Ohio governor, Senate races revolve around economy

By Mark Niquette

Columbus Dispatch

ST. PARIS, Ohio

Standing outside the shuttered Caraustar/Sonoco packaging plant last week where she had worked more than 30 years, Lindsay Shoopman wanted to be optimistic.

After all, Gov. Ted Strickland was there to cut the ribbon for the planned reopening of the plant early next year by Ice River Springs of Canada to produce bottled water using nearby Champaign Springs.

Shoopman, 62, who has not been able find full-time work since losing her job at the plant two years ago, already has applied for one of the 30 positions expected to be created initially.

But she says she’s not holding her breath about her chances, considering that about two-thirds of the former workers at the plant still are unemployed and the jobless rate in Champaign County is 11 percent.

With Ohio’s employment rate stuck in double digits for the 15th-straight month and the state still reeling from job losses, the top issues in the races for governor and the U.S. Senate this fall clearly are the economy and jobs.

A Dispatch analysis of federal employment data shows that Ohio has fared worse than most other states during the current recession but that the slide has been going on for several years.

Ohio has lost 376,300 jobs, or 6.9 percent, during Strickland’s term, measured from December 2006 through May 2010 — the 42nd-worst among all states and above the national job-loss rate of 4.6 percent during that time, data show.

But Ohio’s job loss during the past five, 10 and 20 years each rank near the bottom for all states, and jobs’ performance under Strickland’s predecessors, Republicans Bob Taft and George V. Voinovich, was 49th and 38th, respectively.

The state’s jobs picture has been improving, with gains in three of the past four months. The state added a net 2,700 nonfarm jobs during the past year, although it lost jobs overall in June with the end of temporary census work.

Republicans are blaming Strickland and Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher, the Democratic nominee for the Senate and former state development director, for not doing more to keep and create jobs since taking office in 2007.

“When you become a CEO, your job is to turn around a company, and he’s had his chance at the bat and he’s failed,” said John Kasich, Strickland’s GOP challenger. “When you’re CEO and you don’t get the job done, they fire you.”

But Strickland and Fisher insist that they can’t be held responsible for the recession, and they blame Republican policies for allowing the recession in the first place — including Kasich’s work on Wall Street.

“I think, quite frankly, that John Kasich and his cohorts at Lehman Brothers have had more to do with Ohio losing nearly 400,000 jobs than I have,” Strickland said. “So we can have that debate and that argument.”

Economists say that although there is more Ohio leaders could and should have done to increase the state’s competitiveness, governors and politicians tend to get too much blame when the economy is bad and too much credit when it’s good.