Volley of ads, Hillary visit target Valley in final days

An Obama TV commercial
airing in Ohio features a former
Delphi Packard Electric worker.

By DAVID SKOLNICK

VINDICATOR POLITICS WRITER

T HE DAYS LEADING TO TUESDAY’S Democratic presidential primary will feature an Austintown rally by U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and visits by high-profile supporters of U.S. Sen. Barack Obama in the Mahoning Valley.

Both campaigns are running numerous commercials on local television stations touting their attributes, including one airing statewide featuring Steven Schuyler, a former Delphi Packard Electric worker.

Clinton, D-New York, will make her third appearance and have her second rally in Mahoning County on Sunday.

Clinton’s appearance, billed as a “Solutions for America” rally, will be at Austintown Fitch High School. The doors will open Sunday at noon with the event expected to start at 2 p.m.

Clinton is to begin Sunday in Columbus, then go to Austintown. That will be followed by rallies in Akron and Cleveland.

Gov. Ted Strickland, who campaigned for Clinton on Friday in Youngstown and Austintown, is expected to attend Sunday’s rally.

Clinton was here twice, Feb. 14 to speak to workers at the Lordstown General Motors complex and Feb. 21 for a rally at Chaney High School in Youngstown.

Obama, D-Ill., held a Feb. 18 rally at Youngstown State University.

His schedule includes visits today and Sunday to Cleveland, Columbus and portions of southeast Ohio.

The campaign doesn’t plan for Obama to return to the Mahoning Valley before Tuesday’s primary.

But “high-profile surrogates” will be in the area, said Ben LaBolt, an Obama spokesman.

Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick and Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, will hold a community meeting on universal health care at 6:30 p.m. today at the New Bethel Baptist Church, 1507 Hillman St. in Youngstown. The doors open at 6 p.m.

The SEIU, which has 1.9 million members in North America in about 100 occupations, has endorsed Obama.

Among the numerous television commercials airing throughout the state is one featuring Steven Schuyler of Youngstown, a former Delphi Packard Electric worker. Schuyler’s story was brought to the attention of Obama’s campaign officials, who said it makes a compelling commercial.

In the commercial, Schuyler said he worked 13 years for the company “making good money” before losing his job. Schuyler, who couldn’t be reached Friday to comment, blamed the job loss on the North American Free Trade Agreement, enacted in 1994, when Bill Clinton was president. He also mentions jobs lost to China in the commercial.

“Barack Obama was against NAFTA,” Schuyler says in the commercial while standing outside the Packard plant in Warren. “We need a president that will bring work into this country.”

Packard declared bankruptcy in 2005, which led it to reduce its local operations last year from 3,800 to about 1,000 through buyouts and early-retirement incentives.

Obama wasn’t an elected official when NAFTA was implemented.

He and Clinton have sparred back and forth about who supports the agreement.

Paul Sracic, YSU’s political science department’s chairman, said the commercial is very good even though all of it may not be accurate.

“It’s a solid commercial,” he said. “The mention of a particular company and a person who had a good-paying job that NAFTA took away from him is effective. The specific facts don’t matter.”

NAFTA is very much a sore subject for many in the Mahoning Valley who blame it for the loss of jobs over the past 14 years, Sracic said.

None of the commercials Clinton has aired in Ohio feature the plight of someone in the Valley.

In one commercial, she is briefly shown talking to a Lordstown General Motors complex worker at the facility.

Clinton has TV and radio commercials with Strickland, who represented all of Columbiana County and a portion of Mahoning County in the U.S. House between 2003 and 2006, touting her plan to “fix NAFTA and create jobs” in Ohio.

One lobbying group says too much attention has been focused on NAFTA and not enough on trade with China.

The Alliance for American Manufacturing is running ads Sunday and Monday in Ohio newspapers, including The Vindicator, that challenge presidential candidates to address Chinese trade. The group wants all candidates, by Tuesday, to commit to fighting what it considers illegal trading practices by China.

The full-page ads claim that China is cheating on trade agreements by illegally subsidizing manufactured goods and sending them to the U.S. at below-market costs. The group says 240,000 manufacturing jobs were lost in Ohio from 2001 to 2006, including 66,000 that were lost because of Chinese competition.

skolnick@vindy.com

Contributor: Vindicator Staff Writer Don Shilling