4 posts tagged “ohio”

in the past few weeks, three friends from nyc have told me independently that they are coming to cleveland to campaign for obama. (edit: make that four. my old co-worker in ny just told me she is taking a leave of absence from her job in belgium to spend a month in ohio with me campaigning.) and i am sure there will be more. more people who've never been here before that i get to show around! and hopefully foil some notions about the you-know-what on the lake.

i realized that it's kind of like when i was back in ny, where i worked with a girl from delhi. she was sort of my personal ambassador of india, always taking me out for chaat at holes-in-the-wall in midtown, teaching me hindi words and about indian mythology, describing bombay, calcutta, goa, the tea plantations of kerala. she looked so happy whenever i spoke positively about india or mentioned how much i wanted to visit. and i do. i think i know how she feels, at least a little bit anyway.

so hillary has won ohio. we waited a very long while for cuyahoga county to report results, which were delayed by the nasty ice storm keeping some polls open longer, and probably also by the return to the paper balloting system and (unsurprising) subsequent follies. watching cnn for this many hours in a row is making my eyes feel like raisins.

i remembered that while listening to the sirius satellite radio in our rental car for many, many hours last week, over many, many snowy roads through upstate new york, that the stephanie miller show tipped me off to the highly entertaining twin blogs, i dream of hillary...i dream of barack. people send in their (real) dreams they've had about the respective candidates to the author, sheila heti.

some highlights:

"I Think I Am Falling For Her"

I dreamed that I was in Hillary's small, one-bedroom apartment and she had a little bit of coke left, like a line, and I did it and she got mad at me."

"A Wife and Mother Who Scrapbooks"
Hillary Clinton and I were cleaning my parents' attic. She was actually a lot of fun, and we got a lot of work done.

"A Middle-Aged Woman in Ohio"
I was running some errands with Barack. Michelle was in the hospital after having a cyst removed, and one of our errands was to pick her up. Barack was driving an SUV and we were having difficulty finding a parking spot near the hospital. We drove down a narrow street with cars parked on both sides, then it dead-ended. It didn’t look like it was possible to turn around. I became very tense. I thought, Oh, no, he’s going to get very angry and run into all these cars when he tries to turn around. Then the media will find out and he’ll ruin his chances of being nominated. But he very cooly did a 7 or 8 point turn, deftly turning the car around, and we headed back up the street. I thought to myself, Well, I’m voting for him.

"A Canadian Optician"                                                                                                                                
Barack and I were sitting in my office, and he was consulting with me about corrective eye surgery. He had been referred to my practice for my expertise, and though I was flattered that he had come to me, I  referred him to a well-known surgeon for the consult. I asked about his eyeglasses and if I might see them. He said he hated his glasses, but when he showed them to me, they were beautiful retro frames: thick, tortoise-shell, plastic. Yet they were mangled and badly in need of repair. I encouraged him to wear them, and offered to repair them. I began adjusting the frames in my private lab when I promptly broke them. I was horrified.

so i figured last night might be my last chance to see hillary clinton speak as a presidential candidate, if obama wins big in tomorrow's primaries. we are for obama but wanted to hear what clinton had to say. the cleveland state university atrium filled to about three-quarters capacity. yet i couldn't help but notice the energy from the crowd was not quite there at this do-or-die point in the race. clinton was making her final stop for the night after non-stop campaigning all day in ohio, straight from an appearance on saturday night live in new york the night before. she sounded a bit tired and hoarse, but fought through it with her usual hardened determination. she spoke about how once the "oil men" were out of the white house, ohio would no longer be forgotten. she talked about her aim to make good on promises to create jobs in ohio, specifically "clean energy" jobs. not surprisingly, she talked about nafta. she touted her plan for universal health care, without getting into the specifics. and to raucous applause, she declared the government would forgive student loan debts in exchange for public service (an idea obama has also discussed). she never once mentioned obama. much of the speech i had already heard in some form on tv, but for the experience, i'm glad i went. waiting in line outside also proved interesting -- most notably the anti-warmobile pulling a giant john mccain cut-out atop a bomb, joyriding up and down euclid avenue.

the debate that went down here in cleveland was thrilling. even if it was happening less than ten miles from my house yet i was forced to watch it on tv. and even it's true the candidates are probably focusing too much on minutiae at this point, and not enough on why either one of them would, as rachel maddow put it on msnbc, "kick the tail of mccain in november." they're nitpicking issues because there just isn't much that separates them, except for style.

politics has never been my thing. but as ridiculous as it sounds, i almost feel like the political equivalent of the beatles have landed in america. i can't help but be engaged. and it looks like records for the primary turnouts are being set everywhere. as a voter it's good to be back in such a pivotal state for this election.