The power of the rust belt
This is the idyllic rural mid-west the settlers pointed their wagons towards, the America of farming, hunting, and fishing throwbacks.
Rusty, rusty state. Once you nose your car onto the interstate highways that link the big industrial cities of Ohio, the Huckleberry Finn stuff quickly evaporates.
Cities like Cleveland, Toledo, Dayton and Cincinnati have been dubbed the "rust belt" of America, because of the dramatic slide in the state's once massive manufacturing industries.
It is this rusty, rusty state that will determine the future of America. No Republican president has ever made it to the White House without taking Ohio. In only two elections since 1892 has Ohio sided with the loser. George W Bush had a 3% margin over Al Gore here in 2002 but this time round Ohio is so skin-of- the-teeth close that it's impossible to call.
We are at the wire. Election 2004 has come down to the biggest see-saw state of them all. Bush and John Kerry know that. Between them they have made a whopping 65 visits to this state with 8 million voters (and 20 electoral votes out of 539) that stretches from the Great Lakes in the north to Kentucky in the south. Yesterday, all four presidential and vice-presidential candidates held rallies here the first time it ever happened.
On Saturday, Vice-President Dick
Cheney flew in for one such whistle-stop encounter in the magically-named Zanesville.
In a cramped school hall on the outskirts, Cheney arrived to deliver his standard stump speech to a crowd who were a cliché of everything you imagine the Republican party to be. The Stetson hats and baseball caps are whipped off when they begin with prayer.
Everybody is decked out in Republican and stars-and-stripes clobber. There is even a jolly sheriff of gargantuan girth.
Cheney pressed all the right buttons. He established his huntin' and shootin' and farmin' credentials, talked a lot about God, patriotism, abortion, security and terror. He made platitudes about the finest military in the world.
Kerry will do and say anything to get elected, he says, using the standard Bush line of the campaign's final week. "As we say in Wyoming," he rasps, "you can put all the lipstick you want on a pig but at the end of the day it's still a pig."
That, to be local about it, sure gets them hollering. As he finished, the crowd of about a thousand starts chanting "four more years, four more years."
The only new message is a Cheney response to the Osama Bin Laden tape, which surfaced on Al-Jazeera on Friday. "We have all seen the tape now of Osama Bin Laden. It's a reminder that we are engaged in a global war on terror. This is a conflict we did not choose. It's one that we will win," he says, ratcheting up the fear factor as only he can.
Ah, Osama. Like Bill Clinton, he's made a late and dramatic entry into the campaign, causing much ruckus For the Bush camp, it's a reminder that the chief architect of 9/11 is very much alive and at large. Kerry's handlers are nervy it will edge waverers to gung-ho Dubya.
Maureen Dowd of the New York Times had the most delicious take on the hypocrisy of the Bush reaction to the video.
"It's absurd that we're mired in Iraq an invasion the demented vice president praised on Friday for its 'brilliance' while the 9/11 mastermind nonchalantly pops up anytime he wants. For some, it seemed cartoonish, with Osama as Road Runner beeping by Wile E Bush as Dick Cheney and Rummy run the Acme/Halliburton explosives company."
Yesterday morning in Columbus, the elegant state capital of Ohio, the normally deserted state government district was awash with activity. In this State and there's consensus about this from both camps the so-called "ground battle" of the last 24 hours will be about getting people out to vote and about the local economy.
Jason Mauk, the Republicans' spokesman in the state, gives an example of the campaign's intensity.
"In 2000, we had 22,000 volunteers. Now we have 85,000," he tells me.
Mauk concedes that Ohio has suffered, losing over 200,000 jobs in the past four years.
"Clearly Ohio's economy has been slower to recover from the recession than others. President Bush's strategies to counter that are beginning to show," he argues.
A BLOCK away, Dennis White, the chairman of the Democratic Party in Ohio, thinks it will boil down to turn-out. He predicts that his party will win, because it has registered half-a-million new voters in the state.
"Ohio is going to decide the winner," he predicts. "Both campaigns understand that. It's a very swing state. Whichever party gets out the vote will win the White House."
The battle here has been bitter and hostile, already mired with accusations of fraud, of smear tactics, challenges and legal writs.
The Democrats need two things. They need a big turn-out and need to harness the anger over job losses.
What the Republicans are relying on is another constituency altogether. The translation for al-Qaida is "the base." Republicans also talk about their own "base." They are the 4 million evangelical Christians who did not vote in the last election. For over a year, Bush's chief strategist Karl Rove has been targeting this arch-conservative group.
At Zaneville on Saturday, they were well represented among the crowd. Every second person I spoke to was born-again, talked about their conviction that God was on the side of Dubya.
Evenly balanced. But deeply divided. Sometimes you feel that two nations are vying for power in one country, one fundamentalist, conservative and isolationists and the other secular, liberal and inclusive. And in Ohio that will come down to rust belt versus rustic belt.
