Driving through the countryside here in the 18th district of Ohio today was so nice. The cornfields are just turning golden against the hills and the bright colors peeking out through the trees, but what I really enjoyed was the signs on so many lawns.
In the last eight years I have always seen so many more Republican signs up, but this year it is looking more even and in some places one will see a long stretch of homes through a town with all the local Dems signs, our 18th district congressman, Zack Space is everywhere because he has done such a good job since replacing Bob Ney and everyone likes him, and we have some big Obama/Biden signs as well as the regular ones popping up here and there more and more this week!
In calls to locals, I am getting the question about the recent association between Obama and Ayers or on what Acorn is...if they have a computer at home I give them these sites:
http://www.factcheck.org/
http://www.fightthesmears.com
I hope that Obama/Biden visit Zack's headquarters in New Philadelphia and the 18th district. One of the big problems out here is the talk radio shows and a lack of affordable access for many to a wider choice of media on local television and radio. Many simply cannot afford cable or broadband so listen to the am or fm on the radio or read the local papers which are slightly favoring a republican perspective.
However, with this lack of jobs and all the foreclosures, hard times are here for many and the facts are - right there as real as can be in their own yards now.
With Palin's betrayal of trust problems in Alaska and her Alaska Independent Party associations being revealed - as well as her hypocritical attacks and false accusations on Obama lately being disproven, she is being spoken of openly as a liability to McCain's campaign and causing voters to question his judgement and he is the one having to tone down his own falsely informed constituents.
His plan for homeowners was already rebutted eloquently by Obama on the spot at the last debate which was a surprise to McCain, especially when he shot down the notion by explaining the taxation on homeowners to bail out the loan sharks.
Perhaps most embarrasing is the true red herring with the Ayers acquaintance and the community education project - just what they were doing and who it was, a board of many Republicans.
Check out this great article by Andrew Romano for Newsweek: Assessing Ayers:Innuendo vs. Information.
More from NEWSWEEK partner Factcheck.org:
"In a TV ad, McCain says Obama "lied" about his association with William Ayers, a former bomb-setting, anti-war radical from the 1960s and '70s. We find McCain's claim to be groundless. New details have recently come to light, but nothing Obama said previously has been shown to be false... McCain says in an Internet ad that the two "ran a radical 'education' foundation" in Chicago. But the supposedly "radical" group was supported by a Republican governor and included on its board prominent local civic leaders, including one former Nixon administration official who has given $1,500 to McCain's campaign this year. Education Week says the group's work "reflected mainstream thinking" among school reformers. The group was the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, started by a $49 million grant from the Annenberg Foundation, which was established by the publisher Walter Annenberg, a prominent Republican whose widow, Leonore, is a contributor to the McCain campaign. (FactCheck.org, which is nonpartisan, also receives funding from the Annenberg Foundation. But we are in no way connected to the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which finished its work long before we came into being in late 2003.)...
Voters may differ in how they see Ayers, or how they see Obama's interactions with him. We're making no judgment calls on those matters. What we object to are the McCain-Palin campaign's attempts to sway voters--in ads and on the stump--with false and misleading statements about the relationship, which was never very close. Obama never "lied" about this, just as he never bragged about it. The foundation they both worked with was hardly "radical." And Ayers is more than a former "terrorist," he's also a well-known figure in the field of education."
http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/stumper/archive/2008/10/10/assessing-ayers-innuendo-vs-information.aspx
