Politics at the edge of the world

Editor’s note: ORL is pleased to welcome Ohio Valley native William Whitaker to its electronic pages. Born in East Liverpool and raised across the river in Chester, Will has written for The Review and The Arizona Daily Wildcat. Currently living and working in Tucson, he is studying postmodern American fiction and creative writing at the University of Arizona.

by William Whitaker

Welcome to politics at the edge of the world. This election season in southern Arizona was a wild one, and the blood from contentious campaigns is still flowing through the dry beds of the Santa Cruz and Rillito rivers. The only thing that stemmed the violence was John McCain’s intervention. In Arizona, McCain has supplanted Christ as the Almighty Son of Man, and he’s not real keen on political pissing contests in his home state.

If nothing else, this election served to assert Tucson’s identity. This is still the Wild West, and any attempts to make this city more cosmopolitan are futile. We are not suffering under the same delusion that Phoenix is. Phoenix fancies itself to be the cute younger sister of Los Angeles: a little wild, a little slutty, but someone you can take to a cocktail party and not feel ashamed of. Phoenix has VD and lies about it. Tucson is the girl in leather who smokes in the bathroom between classes and who dates a 29-year-old biker. Tucson is the girl who spent some time in juvie for stabbing her mom’s boyfriend, and elections foreground the identity of a place like no other event.

As I watched the other-worldly commercials of candidates gussied-up in boots and hats and gaudy belts and heading to the border to make promises about illegal immigration and drugs, I developed a persistent headache—congressional hopeful (and object of a moderate crush) Gabriel Giffords (right), toeing a line in the border sand with her snakeskin boots, and congressional hopeful Steve Huffman crouching down in the desert at night with a flashlight in his hand, presumably preparing to bludgeon a drug mule.

Sometimes I fear Arizona is just steps away from an all-out war with the Mexican state of Sonora. Certainly the closer one gets to the border, the more it resembles images of Gaza: the Border Patrol checkpoints, the National Guard. Across the desert, on the Mexican side, one occasionally sees convoys of Mexican troops in the backs of ancient trucks. After being consumed by this, I began to miss Ohio.

During my time as a reporter, I suppose I got to know Ohio Governor-elect Ted Strickland pretty well. I interviewed him countless times and picked his brain about issues. I will not speculate as to what kind of governor he will become, for I don’t know what kind of resistance he will face from a legislature that has, for years, been willful and unproductive. But Ohio is in a unique position to effect national change—and I’m not talking about partisan change.

Pretty much everyone on both sides of the aisle in Ohio agrees that Gov. Bob Taft was a disaster. He nearly bankrupted Ohio townships; he allowed public education to devolve into a terribly inappropriate joke; he fostered a culture of indolence that’s going to take a lot to fix. That kind of overwhelming agreement between Dems and the GOP could be vehicle for change.

The big issues that will face Strickland are jobs–most especially in the eastern part of the state–and education. Strickland is aware of the importance of the Ohio River to the economic resurgence of the Ohio Valley, and that’s reason to be optimistic. Rather than focus his energies on a district, however, he will have to broaden his scope to encompass a whole suffering state, and so I’ll not be so brazen as to say that river commerce will save the Valley from ruin.

Here’s something to cheer you, though: Strickland really, really dislikes the WTO–a group that has probably done more, without knowing it, to damage the Ohio Valley than anything ever has. Because Strickland is most passionate about education, Ohioans can expect big, big changes in that area. Look for this to be a hot-button issue—one over which he is most likely to lock horns with the legislature. And why not? After all, Columbus has allowed Ohio’s school funding structure to flounder illegally for years, and Taft did nothing to address this issue. In a long list of failures, that may well have been the biggest.

Instead of spreading monies around to districts with genuine need, he hung his hat on the Ohio School Facilities Commission–an agency that did nothing but circumvent a major problem and mire much-needed funding in a bureaucratic cesspool. Instead of just giving desperate districts cash that is rightfully theirs, the state dangled it like a carrot and forced them to ask unwilling constituents in depressed regions to pony-up millions of dollars levies. If you think the Ohio School Facilities Commission is a useful organization, you ought to have a conversation with someone in the Beaver Local School District—that is, if they are all not hospitalized after being beaten to death at the polls more times that they can count.

It has pained me to not be in Ohio during this time of transition. I cannot gage public sentiment from 3,000 miles away, so I’ve had to rely on the Internet. From what I’ve read, there’s a lot of enthusiasm, and that is the best kind of fuel. Living in a free society is hard work. Democracy is powered by the idea that every citizen will get involved and stay that way. People in other states notice what goes on in Ohio, and if Ohio can walk out of the fog of political apathy, perhaps others will follow.