You’d think a GOP candidate from northern Ohio would understand what side his
state is best buttered on. But you’d be wrong. Niceness is the be all and end all.
I’ve seen Toledo, mostly from the highway that passes over it to and from Canada. This was years ago. The city was in the rust belt then, sharing a plight similar to Flint’s as a result of GM’s movement of manufacturing jobs to Mexico. For a variety of reasons it’s still in the rust belt, despite a brief interruption of decline during the Trump administration. That guy. The one who killed NAFTA and replaced it with a new treaty that made both Mexico and Canada weep. The same one who further slowed down the offshoring of manufacturing jobs with tariffs on China and the European countries who locked U.S. automotive products out of their markets. Why Ohio went for Trump in 2020, despite the shocking surprise depressant of the COVID epidemic.
The variety of reasons for Toledo’s continued rust belt status is a consequence of the Biden administration, which prefers placating hostile China and ungrateful Europe at the expense of its own citizens and economies within states that don’t vote for Democrats. Why the Keystone pipeline was killed, the NAFTA mentality is returning to U.S. trade policy (billions for thee, none for me), and U.S. manufacturing jobs are hostage to the Most Favored Nation status of trading partners who build more cheaply with child labor and/or the negotiation of reduced U.S. tariffs with no reciprocal reductions in their own protectionist trade policies.
This is all pretty obvious stuff, right? Unless you look to the mass media for accurate assessments of the Biden economy from 2021 to now. If you Google information about the state of the economy in Ohio, here are, in order, the links the biggest ever thumb on the political scale shows you:
Now let’s say you’re determined and persistent enough to go looking for some fact checking about the claims of the legions of Biden apologists. What you’ll find are general assessments from wholly owned disinformation sources like PolitiFact. Who begin their “15 Charts” of economic truth with the “good news.” (These are data through the end of 2022; it takes time to be as authoritative about 2023, which isn’t even over yet.)
They like leading with the great news about unemployment.
Great, huh. Most basic possible sign that the economy really is booming. Unfortunately, you have to wait till the second half of the 15 charts to see this one…
The principal economic effect of the COVID mandates was that people trapped at home simply dropped out of the workforce and lived on government benefits of various kinds. They stopped looking for work. When the mandates receded, they did not return to the job market and were no longer considered unemployed. The employment successes shown above are illusory, because the real unemployment rate remains shockingly high for all demographics. Laziness and permanent government dependence have become institutionalized and conveniently concealed by changing the population measured.
What they hope you get bored and quit before seeing is the most important chart, buried in the second half,
after the good news, where some of the challenges are conceded.
This is why people are suffering. Prices keep going up. The prices that have been going up the most are the ones most essential to household survival: food, fuel of all kinds, transportation, and interest rates on credit. The chart’s optimistic explanation of a recent decline in the inflation curve is misleading. The rate at which inflation is occurring has declined, not prices. It’s impossible to fool people about this distinction. They know they can’t afford to live like they were living a few years ago. If they’re making higher wages, the increase is still lagging far behind the losses imposed by the erosion of their purchasing power.
Why this is a chart no politician can afford to ignore, especially not a Republican politician:
People remember that things were better under Trump. None of his rivals can demonstrate a comparable record. Which is a record after all, not a set of promises to do better in future. Only the Republican Party still has an abundance of flies in the ointment like this guy…
A great argument for election to the Congress in 1954, not 2024. So he’s a nice guy, from Ohio, loves sports, his church, and his hometown in that order, and he’ll work hard in Congress. Convinced? Not me. (A personal bugaboo hardly anyone else will care about. This insistence on the appellation ‘The Ohio State University’ is recent, born entirely from Buckeye players identifying themselves with OSU on TV. My mother and her parents were graduates of Ohio State and never referred to it with that annoying addition of a definite article. Annoying because there are quite a few state universities in Ohio who have done nothing to deserve being belittled by the one that’s on television the most, especially with the deliberate stressing of ‘The’ (pronounced ‘thee’) in oral usages. What’s this? You’re the Harvard of Ohio? No you’re not. Try telling that to Miami University, Wright State, Kent State, Denison University, or Case Western Reserve. Anyway, there’s something Babbittish about this verbal tic, reminiscent of the parochial boosterism that’s also indicated by citing Rotary Club membership as a Congressional credential. Reading this little bio makes me imagine Craig Riedel wearing a doubleknit sportcoat and white patent leather shoes and belt. My bias showing.)
Here’s a better reason for objecting to the fella:
No sign whatever that he’s aware of the economic issues summarized above or the irrelevance of a few mean tweets by a former President of the United States who has been subjected to savage assaults from all directions since the day he declared himself a candidate. No. It doesn’t matter that he’s shallow and callow enough to make a big stand he immediately retreats from. All that really matters is being a nice guy. Very GOP of him, don’t you think?
Here’s Riedel in his own transcribed words:
FTA: <<Of President Trump, Craig Riedel said in a recorded phone call, “I don’t like the way he communicates… I like Ron,” he added.
Jacoby: You’re not looking for a Trump endorsement, are you?
Riedel: I am not. We are not. Nope.
Jacoby: And you’re making it a point that you do not want Trump’s endorsement.
Riedel: Yep. Yep.
Jacoby: when the time comes publicly, and if it does come, that you’re put on the spot about your support for Trump, what are you going to tell people? Like, just straight dope, what are you going to do?
Riedel: I get asked this often, and my answer is the same every time, and I’ve hit on it already. That — look — Donald Trump, he’s, he’s a different person than me. I don’t like the way he communicates. I think he is arrogant. I don’t like the way he calls people names. I just don’t think that’s very becoming a President.
Jacoby: So it’s safe to say that you’re not looking to support the guy’s primary run?
Riedel: I’m with you. We got to, we need to go a different direction. We need people like, you know, people like Craig Riedel, people like Craig Riedel.>>
So this guy will lose and go away. No big deal. Except that it is a big deal. There are a lot of GOP candidates like Riedel, so many that there are probably over a hundred of them in the misnamed Republican House Majority. Better name? Republican House Dummocracy, who use their brains only for dipping into the pork barrels of lobbyists and pretending to oppose profoundly immoral Democrat policies that are destroying the nation and civilization itself.
Overstatement? No. If you think so, you are also part of the problem. It’s not 1954 anymore. Even a rust belt politician living directly across the border from the failing ‘nice guys’ of Canada should be able to recognize the enormity of the challenges we face and the puniness of a campaign based on belonging to the right community social groups.
But who am I to say? Just a guy who’s halfway from Ohio and has lived there for a full ten percent of his life. And someone who knows, deep down, that we’re in a whole bushel basket of trouble in The United States of America.
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