blogger interrupted

OH-17, Tim Ryan’s district, went for Hillary Clinton on March 4 something like 65-35.  That seems like ages ago, but it’s important to remember how Hillary campaigned in Ohio, and how she won places like OH-17 by such huge margins.  Now that he has done the easy thing after seeing those numbers, it’s also important to remember what kind of Democrat Tim Ryan used to be.

And it’s a study in how the TedFern Mafia operates.

Along with so much other campaign crap Hillary pulled in Ohio (NAFTA lies, Bosnia lies, health care lies) Ohio’s primary was a litany of one race-baiting incident after another from the Clinton campaign.  Hillary went so far as to utter the famous “as far as I know” line, when asked if she thought Barack Obama was Muslim, on 60 Minutes two days before the primary.  All this in Ohio was after a January and February filled with the incessant drumbeat of codewords and dog whistles that the intended audience couldn’t ignore - the white, lower education, lower income voters whose fears and prejudices are almost always the target for the GOP’s most vile tactics. 

Hillary made those tactics her own in Ohio, and if there is one state in this process that fell for the race-baiting, it was Ohio.  In places like OH-17, where the jobs left 30 years ago and never came back, the lingering legacy of American bigotry is far more virulent, much closer to the surface, often not even underneath it.  OH-17 is also one of those places where the strains of AM conservative talk radio, and Rush Limbaugh, waft through the air like pollen, in a community where working people who used to work can sit at home and listen to 3 hours of Rush telling them to vote for Hillary on March 4.   Exit polling in Ohio showed that among voters who voted on race, Hillary won by a large margin.  In OH-17, I’d bet that margin was doubled, if not tripled.

This is how the result in OH-17 became so lopsided, and it is now the main rationale for Ryan’s endorsement.  It was also the TedFern Clinton strategy with Ryan all along.  TedFern knew the kind of campaign the Clintons were going to run in Ohio, and they knew that there was no place for the race-baiting message to play better than in OH-17.  All they had to do was keep Ryan from endorsing before the primary, and then after the primary, the OH-17 result would back him into the corner they wanted him to be in.

Ryan stupidly obliged.

Ryan had initially endorsed Connecticut Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd’s presidential bid. Poor showings in early primary states drove Dodd out of the race. Dodd threw his support to Obama shortly before Ohio’s primary.

When the candidate for president you endorsed, shows more leadership than you do in your own state, before your state’s own primary, that shows such a paucity in leadership, it’s hard to describe.  It’s even more unfathomable since Ryan is in the 2nd safest seat in the state - if anyone could show leadership, it’s Tim Ryan.  He’s done it before.  

In 2005, Ryan voted against a flag burning amendment to the Constitution.  Against.  That amendment probably had 90% support in OH-17.  But Ryan had only been there for a term and a half.  The ways of the system he used to rail against hadn’t infected him yet.  My, how far Tim Ryan has deteriorated from the kind of leader he used to be.  

Now, Tim Ryan is fully infected by that which makes our politics so awful, so putrid, and so worthless, that the candidacy of a man like Barack Obama is rising up out of nowhere to destroy it.  Once, Tim Ryan was a part of that movement.  His election in 2002 was a direct result of that movement’s first stirrings.  Maybe someday he’ll remember that.  

Maybe someday he’ll remember sitting in a debate in 2002 when a Republican used the same tactics against him, on live TV, that made last Wednesday’s ABC debate between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton a total embarrassment.  Ryan’s timing, announcing this endorsement of Hillary after the sum-total of her campaign was vomited out onto another live TV debate, is more than a little ironic.  

Until Ryan remembers what got him where he is, I’m sure he’s taking notes from this little game that got played on him, so he can play it better next time.  Or maybe he’ll figure out that leadership isn’t just the right thing to do, it also helps defeat the game-players who want to use you for their purposes, and who will stoop to any low to do so.   But for now, Ryan will have to be satisfied with being forced into endorsing a candidate I’m sure he despises, who will certainly never be president, and whose baggage he now carries.  

Popularity: 5% [?]