STILL HIGH on his double win in Michigan and Arizona, Mitt Romney has come to Ohio to campaign for Super Tuesday. “I want Ohio in my column,” he pleads. “I want your vote. If I’m the nominee, I’m going to beat Barack Obama. I don’t think anyone else can.”
By “anyone else” Romney means that pesky interloper Rick Santorum. “A month ago, they didn’t know who we are,” Santorum said gleefully as the results came in last Tuesday night. “But they do now . . . We came to the backyard of one of my opponents in a race that everyone said, ‘You’ll have no chance here.’ ”
Santorum was soon claiming he won Michigan. Though Romney received 41 per cent of the popular vote to 38 per cent for Santorum, through a quirk of the Republican Party’s Byzantine primary system, they will split Michigan’s 30 convention delegates, 50/50.
Romney looks likely to win at least five of the 10 states that will vote on March 6th, when 437 delegates will be awarded (66 from Ohio), the biggest total for a single day in the January-to-June primary season. Romney currently has 167 delegates to 87 for Santorum; 1,144 are required to secure the nomination.
Delegates will be awarded proportionally throughout March, then on a winner-takes-all basis from April. Mathematically, Romney cannot clinch the nomination until late April.
Santorum’s advantage over Romney in national polls flipped this week, with Romney now leading by 35 per cent to Santorum’s 24 per cent.
AMONG THE10 Super Tuesday states, only Ohio is a truly contested "battleground" state, crucial for the presidential election in November. "As the narrative goes forward, the presidential nominee wants to be able to say they have carried the battleground state of Ohio, Florida or Pennsylvania," says Kevin DeWine, chairman of the Ohio Republican party.
On this winter afternoon, Romney’s strategists have decided it’s time for the ill-loved, millionaire front-runner to Connect With the People. Romney wears scuffed brown loafers, and his jeans look like they need washing.
He answers questions from the clean-cut, friendly audience at Capital University, walking close up to questioners and looking deep into their eyes. He is trying hard to be like them, and they are trying hard to like him. Romney and Republican voters have reached the serious stage of a protracted courtship, knowing they are destined for a marriage of convenience.
“The media portray you as a man without a heart. How can you show the American people you care?” asks a man wearing a stars-and-stripes shirt. Romney speaks of his love for his wife Ann and his 16 “fabulous” grandchildren. “You don’t even have to change their diapers!”
He surprises the audience by evoking his Mormon faith, unprompted. “My religion is unusual,” Romney says. “We don’t have a paid clergy. I ministered for 10 years, 20, 30, 40 hours a week, to people in difficult circumstances. I learned that long-term unemployment is traumatic. People become depressed. I’ve come to know people on a very personal basis. Had that not happened, I would have been very happy to enjoy our success in our little circle . . . breaks my heart to think about families at the margins.”
CHRIS WALISIAKsits next to me in the front row. The youngest elected official on the Wheeling Township board, 19-year-old Walisiak is a Romney clone, tall and slender, in jeans and a gold-buttoned, navy-blue blazer.
“He’s my hero,” says Walisiak, who followed Romney to Iowa last summer. “He’s a great man; a great moral character.”
Walisiak wants to succeed in business before commencing a career in politics; like Mitt Romney. He deplores Obama’s alleged attempts to transform the US into Europe but admires Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel. Has Walisiak not heard that a man who’s on the right at age 20 has no heart? I ask.
He looks puzzled: “I don’t believe in spreading wealth. If you earn your money, you should be able to keep it . . . My family has owned businesses for years and years. I see the destruction that the liberal agenda is doing.”
There are discordant notes in the Romney question-and-answer session. Two days earlier, a teenager in Ohio shot dead three fellow students. “I have guns myself,” Romney tells a voter. “We have the right to bear arms. Trying to find more laws to change bad behaviour isn’t the way.”
A law student tells Romney she’s worried about the debts she’s running up to pay for her education. “I wish I could tell you there’s cheap or free money,” Romney says. “That’s not going to happen. I would like more competition between lenders and between schools.”
For Romney, more competition is the answer to every problem.
“Higher education is going to have to live within its means,” warns Romney, whose personal fortune is estimated at $250 million. “I don’t want the taxpayers subsidising people who want to go to school.”
Later the same day, Romney says he opposes legislation drafted by senators Roy Blunt and Marco Rubio, which would exonerate any US employer from providing healthcare coverage that includes contraception, on the grounds of religious faith.
“Contraception is working,” Romney jokes, repeating a line from one of his debate performances. Within an hour, his campaign retracts the statement; of course Romney supports the Blunt amendment, his spokeswoman says, claiming he’d misunderstood the question. The Democrats call it Romney’s fastest flip-flop.
“If you’d told any political observer, myself included, that Republicans would take such a strong stand on contraception, they’d have been shocked,” says Chris Redfern, the chairman of the Democratic Party of Ohio. “I thought the days of debate over social issues were behind us . . . People are saying, ‘What is this: 1952? Eisenhower never gave his opinion on contraception.’ In the late 1800s, perhaps, there was a discussion of the role of women. That’s where the Republican party is today.”
The Blunt amendment was voted down in the Senate on Thursday, but Redfern says such positions are driving women from the Republican party. Polls show among women voters Obama routinely beats Romney and Santorum by double digits.
REPUBLICANSthrashed Democrats in the November 2010 midterm elections, especially in Ohio. Early last year, Ohio's Republican governor, John Kasich, passed a law banning public sector unions from engaging in collective bargaining. That law, Senate Bill 5, was repealed by a 62 per cent majority in a referendum last November.
Ohio’s firemen and policemen are the sort of blue-collar, public sector, “Reagan Democrats” who rebelled against SB5, says Redfern. Santorum has a certain affinity with them, if he would only stop talking about social issues. But thanks to Kasich’s blunder, Redfern says, the Reagan Dems are ripe for picking: “Many of these voters had not been with us since their parents left the Democrats a generation ago.”
The Republican primary candidates face other problems in Ohio: the economy is improving, and Obama’s auto bailout, which they all opposed, has been successful. Though unemployment is still high nationally at 8.5 per cent, Ohio’s figure has dropped to 7.9 per cent.
Mitt Romney wanted to visit the Banner Metals Group factory in Columbus this week, but vice president and general manager Bronson Jones declined, because he couldn’t accommodate Romney’s 400-strong entourage and audience safely.
A family-owned business founded by John O’Brien, an Irish immigrant, in 1921, Banner is a thriving manufacturing company in central Ohio. As Jones says, “There are not that many.”
Banner makes airline brakes for Boeing, Airbus and a host of regional airlines, as well as parts for Honda, GM and Chrysler. Jones describes himself as a Republican-leaning independent who voted for John McCain in 2008. “When we have a Republican president, our business seems to be better,” he says. “When we’ve had a Democratic president, we’ve had more down time.”
BUT AS A GROUPof journalists visit the factory floor, past 1,000-tonne presses stamping car parts like cookie cutters, Jones's mind, too, is working: regulations, which Romney describes as the scourge of business, aren't a problem, he says.
Santorum says he’d eliminate all tax on manufacturing, but Jones doesn’t believe it. It was the previous, Democratic governor who helped businesses by transforming a tax on inventory into a tax on sales. “What helped us most is the auto bailout,” Jones says. “If General Motors had gone bust, my steel and nut suppliers would have gone down . . . the knock-on effect would have been horrific.”
By the end of our visit, Jones seems to have changed his mind. “I think Barack Obama is going to be re-elected,” he says. “It’s a weak Republican field – the weakest I’ve seen. The economy is growing. In the eyes of Banner Metal, Obama has a plan. Unemployment is dropping in Columbus. There are people still suffering, but we’re very glad we’re where we are today.”