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In blue-collar Ohio, campaign economic debate is also cultural

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Los Angeles Times

MENTOR, Ohio — Presidential elections have hinged on Ohio for decades. Time after time, it has tilted slightly more Republican than the nation as a whole.

But President Obama has tied three things together to build a potential firewall in Ohio for his reelection: the auto industry’s recovery, the loss of U.S. jobs to China and Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital.

Obama’s case against his Republican rival is not just economic. In a state where manufacturing’s slow decline has hurt families for generations and stoked anger at the unseen forces disrupting their lives, it is also cultural.

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The closing line of one of Obama’s final TV ads sums it up. It flashes on the screen over a map of Ohio after a few blue-collar workers voice dismay that Romney opposed the government bailout of Chrysler and General Motors: “Mitt Romney: Not One of Us.”

But will it work?

Obama’s lead in Ohio all but vanished after Romney outperformed him in the Oct. 3 debate in Denver, polls show. In the perennial “dogfight” over Ohio, as former President Clinton recently put it, Romney is now dashing around the state trying to capitalize on the same Rust Belt anxieties that Obama has tapped.

In North Canton on Friday, Romney reminded supporters of the rising cost of gasoline and healthcare. “We’ve seen over the last four years, people out of work, and then people with work find their incomes not going up,” he told them. “These have been tough times to be middle class in America.”

For six months, Obama and his allies have waged a TV ad assault to undercut Ohio’s faith in Romney’s vow to protect the middle class. In Lake County, a stretch of mainly white, working-class suburbs along the Lake Erie shore northeast of Cleveland, the message has resonated with many swing voters.

“His company, Bain Capital, that he was a part of, has a track record of sending jobs to China,” said David Grice, 38, a firefighter who voted for George W. Bush and now supports Obama’s reelection.

Obama’s attacks have also dampened enthusiasm among Romney supporters like Nancy Scanlon, 47, the manager of a dry cleaner.

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“Obama’s got to go,” she said. “He screwed up this country.” But Romney’s track record at Bain, the investment firm where he built a fortune of up to $250 million, has made Scanlon question whether he would help those living paycheck to paycheck, as she does.

“I’m driving this old clunker because I can’t afford a car payment,” Scanlon said, leaning against her 16-year-old Buick Skylark with rusty hubcaps outside the library in Mentor. Scanlon has no cable TV or Internet at home, so she borrows videos and catches up on the Web at the library.

Lake County, an election bellwether, is as closely split as Ohio and the nation, as anyone in Mentor can tell from the alternating Romney-Ryan and Obama-Biden signs on front lawns all over town, alongside holiday displays of pumpkins, witches and scarecrows.

In Ohio, the most coveted prize on the electoral map, the race is now so close that it’s anyone’s guess whether Obama can sustain the dynamic that set him on a path — a steady one until the Denver debate — to replicate his 2008 victory over John McCain by an almost 5-point margin.

Campaigning Thursday in Cleveland, Obama struck each of the main themes in his ads, saying Romney’s economic plan would mean “folks at the very top get to play by a different set of rules than you do.”

“They get to pay a lower tax rate, outsource more jobs, let Wall Street run wild again,” Obama told the crowd on a lakefront runway where Air Force One was parked. “It was the philosophy he had when he was in the private sector.”

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If Romney had been president when the auto industry was on the brink of collapse, he added, “we’d be buying cars from China, instead of selling cars to China. … I wasn’t going to let Detroit go bankrupt — or Toledo go bankrupt or Lordstown go bankrupt.”

Romney, who during the Republican primaries often spoke of creating thousands of jobs in investment deals that he oversaw at Bain, has rarely highlighted his private-sector record in Ohio. Romney has also avoided talking about the auto bailout. At a stop near Toledo on Thursday, he tried to turn the subject to his advantage, saying he’d read that Chrysler’s Jeep division, a major employer in the region, was “thinking of moving all production to China.” Chrysler denied the report.

But Romney has made attacks on Obama’s China trade policies a major part of his pitch in Ohio. And a TV ad aired in Ohio by American Crossroads, a “super PAC” that backs Romney, shows Obama bowing to Chinese President Hu Jintao. It says Obama borrowed from China to cover his economic stimulus spending, and then gave Beijing a free pass to undercut U.S. manufacturing jobs.

“The more Obama borrows from China,” an announcer says, “the more we’ll have to bow to China.”

One of Romney’s challenges in Ohio is the state’s relatively robust economic recovery, a source of pride for its Republican governor, John Kasich. Ohio’s 7% unemployment rate is down from 8.6% when Obama took office and lower than the current 7.8% national rate.

A surge in natural gas production has spurred growth in Ohio’s beleaguered steel industry, with rising demand for pipes, drill bits and other equipment. In Youngstown, where Obama plans to campaign Monday with Clinton, a symbol of the reversal of fortune is construction of a new million-square-foot steel mill by Vallourec, a French company.

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Ohio has long relied heavily on manufacturing jobs, especially in northern regions of the state. It is a major parts supplier for the auto and aerospace industries. But since the 1970s, companies seeking to cut labor costs have shifted production overseas or to states where they can employ nonunion workers, which has made “outsourcing” a favorite line of attack in Ohio campaigns.

“Outsourcing means a lot, because people all over the state have a factory somewhere nearby that either got smaller or went out of business, and they have a friend or relative who experienced it,” said Ned Hill, the dean of Cleveland State University’s Levin College of Urban Affairs.

Though no issue outranks the economy in Ohio, both Obama and Romney are using other appeals to drive up turnout among core constituencies. In Lake County, Obama’s ads on Romney’s vow to stop public subsidies to Planned Parenthood have helped him win the support of women like Brandy Stacy, 39, who was listening to Matchbox Twenty on her iPod while raking her frontyard in Mentor.

“He wants to get rid of family planning,” she said. “I don’t like that at all.”

A few blocks away at a Marc’s grocery store, Linda Laws, a 60-year-old retired caregiver for the elderly, explained why she had already cast an absentee ballot for Romney: “Someone’s got to stand for the unborn.” Romney and his allies have tried to maximize conservative support with targeted appeals, such as mailed brochures outlining his opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage.

But his statewide appeals, like Obama’s, emphasize the economy. To John Green, a political science professor at the University of Akron, it is clear why Obama has focused his Ohio campaign above all on the auto bailout, outsourcing and Bain Capital — and why Romney has focused on the president’s record on trade with China.

For many of the state’s blue-collar voters, he said, “there is a sense that capitalism has not worked very well in Ohio — partly because of international trade, partly because of rapacious capitalists and partly because of the lack of investment in traditional industries.”

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One in a series of occasional stories on the states that will determine the next president.

michael.finnegan@latimes.com

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