The World According to Oatney

Great new idea: Hit Cleveland Democrats over the head with a hammer to knock sense into them

By now, a lot of folks are aware that several Democrats from Ohio, nearly all of them from the Cleveland area, attempted to have a federal judge throw out the election results from Ohio and, get this, have John Kerry declared the winner last week. Myself and several other political commentators have surmised that these people were operating on the theory that no Democrat could possibly lose to a Republican in Ohio.

(For more on this, I highly recommend the Politics Insider blog at the Washington Times, which you have to register for, but membership is free. There is a great little diddy on the blog about the Ohio Democrats from political columnist Greg Pierce.)

I don't know what planet those people up there in Cleveland are on, but the rest of Ohio has left them and their hairbrained thinking behind decades ago. A county-by-county 1996 survey of Ohio officeholders indicated that Ohio is the second most Republican state in the Union. The only state with more Republican officeholders than Ohio is-Idaho (pass the potatoes)! A lot of people may argue that while that may be the case, Ohio went for Bill Clinton that same year for the second time. So, I would argue, did Montana, but Montana is hardly a bastion of liberalism, as evidenced by resounding Republican victories there in the last two elections.

The evidence of Ohio's resounding electoral shift to the GOP can be found in the reality that the Republicans control both houses of the General Assembly by large majorities, and control every major state office. That is political dominance of the first order. Yes, Cleveland, Republicans win in Ohio, even though most people in Cleveland don't vote that way.

Many people outside of Northern Ohio have believed that folks in those parts are still feeling the effects of the mass industrial pollution that poisoned the air in Cleveland and Toledo up until the mid 1980's: Apparently, breathing all that smog and Carbon Monoxide has caused permanent damage to North Coast brains.

After all these years, it is still the Mistake-By-the-Lake.

posted by Deacon David Oatney @ 10:43 AM