Whereupon I Torture Myself By Reading the Dispatch
Here's a great way to have it both ways if you're a newspaper that wants to appeal to liberal and conservative readers.
You endorse the Republican candidate but support him for all the wrong reasons. You support him by saying he brings a ton of pork to the district. In other words, if you bring home more benefits than your constituents give to Washington then you're a hero.
And that's precisely the problem with politics today. Everyone wants something for nothing. Fifty U.S. senators trying to rob from the treasury or at least get a better deal than their neighboring state. No wonder we run deficits.
One of the paper's columnists mentions that Ohio has an unemployment rate a full point above the national average. We're supposed to be horrified. But southeast Ohio is part of Appalachia and has chronically sky-high unemployment rates. After adjusting for southeast Ohio we might even be lower than the national average which is pretty darn good considering we're in the "rust belt".
That's not to minimize the pain felt in southeastern Ohio but I've yet to see anyone find a way to do anything about it. LBJ tried in the '60s. Lord knows Sen. Byrd has brought home more pork to West Virgina than twenty senators. And it's had little effect. The tools politicians can bring don't work. Linking a politician's effectiveness with the unemployment rate in southeast Ohio is like linking Jeb Bush's performance in office to the orange yield in central Florida. You can measure a politician by how much aid they give to southeast Ohio, but not the unemployment rate there.
Best you can do is provide a climate favorable to business because jobs are a very, very good thing and jobs come from businesses. So let's see where Ohio was, unemployment-wise, before Republican governors took over in '92 compared to now (both in relation to the national average). I'd be willing to bet it's better now. In fact, if it isn't I'll vote for the Democratic candidate.
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