One month ago today, John McCain hosted a town-hall event in Ohio, when Mary Houghtaling, who runs a hospice in Wilmington, choked up in describing the devastating job losses associated with DHL’s plans to close its domestic air hub in her town. McCain said he’d been “briefed” on the situation, which he described as “a terrible blow.”
Responding directly to Houghtaling, a McCain supporter, the presumptive Republican nominee added, “But I’ve gotta look you in the eye and give you straight talk. I don’t know if I can stop it or not, or if it will be stopped. So I have to tell you that. That’s some straight talk. In fact, some more straight talk? I doubt it.”
No one realized it at the time, but the exchange may have seriously undermined McCain’s chances of winning Ohio in November.
We learned this week that McCain helped push the DHL deal in the Senate, and it was McCain’s lobbyist-turned-campaign manager Rick Davis helped orchestrate the DHL deal in the first place. Workers in Ohio feared that the foreign merger would cost the community a lot of jobs, and that’s precisely what happened.
McCain made it happen, and now the Obama campaign is pouncing. This radio ad was unveiled yesterday.
“But there’s something John McCain’s not telling you,” the ad explains. “It was McCain who used his influence in the Senate to help foreign-owned DHL buy a U.S. company and gain control over the jobs that are now on the chopping block in Ohio,” the announcer says. “And that’s not all: McCain’s campaign manager was the top lobbyist for the DHL deal…helped push it through. His firm was paid $185,000 to lobby McCain and other Senators.”
Yes, this is largely an Ohio-centered issue, but as you may have noticed, Ohio’s pretty important in a presidential election.
More importantly, after a month of a McCain-attacks-Obama-responds dynamic, this is turning the tables.
The McCain campaign’s response doesn’t make any sense.
The McCain campaign has unveiled a new message today, amplifying their theme about Obama’s life being “grand”: When Obama talks about job losses, he’s just exploiting the working class — and they’ve rolled out a working-class supporter to make that very case.
On a conference call just now with reporters, held in response to an Obama radio ad in Ohio tying McCain and Rick Davis to local job losses, an area resident who supports McCain lambasted Obama for running the ad.
“Shame, shame on Barack Obama for making us and putting us in this sort of position to look like the sad little Wilmington people,” said Mary Houghtaling, a local McCain supporter. Houghtaling later added, “He should be helping us, not harming us. He makes us look foolish, it’s not right.”
Obama, however, is and has been actually trying to do something to help those trapped in this situation. A little over a week ago, he called for the Bush Administration to take action against the deal in question.
Josh Marshall summarized the McCain message: “Telling people about the workers our campaign manager helped get laid off is unfair to the people who got laid off.”
This isn’t just some passing interest for the Obama campaign.
Barack Obama’s presidential campaign claimed that the general election had reached a critical turning point this past week after it was revealed that John McCain and his campaign manager had helped facilitate a merger that could result in the loss of thousands of jobs in Ohio.
On a conference call with reporters, Obama’s campaign manager David Plouffe said news of McCain and Rick Davis’ involvement in the DHL deal was “the most important development of the entire campaign this week” and would convince voters in the critical swing state that the Arizona Republican was far from his maverick image.
“He was there a month ago in this community and was asked a question about this DHL issue and did not say one word about his role in this or the role of his campaign manager. That is the furthest thing from straight talk that we can imagine,” said Plouffe.
Expect to hear more about this as the campaign unfolds.