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Strickland hammers on Kasich's record during campaign stop

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August 15, 2010

by Marc Kovac

Capital Bureau Chief

Circleville -- Gov. Ted Strickland continued to hammer on his Republican challenger's congressional record Aug. 12, blaming John Kasich's votes on U.S. trade policies for boosting Ohio's unemployment numbers.

During a campaign stop south of Columbus, the state's top Democratic office-holder said trade deals supported by his opponent, including the North American Free Trade Agreement, led to job losses for communities like Circleville, formerly home to a television panel manufacturing facility that moved its operations overseas.

"Times are tough and have been tough," he said. "But we're fighting every day to try to bring this economy back. This recession was not of Ohio's making. It was not caused by Ohioans. In fact, it was not caused by me.

"This is a national recession that was brought about by policies that increased benefits for the wealthy and quite frankly took the economy off the cliff."

Strickland's speech stayed on the campaign message he's been pushing for months -- that Kasich's Wall Street ties and support of NAFTA and other national policies that Strickland opposed during his time in Congress have cost Ohioans their jobs and pushed the nation into recession.

The campaign stop came in a central Ohio county where the unemployment rates has roughly doubled since Strickland took office, from 6.6 percent in January of 2007 to more than 13 percent earlier this year. The June rate was 11.4 percent.

Rob Nichols, spokesman for the Kasich campaign, said in a released statement Aug. 12, "By raising taxes and piling on more state bureaucracy, Ted Strickland has made Ohio hostile to business. In fact, under his watch, 1,720 Pickaway County residents have lost their jobs, 569 more residents fell into poverty, and 50 Pickaway County businesses have disappeared. We need to get Ohio back on track by tearing down the barriers that are killing jobs, barriers that Ted Strickland seems to defend and cling to, but which only hold Ohio back."

But Strickland countered those assertions.

"My opponent likes to say that I'm responsible for losing 400,000 jobs," he said. "The truth is that his friends and his work on Wall Street brought on this recession. Ohio was moving I think forward in a positive way before this recession hit us. We wouldn't have had this level of unemployment had it not been for the collapse of Wall Street, the collapse of Lehman Bros."

He added, "I don't want to evade responsibility. My responsibility has been managing the recession, making the right decisions during the recession that will enable us to move forward once this economy starts picking up. And I think I have done that."

Marc Kovac is the Dix Capital Bureau Chief. E-mail him at mkovac@dixcom.com or on Twitter at OhioCapitalBlog.




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