen. Obama is expected to hire Aaron Pickrell, the chief political strategist of Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, who helped Sen. Clinton roll to victory in early March in Ohio, a key Midwest battleground state that can make or break a campaign for the White House.

“The changes we're working for are changes that we can only accomplish together. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are rights that belong to us as individuals. But our lives, our freedom, our happiness are best enjoyed, best protected, and best advanced when we do work together.That is what we will do now, as we join forces with Senator Obama and his campaign. We will make history together, as we write the next chapter in America's story. We will stand united for the values we hold dear, for the vision of progress we share, and for the country we love. There is nothing more American than that.”

WINNING OHIO, WHITE HOUSE DEMANDS FORGED COALITION

Obama and Clinton represent the best the Democrats, and the country at this time, have to offer. If George Washington could govern with John Adams as Vice President and Adams could serve as President with Thomas Jefferson, his malicious rival, as Vice President, then it seems a test of their true skills and strengths that they form a coalition government that can bring their strengths together at a time of need to affect the kind of change (from the Orwellian ways of George Bush and Dick Cheney) the country desperately needs if we are to ever call ourselves the moral compass of the world and the true beacon of liberty.

For all the pejorative talk of TV pundits, and those who listen to them, that Democrats cannot come together given the roughness of the primary contest enough to beat theRepublicans in the fall, is say it is pure nonsense and we should all treat the American media with the same disdain Ulysses did to the Sirens, whose goal was to lure him to his destruction.

If Obama cannot come to terms with Clinton enough to make her his running make and by so doing forge a new, stronger platform that America needs at a time when it is buckling under the disastrous policies of Bush (which McCain has endorsed) that have unemployment and fuel and grocery prices up and will only continue the insidiousness of Bush’s war in Iraq, then how can he be expected to not only take on foreign leaders or even a lackluster American Congress, as he sets about trying to undo the grievous harm that has befallen this nation in the last seven years? Bringing Clinton onto the ticket is his first Herculean Labor.

AMERICAN MEDIA SIRENS: WHY HILLARY SHOULD BE BARACK’S VP

Near the end of her remarks, Clinton encouraged everyone listening to “always aim high, work hard, and care deeply about what you believe in” and advised them that “when you stumble, keep faith. And, when you're knocked down, get right back up and never listen to anyone who says you can't or shouldn't go on.”

This last note, I think, relates more to the American media than anyone else. They have been wrong at every step of the long journey, shrill, one-sided and biased to a fault against her in the process. They first declared her to be the inevitable candidate, then worked their high-paid hearts out to undercut her, then called on her to quite the race nearly every week. American media, as I’ve watched it report and cover the Republican but especially the Democratic primary, has showed itself to be an industry with a political agenda instead of an industry that reports facts and events so the rest of us can make up our own minds.

If Chris Matthews or Tim Russert – both multi-millionaire pundits who mislabel themselves as journalists and who employ different standards on different shows depending on who they are talking to, one for McCain because they like his likeability quotient and a decidedly different one for Clinton because she has the audacity to not comply with their self-manufactured view of the world – were to take the advice they gave to Clinton about dropping out because she had no chance of being first, then MSNBC should turn the lights out because they are perennial laggards in TV ratings and will never be number one.

If they were to harp on anyone who couldn’t win a race the way they stalked Clinton over the months of this grueling primary fight, they would tell the aging man or woman or the handicapped person competing in the Boston Marathon to just stop running because they didn’t have a snow ball’s chance in hell of breaking the ribbon before anyone else. They have denigrated the spirit of democracy and not educated, as I believe their responsibility to the public as representatives of the Fourth Estate behooves them to do, voters and would-be voters that if you treat the democratic process in the same way you cover sporting events you will lend credence to the notion that it’s all just a game and those who play in it are to be distrusted or dismissed as just politicians.

Yet these are the same people who, as report after report now shows us, allowed the misrepresentations and, some would say, out right falsehoods to go completely unchallenged. And they were so willing to carry the White House’s water on the run up to war that they became complicit enablers of a war machine that has cost this nation over 4,000 lives and trillions of dollars not to mention what it has cost in the lives of hundreds of thousands of lives there and elsewhere.

For them to dwell night after night on banal trivialities about issues or topics of their own making that only served to distract us all from the larger issues at play, while never spending any time let alone even mentioning the grievous breaches of our constitution and laws by the Bush White House and those who support them, like McCain, is an tantamount to professional irresponsibility at its highest level.

About the author