The fight for Ohio waged in wallets

CANTON, Ohio - Just down the street from a Timken ball bearing plant, the conversation around Bill Carrick's motorcycle turned to jobs and politics.

"About everybody around here knows people who have lost their jobs," said Carrick, a burly former Timken worker in a Yankees cap. "But one reason I'll vote for Bush is I'm against abortion. And I'm against gun control. I'm probably against everything John Kerry stands for."

White-haired retiree Gloria Wade grimaced at Bush's name. "I'm not voting for him again, hell no," she sputtered. "Look what he's done to this country. Look at all the jobs going away."

The political question in the Canton area - a microcosm of middle America - is basic: Do pocketbook concerns trump cultural issues?

Nowhere is the answer more critical than Ohio, competing with Florida as the most important battleground state in the presidential election. No Republican has ever won the presidency without taking Ohio, and John F. Kennedy in 1960 and Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1944 are the only Democrats to manage it.

Al Gore pulled out of Ohio six weeks before the 2000 election and lost the state by less than two percentage points. Bush has visited Ohio 18 times since taking office, and recent polls variously show him with a slight lead or Kerry with a narrow edge.

If history is any indication, the winner of the Kerry vs. Bush debate in Stark County, Ohio, will be the next president. This is the bellwether county in the bellwether state.

And lately a lot of Stark residents are hurting.

"You want to know the truth about what I do? I siphon the gas out of junk cars just to get around," said Patricia Reich, who worked 25 years at Canton's Republic steel mill until she lost her job five days before Christmas in 2002. She suffers from severe high blood pressure.

"I don't have any health insurance, and Good Samaritan Hospital has so many people needing help, a nurse told me to say I would commit suicide so I could get in there."

These days, Reich helps union organizers mobilize members to swing Ohio's 20 electoral votes to Kerry. For as many neighbors she knows sharing her dire financial straits, she still thinks Bush has a good shot at winning the county.

"It drives me crazy. You hear all these people say, "President Bush is a moral man. He reads the Bible.' They don't know much about John Kerry," she said.

Stark County is 576 square miles of rolling farmland, dingy brick smokestacks and mills, and suburbs dotted with Starbucks and Pier 1 Imports. Since 1960, it has voted for the winning presidential candidate in every election but 1976. It usually votes in margins mirroring the state and national electorate.

That's why Massachusetts Sen. Kerry came to this northeastern Ohio county Friday, his eighth day of campaigning in the state since clinching the nomination in March.

"Do you know when you go to work today, those of you who are working, and you earn your money, some of that money is actually going to be used to reward a company that goes overseas? When I'm president, we're going to close tax loopholes that export jobs," he told more than 3,000 people at Perry High School in Massillon.

"I can't promise to make the river of steel flow the way it used to," Kerry said. "But you deserve a president who will fight for your job as hard as he fights for his own."

If there's a heart of Canton, it's the Timken Co., a 103-year-old steel and bearing manufacturer whose name graces assorted public buildings around town. It has long been a benefactor of civic organizations and charities. Many families include three generations of Timken workers.

Bush visited a Timken research facility in Canton in April 2003, standing before a giant "Jobs and Growth" banner with W.R. "Tim" Timken, the great-grandson of the company's founder and one of the country's biggest Bush-Cheney fundraisers.

"Tim told me this is a can-do company - we are a roll-up your sleeves company, a can - it is a can-do environment. . . . I know you're optimistic about the future of this company, and I'm optimistic about the future of our country," said Bush, hailing Timken for caring for shareholders and employees alike.

A year later, Timken announced plans to close three Canton bearing facilities employing 1,300 people earning an average of more than $40,000 a year.

The shockwaves are still reverberating, particularly after another community institution, Hoover in North Canton, recently started cutting another 500 white-collar jobs.

Ohio has lost more than 218,000 jobs since Bush took office, including 12,000 in the Canton metropolitan area. Stark County's unemployment rate, 5.8 percent, is only slightly higher than Ohio's, but it doesn't include thousands of people who have dropped off the unemployment rolls. Nor does it reflect the deep anxiety heard among many residents.

Around Stark County, statistics showing a growing national economy are, at best, an abstraction.

"This is home, our way of life. This is where we were raised as children, and where we want to raise our children," said Scott Albertson, whose father retired from Timken and who started working there 23 years ago at age 18.

"I have no idea what I'm going to do when Timken shuts down. I have two young children I've always been able to provide for, but all the jobs where you can provide for your family are leaving," he said.

Timken is negotiating with the union and no job cuts are certain. But around Canton, the likelihood is seen as much more than the latest in a string of manufacturing layoffs. To many people it is nothing short of a fatal tear in the community fabric.

"There was always a sense here that if you could get a job at Timken, you would always have a job, be able to buy home, to put your kids through college," said Bill Wright, a lifelong Stark County resident and preacher's son who serves as vice president of the Steelworkers Local 1123, representing Timken workers.

"The closure announcement has basically destroyed everybody's opinion of what security is all about and what loyalty to the community is all about."

Among Stark County's 378,000 residents, one finds little sympathy for gay marriage or worry about restrictions on abortion. Hundreds of people gather for Wednesday evening worship at the Canton Christian Fellowship, and the high school football rivalry between the Massillon Tigers and McKinley Bulldogs spurs even more excitement than the annual inductions at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton.

Canton was home to President William McKinley, who with help from sharp political advisers, beat populist William Jennings Bryan in 1896 and started a 30-year Republican dominance of Washington. Karl Rove, Bush's chief political adviser, is famously fascinated by McKinley.

Despite an independent streak that gave Ross Perot 25 percent of the county vote in 1992, a strong Republican sentiment runs through Stark. County offices are almost all held by Republicans.

"What people are looking for is a strong leader," said Stark County Republican chairman Curt Braden. "This is middle America. It's a microcosm of the country, and that's why it's known as a bellwether."

Even in the midst of a heated presidential campaign, many local union members - supposedly pillars of the Democratic base - quietly acknowledge they often vote Republican. They mention abortion, gun control and other social issues.

"A lot of us blue-collar workers had done so well over the years on wages and benefits and pensions that people started thinking, "I'm better than blue collar,' and they voted Republican," said Dave Leasure, a former Republic steel worker who lost his job in 2002.

"As long as your wages and benefits and pension aren't being touched, you have the luxury of having your priorities elsewhere. I don't think that will happen this year," said Leasure, who now works for America Coming Together, a Democratic-leaning group trying to mobilize anti-Bush voters across the country."

But as ACT staffers canvassed the other day in a former mill village in the shadow of one of Timken's plant, that appeared to be an open question.

"Do you know anyone who's lost their job because of outsourcing?" canvasser Sean McDonald asked at one door.

"You hear a lot about that around here," responded retiree Charles Moore, who worked 43 years for Timken.

"But I think I'll stick with Bush," he continued. "Bush has started something in Iraq, and I think he's the one who should finish it. Also, I'm an NRA member."

- Adam C. Smith can be reached at 727 893-8241 or adam@sptimes.com

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