Word: ashtabula
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...short, Obama as messiah wasn’t in the air in Ashtabula. Indeed, for some, it was to the contrary. In the course of a Saturday afternoon spent canvassing Roaming Shores, a planned lakeside community, one of my volunteers came across a voter who, when prompted to for her preference among the candidates for President said, “Oh, don’t worry, I’m voting for Obama,” and enigmatically added, “but, you know…right?” Know what? “Well, that he?...
...even while I am wholeheartedly caught up in Obamania, I nonetheless can’t help but think back to this fall, which I spent in Ashtabula County, Ohio, campaigning for Obama. I was a field organizer in the mostly rural townships in the southern part of the county where I spent my days knocking on the doors and calling the homes of undecided voters. My experience in the rural stretches of Ashtabula Country was that people weren’t seeing Obama in messianic terms...
...Ashtabula is in the northeastern corner of the state, between Cleveland and Erie, Penn., and it is perhaps Ohio’s most economically depressed county. The passing of a couple of months means another plant closing, families losing jobs and healthcare coverage. Homes everywhere are being foreclosed. The mall has almost as many empty storefronts as occupied ones. There is no Starbucks in Ashtabula. The home I lived in the first month I was there didn’t have cell phone reception, and many people in the southern half of the county—everything south...
...vast number of people I spoke to while canvassing the small towns, farms, and Amish communities of southern Ashtabula County just wanted answers to questions like, “How will I provide my family with healthcare if I lose my job?” and “Which of these candidates is going to bring jobs back to where I live?” The 100,000 or so residents were in a sense primed for Obama’s economic message, and this reflected in the fact that 56% voted him in. Still, at no point...
...Many Ashtabula voters were confirmed Clintonites who didn’t ask themselves whether the Black candidate was going to represent their interests as a white person. The question on their minds was whether the big city, Harvard educated lawyer shared and was willing to protect the values of a rural Ohioan. To them, Obama’s election wasn’t about members of the elite trying to chase the cowboys out of the White House. It was about what the Democrats can do for “me,” to restore security and maybe...