The Deep Pocket Republican Attack On Ohio Corporate Shill Rob Portman

One of the Cleveland area's biggest car sellers, Tom Granley, is a very, very wealthy Republican-- but he's always been kind of stingy with his campaign donations to his political party. In the past 10 years he's given a couple of hundred dollars to a few candidates each, like Steven LaTourette, Mike DeWine, a bit more to Voinovich and a few hundred bucks to some GOP committees. One good day at Blue America funnels far more money into candidates' coffers than a decade from this multimillionaire. But all that's changed now. Granley is about to open up his wallet... wide. He's promised as much as $7 million... to defeat the Bush clone that the Republican Party Establishment is determined to hand their party's nomination for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by George Voinovich. Why the sudden interest in defeating Rob Portman? Well, Granley think's he's found a better candidate: Tom Granley.

"The government is trying to control everything, from the car you drive to the doctor you visit from where you work to where your children go to school," he babbled, sounding more like a Rush Limbaugh listener and teabagger than like someone from your father's staid GOP. "I am a businessman, not someone who ever thought about being a professional politician," a slap in the face of political hack Portman, who's been nothing but a politician, first working for George Bush, Sr., then doing a stint as the congressman from the district now represented by Mean Jean Schmidt, and then going to work for Bush, Jr as the person in charge of dismantling American manufacturing jobs-- Trade Rep, they call in-- and ultimately as the Director of the OMB, where he had a major role in the Bush Economic Miracle. "But maybe that's what's needed in Washington now," he continued, "someone who understands financial responsibility and what it takes for a business and a country to be competitive. Someone who has built a business from scratch. Someone who knows how to create jobs. Someone who has met a payroll and knows his employees are dependent on him." Sounds familiar. The last time we elected someone singing that song, he drove the country close to bankruptcy and the economy to the edge of Depression.

The best thing Granley will accomplish is draining a huge amount of money that Portman would otherwise use against Ohio's spectacular Secretary of State, progressive Jennifer Brunner, the woman we've endorsed for the Democratic nomination for the Ohio Senate seat. So teabagger or not, and regardless of the fact that he has other intentions entirely, Tom Granley might actually be doing something right for America and Ohio. I might add, however, that polls show Brunner running ahead of Portman anyway. The most recent Public Policy poll shows her beating Portman 40-32% with 29% undecided. It's a great thing that Granley will force Portman to redeploy at least $5 million that he was hoping to use to smear Brunner into defending himself against charges from a fellow Republican that he bares a good deal of responsibility for the horrendous job losses in Ohio and for the severe downturn in that state's economy.

No matter which of the two cloddish Republicans wins, you will never hear anything from either one of them remotely like what Jennifer Brunner wrote at Daily Kos today about the healthcare crisis that is having such a gigantic impact on Ohioans:

A public option is essential because it is the surest way to quickly provide access to health insurance benefits to the more than 47 million Americans without health coverage at the lower cost and high quality of care now enjoyed by millions of older Americans who are insured through the government’s Medicare program. With the exception of Medicaid and Social Security benefit provided care, access to affordable and quality health care by Americans under the age of 65 has deteriorated under a completely privatized system that is motivated by making a profit for shareholders of the companies that pay for the services. That system has rewarded exclusion of Americans in need, the proliferation and duplication of tests and procedures, and the "silo-ing" of care that has affected its quality. Thousands of Americans have been pushed into bankruptcy, while our hospitals have been forced to provide uncompensated care that has driven up costs of services to those who are insured, increasing premiums and further exclusions to the point that it will break very soon.

...There is no benefit either for the American people or for the Democratic Party in surrendering the public option in return for the scarcely formed alternative of health-care cooperatives (billed to be like rural electric cooperatives that would be seeded with federal dollars). These health care cooperatives are unlikely to compete effectively any time soon with private insurers. They will need to be assigned to an agency for accountability and regulation, which, if not already formed, will face startup and rulemaking delays that will further exacerbate the problem. Why not provide a safety valve to relieve the stress on the health care system with a model that we know has worked for years? The public option has a sound, popular, and enduring foundation in the success of Medicare, a tested system that has covered older Americans for more than forty years and successfully provided decent health care to millions. Extending this type of model as a choice of coverage to the more than 47 million Americans without health coverage is not earth shattering-- it’s a choice and one we’ve been handling with success for decades.

The compelling need to retain a public option was brought into sharp focus for me at a public forum for seniors I attended near Cleveland last week, just before driving to Pittsburgh for the opening day of Netroots Nation. At the forum, 90-year-old retiree Belle Likover spoke of how she had studied the issue of universal health care in her high school debate class in 1936. The arguments she and her classmates used against it in class debates were the same as she hears today. When Medicare passed in 1965, as Ms. Likover pointed out, it required stout courage on the part of Democrats, because the same misleading scare tactics we see today were used then, and Medicare was passed without Republican support. Then as now, the Democratic Party needed to persevere in doing what was right, putting aside all criticism and misinformation, and the result was one of the most important and successful government programs ever established.