McCain Playing "Jocko Homo" As The Double Talk Express Pulls Into Wilmington, Ohio Today?

Just over a week ago I called Democratic congressional candidate Jane Mitakides to ask her about an unfolding tragedy in the district she seeks to represent in southern Ohio. It's a saga that pits the Republican economic agenda and the Bush Economic Miracle against working American families.

Ohio's third congressional district, centered in Dayton but including Wilmington and Clinton County is represented by a far right Republican ideologue, rubber stamp Congressman Mike Turner. Even after the tsunami of job losses due to NAFTA hobbled Ohio's economic development and devastated hundreds of thousands of Ohio families, Turner was still, zombie-like, rubber stamping the Republican Party party-line and voting for every awful "free" trade treaty Bush vomited up, from CAFTA to Peru to Colombia and everything in between. Mike Turner is not just an extremist and a rubber stamp, he is someone well known for taking "contributions" from big corporations and then voting for their special interests no matter how badly that hurts his own constituents. And that brings us back to Wilmington, a reliably Republican area. (The 3rd Congressional district gave Bush 54% of its vote in 2004 and re-elected Mike Turner with 59% in 2006.)

The biggest employer in Wilmington and in Clinton County, and a major employer for 5 adjacent counties, is German-owned DHL. Following the closure of the Clinton County Air Force Base in 1971 Wilmington was an economically depressed city until 1979 when Airborne Express bought the former base (which had cost approximately $100 million in taxpayer funds to construct) for a sweet $850,000. Airborne (ABX, Inc) has invested almost a quarter billion dollars in putting together a first-rate hub for its national delivery service. It's primary customer is DHL. Two months ago DHL announced it is in the process of coming to agreement with UPS, an agreement which will immediately cost Wilmington at least 6,000 jobs, probably 8,000, as DHL's business goes to Louisville. For Clinton County this is nothing short of what Democratic congressional candidate Jane Mitakides refers to as "a corporate Hurricane Katrina."

Last month McCain and his lobbyists drove the Double Talk Express into the neighboring 2nd CD, where Mean Jean Schmidt is going to be defeated by Vic Wulsin in November, and he was asked about the tragedy in Wilmington. He punted, uncomfortably and changed the topic to community colleges and job retraining. He called that "straight talk" but the straight talk didn't include his own role, and that of the lobbyists who run his campaign, in the Ohio DHL misery. You can't blame him; he would have been lynched if he was honest. Yesterday's Cleveland Plain Dealer laid out the actual straight talk that McCain was ducking.

McCain and his campaign manager, Rick Davis, played roles in the fate of DHL Express and its Ohio air park as far back as 2003. Back then, however, their actions that helped DHL and its German owner, Deutsche Post World Net, acquire the Wilmington operations resulted in expansion, not retraction.

In a private meeting Thursday, Wilmington residents will ask McCain for help in stopping DHL's proposal to quit using the airport as a hub, which could cost more than 8,000 jobs. DHL says that it wants to stay in the freight business but that it can stem financial losses if it can put its packages aboard the planes of a rival-- United Parcel Service-- before delivering them in DHL trucks. UPS flies out of Louisville, Ky., so the proposed change would render the Wilmington airport unnecessary.

None of that was anticipated in 2003, when McCain and Davis, who was a Washington lobbyist before managing the presidential campaign, first got involved. Several Wilmington civic leaders said that what happened in 2003 created an economic gain for their community, lasting several years.

But because that gain, and now the prospective loss, came from the decisions of a foreign-owned corporation, look for some Democrats and labor to seek to tie Wilmington's current troubles to McCain.

"Those jobs are on the chopping block because Sen. McCain and his campaign were involved in a deal that resulted in control of those positions being shifted to a foreign corporation, and there's no getting around that," said Joe Rugola, president of the Ohio AFL-CIO.

...The roles of McCain and Davis in the 2003 DHL deal have not been noticed in the current Wilmington flap. They were mentioned briefly, however, in a Washington Post story in June on Davis' lobbying work.

In 2003, Davis lobbied the Senate to accept the proposal by DHL to buy Airborne Express for $1.05 billion. Airborne Express at the time ran the airport and package-sorting facility in Wilmington.

Filings in the Senate show Davis' lobbying firm, Davis Manafort, was hired to help both companies deal with Congress, where objections over DHL's foreign ownership arose. Davis and a partner earned their firm $185,000 for the DHL-Airborne Express work that year, records show. They earned $405,000 more from Deutsche Post for work on other issues in 2004 and 2005, Senate records show.

Before the merger, some members of Congress, as well as UPS and Federal Express, cited concerns about a subsidiary of a foreign company controlling a segment of air commerce in the United States. Sen. Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska, tried to insert language in a military spending bill to ban a foreign-owned carrier from flying military equipment or troops. That would have made the Airborne Express purchase less attractive to DHL.

McCain, of Arizona, and fellow Republican Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi objected...

Long before I worked at Warner Bros, I was a dj and rock writer in San Francisco. I was the first DEVO supporter on the West Coast and played their independent single, "Jocko Homo/Mongoloid" in heavy rotation on my radio show. When they first came to San Francisco they slept on the floor of my office, covered in magazines. When Warners was thinking of signing the strange Ohio band they were a little frightened of the band members and few me to L.A. to make the informal introductions and their corporate offices. It was funny and I couldn't imagine that one day I would be a president in that building. McCain's bungled response to the tragedy in southwest Ohio reminded me of the very first DEVO song I ever heard:



UPDATE: OBAMA'S BEST RADIO AD

McCain's straight talk on DHL