Yes We Have?

One year ago today, I was clearing out my office. I was in Ashtabula County (population approximately 100,000), working as a field organizer for the Barack Obama campaign in Ohio. Being a field organizer meant I occupied a position on the lowest rung of paid staff. My job was to recruit volunteers to knock on doors and call their neighbors asking them to vote Obama. Our office was a former supermarket whose buzzing lights, paucity of electrical outlets, and poor acoustics made it singularly ill-suited for all the electronics and phonebanking of a campaign outpost.

When the head of the local Democratic Party announced the results on election night—a year ago Wednesday—campaign volunteers and their families cheered as Barack Obama laid claim to a decisive victory in Ashtabula County, even in many of the rural townships in the southern parts of the county. He overcame questions about his patriotism and his purported inability to relate to rural Ohioans in small towns like Orwell, Rome, and Denmark because those places had been feeling the pressure of an economy on the decline since well before Lehman fell.

The city of Ashtabula, once the final destination on the Underground Railroad, is an hour outside of Cleveland. A third if not more of the storefronts in the mall were already empty when I arrived. The Obama campaign shared a large and desolate strip mall with an unemployment office that always had a steady stream of people walking through its doors.

I worked the southern part of the county. My turf was mostly rural, and Amish horse-drawn buggies were not uncommon. Overwhelmingly, the question on people’s minds when I knocked on their doors was whether voting for Obama would mean they could gain universal access to affordable health care. If there was a second question, it usually concerned the economy and bringing jobs back to a county and a region that my generation would need to look up on Wikipedia to know it was called the Manufacturing Belt before it became the Rust Belt.

The dominant narrative in the press coverage of the one-year anniversary of Barack Obama’s election is that of a transcendent politician brought back to earth by the weight of The System in Washington. His first year has been a legislative slog, but after health care is passed, and if climate change follows in early 2010, it could be remembered as one of change and progress on a massive scale.

But through the din of the commentariat, I try to keep Ohio and Ashtabula County as points of reference. By comparison to this time two years ago, 300,000 more Ohioans are without jobs. A year ago, unemployment was at 6.9 percent before rapidly escalating to 10.2 percent, where it stood in February as Obama was settling into the White House. In September, the unemployment rate stood at 10.1 percent across Ohio and nearly 14 percent in Ashtabula. Unemployment in Ohio has been higher than the U.S. average since late 2003.

Some national policies enacted over the last year have certainly helped. The stimulus bill has meant important road-works projects throughout Ashtabula County, and some larger-scale projects are now in the pipeline thanks to grant money that was not available before. But these are stopgap measures and hardly constitute a coherent policy for long-term economic recovery in the Rust Belt. They accomplish little else than to temporarily allay the fears engendered by high unemployment figures.

Speaking to friends back in Ashtabula over the last couple of days I tried to get a sense of attitudes toward Obama and the state of the union. One former volunteer characterized the mood toward Obama’s presidency as one of tempered positivity. “I really don’t hear much negativity in my day-to-day about things he’s done…I don’t see people in Ashtabula being as negative about government as during the Bush years,” he ventured.

“Optimistic, but high unemployment, fewer social services, worse education, and some large-scale public works projects. That’s Ashtabula for ya.”

Clay A. Dumas ’10, a former Crimson associate editorial editor, is a social studies concentrator in Lowell House. His column appears on alternate Fridays.