Hillary Wages War in Ohio

Tuesday’s election will do more than let Ohio voters potentially choose the Democratic presidential nominee.

Their vote could also destroy Ohio’s future.

Ohio, my mother’s birthplace, used to be the industrious state that spawned presidents, astronauts, and the Wright Brothers.

But then came organized labor, turning the state’s factories, steel mills, and elections into battlefields of class warfare.

As this leftist hatred polluted and poisoned Ohio, investors stopped coming — and those already there are looking for the exits.

Since 2000, Ohio has lost 200,000 industrial jobs.

Today the word “Rust Belt,” evokes images of Youngstown and other once-great Ohio industrial cities.

An implicit message in talk-radio superstar Rush Limbaugh’s theme song, the instrumental riff of The Pretenders’ song “My City Was Gone,” is its unheard lyric: “Oh, where did you go, Ohio?”

Fat-cat bosses of Ohio’s Democratic political machine include Hillary-backing Veep wannabe Gov. Ted Strickland and members of the openly-socialist “Progressive Coalition” in Congress, the likes of Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Cleveland, Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones of posh Shaker Heights, and Sen. Sherrod Brown of the Cleveland-Akron axis.

These radical lawmakers practice anti-capitalist, pro-big government class warfare incompatible with free market economics and private property.

For its part, the Ohio Republican Party has lost much of its power owing to an appearance of corruption and lack of principle.

Former Republican Gov. Bob Taft, for example, following the 2000 Census blocked legislator efforts to eliminate or redraw then-Rep. Sherrod Brown’s district with fairer, un-gerrymandered boundaries because Brown, with heavy union backing, threatened to run against Taft if he lost his seat.

Ohio Republicans were all too willing to cut deals with the devil. This lack of principle has impaired the GOP’s ability to give Ohio voters an honorable alternative in this state that used to be the nation’s strongest Republican bastion.

With both the Democratic primaries and the November general election potentially turning on how Ohio votes, those going to the polls here have an awesome responsibility — both to the nation and to Ohio’s future.

If Ohioans this week cast their ballots for New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, and then in November vote Democratic, it will cost their state far more than another 200,000 lost jobs. Investors will flee and stay away from Ohio in droves.

From a capitalist point of view, Ohio is hobbled not only by its socialist-leaning labor unions and left-wing Democratic Party, but also by exploitable racism.

If the Mason-Dixon line between Pennsylvania and neighboring Maryland and West Virginia were extended, it would slice off the bottom third of Ohio, a region that in some ways resembles the Old South.

The biggest city of southern Ohio is Cincinnati, torn in recent years by racial strife. This city not long ago restored some German street names erased during the anti-German fervor of World War I.

Marge Schott, now deceased, was former owner of Major League Baseball’s Cincinnati Reds. She repeatedly was accused of racial epithets, allegedly referring to members of her team as “million dollar n*****s,” and the like.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign, although it denies this, may be going all out to win the Marge Schott vote in southern Ohio.

As CBS’s “60 Minutes” reported Sunday night, southern Ohio is rife with heavily-stoked rumors that Clinton’s opponent, African-American Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, “doesn’t use the Holy Bible” but instead “believes as the Muslims believe.” The implication: Obama is not one of “us.”

When asked by “60 Minutes” about whether Obama is a secret Muslim, Clinton replied: “There’s nothing to base that on . . . as far as I know,” thereby with cynical calculation throwing gasoline on rumor-fanned hot voter fears and suspicions about her rival.

Any such tactic must be carefully focused, because Ohio’s population matches the national average of African-Americans at approximately 12 percent — double the proportion of blacks in Wisconsin, an otherwise similar state recently won by Obama.

In 2004, fully 18 percent of those casting ballots in Ohio were African-Americans, a voter turnout 50 percent higher than their share of the state’s population.

If Hillary squeaks out a win in Ohio, her winning margin will almost certainly come from the southern third of the state and cities such as Cincinnati close to the Kentucky border.

In northern Ohio, the Clinton campaign echoes Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown by running against the North American Free Trade Agreement, blaming it for lost jobs and promising to re-write it.

This is a neat trick, because NAFTA was signed into law by President Clinton and has been praised repeatedly by Hillary Clinton before and since its enactment.

So the questions for Ohioans who vote Tuesday for Clinton will be a choice of three alternatives:

Did you vote for Ms. Clinton because you hate capitalism and international trade?

Did you vote for her because you are a racist who would not vote for any black candidate for president?

Or did you vote for Hillary Clinton simply because you are stupid and gullible enough to believe anti-NAFTA words and promises from the former ruling family that created NAFTA?

Note that an affirmative answer to any one of these three questions gives intelligent business people good reason never to invest another penny in Ohio. And yet some combination of these three would be behind a Hillary Clinton victory in Ohio.

Obama likewise attacks NAFTA and in speeches promises to renegotiate the agreement. But a Canadian diplomatic memo made public this week confirms that Obama’s campaign secretly promised Canada he will leave NAFTA intact.

Meanwhile down in Texas, The Politico has reported that a secret Clinton campaign memo instructs its operatives on manipulative tactics to seize control at Tuesday’s statewide caucuses, where approximately one-third of Texas Democratic delegates will be allocated.