Buckeye Back Road Tour cont.: We made a brief pit-stop back home in Cleveland last week. Liz and I painted a couple rooms in the place next door to put food on the table. I told a Channel 3 News reporter (the paint still on my hands) that while the other presidential candidates were posturing to appeal to the middle class, I was, well, “painting houses.” I bowl too. While at home, I was also interviewed by the Cleveland Catholic Diocesan newspaper. I said our platform revolved around the underpinnings of Catholic Social teaching, including having a “Consistent Life Ethic” that sets us against: abortion, euthanasia, poverty, pollution, global warming, nuclear proliferation… and anything else that can end life prematurely. Note: While back in Cleveland this time, we had two bicycles stolen over a period of three days. Last year we had our campaign vehicle grafittied and a brick was also thrown through the passenger window. That’s just the kind of neighborhood it can be sometimes.
9/26/08
Buckeye Back Road Tour cont.: On the current ‘financial crisis’… Foreclosures seem to be starting a chain reaction. A homeowner is foreclosed upon when they can’t pay the mortgage anymore. This begs the question: How many people are simply living beyond their means these days? Sure there’s inflation. And yes, variable rate mortgages are going up. So in the face of this, many could adjust by, say, living more simply, and creatively (like house-sharing). This should be how we approach the National Debt as well. That is, the Federal Government should: tighten it’s belt and come up with creative ways to pay it off. Note: During a talk I gave to a group of Amish in Kidron, Ohio, during Campaign 2004, one man said he had a fool proof answer to keeping the National Budget out of the red: First, we should have someone in D.C. with “a caluculator that works,” he said. And secondly, we should use this calculator to count up how much tax money has come in in a given year. “Then we shouldn’t spend any more than what’s come in,” he added. A lot of people might look at this as tremendously over-simplified, even naive. But is it? Maybe it is, indeed, the simple common sense way we should have been approaching this thing all along. I think it is.
9/20/08
Buckeye Back Road Tour cont.: In a recap of the last week… We met with students of St. Paul’s Outreach at Ohio State University in Columbus. This group of Catholic Christians live in community, pray together every morning, see modesty of dress and chastity as important issues, and witness about their faith at every turn around campus… And we witnessed about the “pro-Life aspect” of our faith on a busy street near the heart of the OSU campus. Our family stood on a street corner there holding abortion protest signs to the honks of support and glares of non-support from those who went by. “Abortion would end tomorrow if pro-Life people took to the streets en mass and created enough social unrest to stop it. Just like what happened with the ending of Segregation in the South,” I said during a talk at St. Rose Church in Perrysburg, Ohio, during an earlier stop… We then stumped in Delaware, Ohio, where I talked with a man-on-the-street about the economy. He said his first mortgage was a one-page document that said the bank was going to loan him so much money and he would have to pay so much money each month in return. That’s it. Now those documents are multi-page, small print, extremely complicated (and convoluted) legalese, with all kinds of additional provisions, loopholes, etc.. Extrapolated out, that’s the picture of our economy in general these days. For instance, the recent stories of all the intricacies of the Federal bail outs, and the tremendously multi-dimensional dynamics of the companies being bailed out, paint a picture of an extremely complex (and superfluous) behemoth — that needs to go back to a simple, one-page form, metaphorically speaking… In Prospect, Ohio (pop. small), I put up a campaign flyer at a laundromat and wrote on it: “The ‘prospects’ look good.” My wife Liz said that was corny. “What was corny?” I asked. (And we’re doing this all without paid political consultants.)… I Caledonia, Ohio (pop. 600 and hometown of Warren G. Harding), I stumped at Reeces Market. In the middle of one of the market’s aisles was a book-shelf with three generations of family pictures of the owner’s family. I loved that! When I approached him, owner Jack Reece was talking to a woman that he’d graduated from high school with here — in 1948. They were talking about the past. I said our platform includes placing a lot more emphasis on: heritage… Last night our family caught the second half of the Crestline Bull Dogs High School game. Small town Americana under the lights…
9/15/08
Buckeye Back Road Tour cont.: Ohio got hit by it’s first (Category 1) Hurricane, ever, yesterday. Hurricane Ike arrived in the Buckeye State with wind gusts of up to 76 mph. We were driving our campaign vehicle/camper when the hurricane hit. My wife Liz, who is in a perpetual state of denial about these things, said she thought the wind wasn’t “wasn’t really all that bad” — as big oak and elm trees swayed like bamboo all around us. In all our years of campaigning (9), except for Montana and North Dakota in January, these had to be the worst conditions we’ve ever traveled in. We eventually took shelter at a horse farm near Hillsboro, Ohio. And after the hurricane let up, the kids actually got some informal horse riding lessons to boot (a pun, sort of). We don’t campaign on Sundays because of religious beliefs, so the horse farm turned out to be a great stop. Note: This morning we stumped in Leesburg, Ohio, where we stopped in at Leesburg Hardware (old, dusty wooden floors, the whole small town thing). I gave owner George Smith $20 for a 39 cent black foam paint brush and told him to keep the change. It’s so vital these Mom & Pop small town stores continue to survive in the face of what amounts to the gathering sea of big box retailers. And what’s to keep any of us from, well, donating to their cause? For our position on this…
9/12/08
Buckeye Back Roads Tour cont.: It’s been somewhat of a whirlind since we launched on this final tour through Ohio. We stopped in Yorkshire, Ohio, where we met with the Kremers and the Smiths, both organic farming families who do everything in line with Catholic Rural Life Association teaching. They look at how they treat the land as a moral issue… We then stumped at the Annie Oakley Restaurant — she’s from this area– in Dawn, Ohio, where I put up a campaign flyer that said “…from a straight shooter.” (I’ve got a million of ’em.) Further down the road in Greenville, I told The Daily Advocate newspaper that Liz and I are running as your “average concerned Midwestern parents.” What we’re most ‘concerned’ about is our children inheriting a world of abortion, war, global warming, a nine trillion dollar debt… Heading further south, we campaigned in West Manchester, Eaton, Gratis, Carlisle, Waynesville and Wilmington. Then in Blanchester, Ohio, I talked with Jim Thie who did multiple tours in Vietnam spanning 41 months. He got a Purple Heart, Bronze Star and cancer (from his exposure to agent orange). What were we thinking dropping that?… We then headed on to Fayeteville, Mt. Orab, Sardinia and Peebles. Last night, I met with a group of Amish at a homestead on Tater Ridge Road, just south of Peebles. We discussed the Irap War (Amish are non-violent and don’t think Jesus would go to war), the economy, and the accelerating breakdown of faith, family and community in America. The Amish place extreme importance on faith, family and community — and boy does it show. One of the men said their lives are “a silent witness.” I said America would benefit from them being more vocal about it as well. Note: The discussion (over homemade ice-cream) last night was lively and I believe I convinced a number of the Amish that I, indeed, was the best presidential candidate. One problem: These Amish (because of religious reasons) don’t vote. Is there any wonder why I’m still, oh, a little behind in the polls? Of course ever optomistic, we’re just chalking that up to the ‘margin of error.’
9/10/08
Buckeye Back Road Tour cont.: Barack Obama spoke in Dayton yesterday and John McCain spoke in Lebanon, Ohio, yesterday, some 30 miles south of Dayton. Meanwhile we split the difference, stumping in Germantown, Ohio, yesterday, which is about halfway between. Dayton’s Channel 2 News did a piece on us. We don’t have a television in the camper so we didn’t see it, but I’ll bet the story contrasted the big campaigns with the small one. (Incidentally, we’d be the small one.)… After his talk, Obama met with employees of the troubled DHL headquarters in nearby Wilmington, Ohio. We parked for the night in the Wal Mart parking lot just across from the DHL headquarters. Incidentally, their planes, all their planes, take off between 4 a.m. and 5:30 a.m. Talk about loud ! And such are the trials of the more low budget campaigns.
9/4/08
Buckeye Back Roads Tour cont: A reporter frm the Wapakoneta Daily News noted that I would like to see a cutback in lifestyle in America and a shorter work week. This would free up more time for faith, family and community… In Kettersville, Ohio (pop. small), I stumped at the K-Village Restaurant with a group of area farmers. One of their bumper stickers said: OPEC… Drill This! Ethanol from Ohio corn… We then stopped in New Bremen, Ohio, home of the Great American Bicycle Museum. Instead of all this talk about “drilling,” maybe we should be, oh… bicycling. A friend of mine back in Bluffton has a bicycle sticker that says: Question internal combustion. Has anybody done that (except the Amish of course)? Note: Last week I talked with Loretta Dieringer who helped start the ecumenical Hands of Grace in Fulton County, Ohio. A non-profit, Hands of Grace has an adult day care for people who otherwise would have a hard time getting out. Volunteers also visit shut-ins and do lawn work, house cleaning and the like. They also take people for groceries, to the doctors and so on.
8/30/08
Buckeye Backroad Tour cont.: We talked with a woman today in Bluffton, Ohio, who said she was quite disturbed with the Olympic: clothing. She said, for instance, that the women marathon runners, the women sprinters, etc. were dressed, well, immodestly. (Anybody remember that word?) They were all dressed immodestly except Rogaya Al-Gossra, a Muslim woman who ran the 200 meters event. She ran in a headress, full length shirt and pants down to her ankles. What’s more, in the preliminaries she won her race… We stopped in Lindsey, Ohio, where I talked with Keith Naus of Naus Bros. Hardware. He said several years ago he had a heart attack and now has to go in to get his cholestoral tested every couple months, at $350 a visit. Mr. Naus has no healthcare insurance and struggles to pay it each time. What’s more, his heart surgery was quite expensive, and he didn’t have healthcare insurance for that either. He paid that off, too, by himself. He said he’s hoping for a president who can help him. I said we could.
8/27/08
Buckeye Backroad Tour cont: We headed further west where we interviewed Clyde, Ohio’s Dave Woodruff. He is the founder of the organization Blue Collar Community. He is also a former employee of the Whirlpool Corporation, which has it’s main plant in Clyde. Woodruff said when he worked at Whirlpool the company went to profit sharing, which meant the employees would get shareholder statements — showing, among other things, how much money the guys (and gals) in corporate were making in comparison to the workers on the floor. “They’d get millions, and we’d get a lunch box,” Woodruff said of the salaries, perks. The CEO, especially, was “knocking down big bucks,” he said. So Woodruff sent him a letter protesting. One of the things Woodruff told me was that the company was cutting large amounts of money from different departments, but it didn’t seem the people in corporate were necessarily taking any significant cuts. Woodruff, through his organization, is now trying to organize blue collar workers in the area to come together and stand up for their rights. “There’s enough pieces of the pie to go around,” he added.
8/26/08
We traveled further west to Norwalk, Ohio, where we were asked to participate in a Farmer’s Market that’s coordinated by Chrissy Houtz. Houtz is a Vegan vegetarian who opposes the cruelty of factory farming. We also discussed, among other things, the phenomenal amount of grain used to fatten animals in this country — that could be going to feed the hungry of the world. Given that 24,000 people starve to death in the world every day, this is one of the biggest social justice travesties of our time… At the Farmer’s Market, I interviewed John Dickerson who has a land conservation service. A tremendously knowledgeable guy. He said that traditional farming methods (using pesticides, herbacides, etc.) are rapidly destroying the soil. But the ties between agri-business (that promotes this) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture are so strong that changing this seems near impossible, he said. ‘Changing this,’ by the way, would mean going to a much more sustainable, organic small farm base in this country. Something our agricultural position paper wholeheartedly embraces.