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This week, I wrote two items on our gubernatorial race. When I got my start in politics (checks calendar) 27 years ago, I was an active participant in campaigns. Now, I observe them and write about them. It’s been an interesting trip down memory lane for me, but more on that in a bit. I hope you enjoy the Buckeye coverage and will join me in the comments for some #OhioTalk.
Amy Acton’s Prescription for Ohio
Cincinnati, Ohio
AMY ACTON PICKED UP A BIG ENDORSEMENT Monday in a union hall on the city’s west side. In a room decorated with historical mementos honoring Cincinnati’s fire department, the oldest professionalized municipal fire department in the country, Acton was surrounded by a dozen or so union leaders as the Ohio branch of the International Association of Fire Fighters threw its support behind her gubernatorial bid.
ICYMI: Here are links to each newsletter section so you can quickly get back to that edition you may have missed this week.
Morning Shots - Triad - Huddled Masses - Press Pass - Bulwark Goes to Hollywood - The Opposition - False Flag - The Breakdown - Receipts
BOOK CLUB THIS WEDNESDAY!
Join Mona Charen and Bill Kristol for the next edition of The Bulwark Book Club LIVE at 1:30 p.m. EDT. This month’s pick is Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson. Read it this weekend–it’s a quick read–then drop your questions, comments, thoughts on it for Bill and Mona through the comments of this post. We are excited for an afternoon of book talk and community with you.
Vivek Ramaswamy Gets a Reality Check at the County Fair
Owensville, Ohio
FRESH OFF A HUMILIATION, last week saw Vivek Ramaswamy barnstorming Ohio’s county fairs.
On Wednesday, Ramaswamy attended an annual convention of Young Americans for Liberty, a libertarian group for college students, at Xavier University in Cincinnati. (Think of it as a Temu TPUSA.) It did not go well. He came across less like a traditional politician in campaign mode than a too-confident debater who assumes the way to win an audience is to out-argue it. He was booed. He was heckled.
🚨OVERTIME🚨
Much like any job… Being a former political operative is not unlike working at McDonald’s. Once you’ve operated the fryer or manned a drive-thru window, you’ll never look at ordering fast food the same way.
For me, since politics is everywhere, being back in Ohio, where I grew up and worked in politics since I could drive, there’s a lot more I can’t unsee. Parades, county fairs, festivals. You watch the present-day practitioners and inevitably think back to your own glory days, perhaps even glamorizing the good old days a little. (The merch these days is way better.)
As I was waiting for Vivek Ramaswamy in Clermont County, I scanned the audience like I was doing advance work, making note of the potential disruptors. Not because I was worried about a heckler, but because I was curious about their perspective. And in Cincinnati, as I waited for Amy Acton to arrive at the local union hall, I kept thinking about a police union hall I was in 20 years ago, wondering if it had the same architect.
Suffice to say, if you read my two pieces, only one candidate, Amy Acton, has nostalgia on offer, the Ohio of yesterday. Vivek Ramaswamy seems to be “conservativemaxxing” hoping that decades of Republican rule will pay off for him. But it’s hard to be the candidate of change when your party has run the joint for decades.
As we saw in Missouri this week, voters rejected a ballot initiative to phase out the income tax. In Ohio, too, as I watched voters ask Vivek questions about his multitude of plans to make you pay less (or zero) for things that make the state and local governments run, I had a shred of hope.
Nobody loves paying income taxes or property taxes. But even people who have a sort of ironic disconnect who will laugh off extreme rhetoric as part of the game realize that at the end of the day, we have to pay for things. (Vivek had not yet announced his “free electricity in exchange for data centers” plan.)
In these 88 days until election day, I look forward to reporting more from the trail here in the Buckeye state on these campaigns, as well as from Springfield. It’s been so nice to hear from longtime members in my inbox and in the comments about their Ohio memories. And I’ve even met some readers who used to live in my Cincinnati neighborhood.
So this week’s comment prompt is: What do you miss about the politics of yesteryear? How much of that can we bring back, and how do you convince people to #Believe?1
Was this a job interview? A retiree won an auction to call an inning of Philadelphia Phillies baseball and… he belongs in a booth somewhere.
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Editorial photos provided by Getty Images. For full credits, please consult the article.
Can you tell I’ve started the latest season of Ted Lasso?
I miss how Republicans used to be. I had Republican friends and even some family (much older) while we disagreed on the proper function of government, we got along and even respected that others had differing views. No longer. Trump gave people permission to hate what and who he hates and brag about it.
I miss that politicians were really interested in the average person instead of their sponsors,before citizens united. Too much money in politics now