“Why, oh why, oh why, oh–why did we ever leave Ohio?”
Such is the lilting lament sung by the stars of the hit Broadway show “Wonderful Town,” a revival of Leonard Bernstein’s sunny musical about the travails and triumphs of two Ohio sisters seeking their fortune in Manhattan.
But members of the 179-member Ohio delegation, the undisputed delegate stars of the Republican National Convention’s four-day production here, are singing quite a different tune this week.
Never, they marvel, have they been so pampered with perks–prime seating, front-row center, on the convention floor; a plush hotel; dinner cruises around Manhattan and tickets to shows including “Wonderful Town.”
Never have they been so pursued by the media–all the TV networks, major newspapers and even Danish television are clamoring for interviews.
And never have they been so lavishly courted by the party’s luminaries: A number of Ohioans have been invited to address the convention, and some of the most glittering GOP names are lined up to address their daily breakfast meetings at an eye-squinting 7:30 a.m.
In fact, a delegate from Ohio, Juan Jose Perez, was chosen to put President Bush’s name officially into nomination Monday.
The reason for all this is simple and seemingly stated at least hourly by anyone having anything to do with the Ohio delegation. As Greg Lashutka, a former mayor of Columbus, put it: “No Republican ever won the presidency without being successful in Ohio.”
And this time, being successful in Ohio may come down to a handful of votes; a Columbus Dispatch poll released Sunday shows Bush and his Democratic rival, Sen. John Kerry, both with 46 percent of the vote.
The 2000 race in Ohio was also close; Bush won by 4 percentage points. Even that slim margin might not have existed, delegates said, had Bush’s rival, Vice President Al Gore, not stopped advertising in Ohio and diverted resources to Florida, among other places, in mid-October.
Ohio always is an important state, but in a race that looks as tight as the 2000 contest, its 20 electoral votes may be crucial.
“We are front and center on the floor. We are front and center at this convention. No state is more critical than Ohio. We are the Florida of 2004,” Gov. Bob Taft told the delegation Monday morning, referring to the state that determined the outcome of the 2000 election.
Karl Rove, Bush’s senior political adviser, agreed that Ohio may be the deciding factor in November and that GOP efforts to register new Ohio voters and rally them to the polls may make the difference. “You are, like it or not, ground zero,” he told the delegation at breakfast.
Rove’s appearance at the breakfast–flanked by Bush-Cheney campaign manager Ken Mehlman, House Majority Whip Roy Blunt and Margaret Spellings, assistant to the president for domestic policy–on the convention’s first day is one more measure of Ohio’s import.
Bush has made 22 visits to Ohio since January 2001–16 of them since March–and plans to return to campaign there three times in the next week.
In fact, said Jason Mauk, communications director for the Ohio Republican Party, Ohio has been told to expect either the president, Vice President Dick Cheney or their wives to be in Ohio about once a week until the Nov. 2 election.
The leading issue in Ohio is jobs. The state has lost more than 200,000 of them, especially in manufacturing, over the past four years, and many union members lean Democratic.
“The president is putting his heart and soul into carrying our state,” Taft told his delegates. And the party is putting pressure, albeit sugarcoated with preferential treatment, on Ohio to make it happen.
“We’ve got 64 days left, not that anybody is counting, and I’m asking you to do more than you’ve ever done before,” Rove told the delegates. Mehlman urged every one of them to register 10 new voters.
The effort in Ohio revolves around grass-roots work to register voters and to rally them to the polls on Election Day–a technique that Democrats have used far more than the GOP in the state.
“We learned a pretty valuable lesson in 2000,” Mauk said. “The Democrats learned that you don’t pull out of a battleground state before the battle is over. And the Republicans learned that if we’re going to win, we’ve got to revamp our voter-registration effort.”
And they did.
“I’ve been in politics since 1960, and I’ve never seen anything like it,” state party Vice Chairwoman Kay Ayres said of the size of the effort–more than 60,000 volunteers working in the state–and the resources the party has thrown into it. “If we need more people, we get more people. If we need more bumper stickers, we get more bumper stickers.”
The delegation also gets seated in the center of the arena, just feet from the main stage, flanked by Florida and Texas. “I’ve told the delegates to bring napkins to wipe the spit off their faces,” Mauk said, grinning.
Ohio delegate Alan Bedol, however, said he’d already had a close encounter with spittle of another kind.
A manufacturer of TV tray tables and barbecue grills in Cleveland, Bedol, 69, said that he was taking a walk near the convention hall during Sunday’s massive protest march. A young woman protester spotted the delegate badge on his shirt and spit at him, he said.
