Obama, Romney Surrogates Campaign in Youngstown
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – Surrogates for President Obama and Mitt Romney both made their pitches Tuesday to encourage area supporters to cast their ballots early in this year’s presidential election, just two weeks from Election Day.
Oakhill Renaissance Place, where the Mahoning County Board of Elections is based. was the backdrop for visits by both candidates’ campaigns the day following Monday night’s final debate between the sitting Democratic president and the Republican challenger who hopes to unseat him. Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, a Romney supporter, stopped by before heading to the Trumbull County Elections Board, while the international president of the United Auto Workers. Bob King, and UAW Region 2’s director, Ken Lortz, joined U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan there and about 125 auto workers and supporters in the afternoon.
The surrogates offered contrasting visions of the candidates and their performances the night before.
Brownback said Romney “really cleaned up” during the debate. “He looked like the president,” and made the “key point” that the United States can’t have a strong foreign policy without having a strong economy,” he said.
“What Mitt Romney did is he pointed out the problems with the presidency, not the president,” he remarked. “Barack Obama is a fine man, but his policies have been all wrong and they’ve produced a bad economy and a weak foreign policy.”
While Romney often agreed with Obama on several issues during the debate -- not always consistent with past positions, the president noted during the forum -- Brownback said the GOP nominee also pointed out “key differences,” such as “the president allowing space” between the United States and Israel. He also contended Romney “had some nice answers on China,” which the Kansas governor described as a “key and difficult relationship” for the country, particularly with regard to currency valuation and intellectual property.
“The other thing that I think is key," Brownback continued, "is that when you’re in debt to one of your major competitors, this is a piece of weakness. When we owe China as much as we do, it puts them in a stronger position than they should be [relative] to us.”
Brownback stressed the need for the United States, as he said Ohio has done, to “cut the budget and grow the economy at the same time.” He praised Romney’s running mate, U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, a “budget guy” who worked in his congressional and Senate offices.
At the afternoon event, Democrats ventured into familiar territory, seeking to capitalize on popular support locally for Obama’s backing of direct government aid to General Motors and Chrysler. The popularity of the auto rescue, which local supporters say helped preserve and add jobs at the Lordstown GM plant, is considered a cornerstone of Obama’s effort to win Ohio’s 18 electoral votes, increasingly considered crucial to both campaigns.
“The president stood by the auto industry when so many others across the country said let the auto industry go bankrupt, including his opponent,” UAW Region 2’s Lortz said.
“I’m tired of Mitt Romney changing his story on the auto industry every time he talks,” said the UAW’s president, King. “I was there when Romney said let us go bankrupt. Then when he found out public opinion was supporting the fact that the auto industry was coming back, he tried to say President Obama had followed his gameplan.”
During Monday’s debate, Romney repeated his support for federal loan guarantees for GM and Chrysler as part of the bankruptcy process. However, as King and others have pointed out, there was no private capital to be lent to the auto makers because the markets were frozen from the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009. The CEO’s of the Detroit Three all have agreed that the domestic auto industry would have been forced to liquidate without the direct federal support, King said.
“As much as Romney tries to spin it in another direction today, the bankruptcy he talked about was the type of bankruptcy where the corporate raider vultures swoop in and pick the meat off the bones, throwing retirees under the bus with the possible loss of health care, possible loss of pension benefits, breaking collective bargaining agreements,” Lortz said. Instead, the carmakers are paying out profit-sharing bonuses to members and are making investments in plants, such as the $200 million GM will spend at Lordstown to produce the next generation of the Chevrolet Cruze.
Countering claims that the bailout was a payoff to labor and UAW allies, King noted that members gave up $7,000 to $30,000 apiece to save GM and Chrysler.
King also accused Romney, while talking about getting tough on China, of bankrupting companies in America and shipping their jobs there. “You might have been a good investment manager … but you did not create manufacturing jobs in the USA,” he remarked. When the Chinese were dumping tires on the U.S. market, it was Obama who pushed for stopping that, a decision Romney criticized, he added.
The Mahoning Valley is in a “unique position” to see the benefits of the Obama presidency, said Ryan, D-17 Ohio, as he pointed to GM Lordstown, V&M’s new plant in Girard and Youngstown, and the new National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute downtown. “We don’t have to see a commercial. We don’t have to walk to another state or drive to another state or fly to another state,” the congressman said.
To support the president’s re-election effort, Lortz, whose region covers Ohio and Indiana, said the UAW has phone banks all over the state and members knocking on doors to get out the vote. “In 2010 we didn’t have voter turnout and we paid a horrible price for that,” he said, referring to the Republican rout of Democratic officeholders in Ohio. “In 2011, with Issue 2, we turned out 300,000 more ‘no’ votes on than the total number of people that voted in the gubernatorial election and we won.”
Copyright 2012 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.