Citizens National Bank in Bluffton
By Eli Saslow
The Washington Post
LIMA — A six-cylinder engine rolls down the conveyer belt and stops in
front of Bo Huenke every 28 seconds.
He attaches a metal pipe, twists in four screws with hands that suffer
from carpal tunnel syndrome and finishes just in time to stretch his
back before the next engine arrives.
His hands move from memory while his mind calculates the math: 28
seconds per engine, eight hours each shift, five days a week, 13 years
until retirement.
Inside this Honda manufacturing plant built on top of an old pig farm,
Huenke's only hope for distraction is a good argument with the other
men who work on the line. They're mostly what he calls "good ol' boys"
— white, Catholic and descendants of Italian and German immigrants,
just like him — so liberal proclamations usually instigate heated debate.
"Democrats are taking over Ohio," Huenke says to a chorus of protests.
Or, "This war has been a disaster from Day One."
But, every now and then, Huenke makes the rare political assessment
that most people here seem to agree on.
"Obama, doesn't he sound a little naive?" asked Huenke, 52. "He stands
up there, so optimistic, preaching about hope and change. It sounds
great and everything, but come on. He doesn't quite get it."
Voters like Huenke present a difficult challenge to Sen. Barack Obama,
D-Ill., as he looks ahead to March 4, when primary battles with Sen.
Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., in Ohio and Texas threaten to halt his
campaign's momentum.
In Lima and other fading manufacturing towns, he must confront
difficult questions that go to the heart of his candidacy and its
appeal to a broad section of Americans:
Can grandiose visions of hope and change resonate in places where
change — in this case economic change — has brought housing
foreclosures and economic ruin, where hope means avoiding another
round of layoffs?
Can a candidate whose support has been based on African Americans and
upper-middle-class whites transcend class and race in places where
racial tension still colors everything?
When the Clinton and Obama campaigns set up field offices in Lima last
week, they discovered a sad town of about 40,000 already at odds
between black and white, between dreamers and realists.
There are people here like Josiah Mathews, 25, a black man who
believes Obama can help bring peace and prosperity to his home town.
But there are also people like Huenke, white and working class, who
sense a disconnect between Obama's inspirational rhetoric and life's
daily struggles. They prefer Clinton for her experience and economic
policies, which they believe might stabilize Lima's decline.
"A minority president or a woman president — both are hard sells in
Lima," Huenke said. "But Hillary's easier, because you also get Bill.
When you're thinking politics around here, you've got to be practical."
The Lima that Huenke grew up in was a canvas for big dreams — a
booming industrial town halfway between Dayton and Toledo where jobs
outnumbered workers, trees lined the downtown square and a new airport
opened a portal to the world.
Huenke lived in a large house near Main Street with seven brothers and
two sisters. The oil refinery gave his father regular raises.
When Huenke left home to try college at Ohio State, he never doubted
he'd return to Lima. He came back in the late 1970s to open a
restaurant, and he discovered a Rust Belt town that had lost its major
railroad and its biggest bus company.
Racial tension twice erupted into violence and riots that necessitated
the presence of the National Guard. The city built low-income housing
near Huenke's old neighborhood, and he eventually moved into the country.
"I had a lot of those minorities around me," Huenke said, "and some of
them were just causing trouble and collecting welfare."
Huenke's restaurant leaked money, then closed.
When Honda called a decade ago to offer a $23-an-hour job, he hardly
hesitated. Lima had lost 8,000 jobs in the previous 25 years; no
decent-paying work was beneath him.
"Yes," he said. "Thank you. I'll take it." That decision has resulted
in two hand surgeries and constant shoulder pain.
A divorce last year doubled Huenke's housing payment to $800 a month,
and a faulty thermostat means the temperature in his house sometimes
dips to 52 degrees.
A lifelong Democrat, Huenke went to a rally in Columbus last month and
decided that Clinton's economic and health-care ideas could help him
endure another decade or so in Lima. He liked how the senator from New
York outlined her plans with specifics.
Obama, he thought, sometimes spoke about long-term goals and
principles, which Huenke rarely had the leisure to consider.
He started sending e-mails to friends at 2 in the morning after a late
shift at the plant last week, soliciting volunteers for Clinton. A few
days later, he sat in a small meeting for supporters, where one person
suggested that the group canvass all of the houses in Lima.
"Yeah, we might need to do that," Huenke said. "But there's some
neighborhoods in this town where I don't want to be walking around, no
matter what we're doing. We've got some slums now. You never know
what's going to happen when you knock on somebody's door."
Josiah Mathews walked out of his house dressed in a dark gray suit,
with rings on both middle fingers and a scarf around his neck. He had
carefully clipped his goatee and trimmed his mustache to a shadow
before a full morning of meetings.
Mathews grew up only a block away in a neighborhood, South Union,
where blacks were once forced to live by law.
The single-story houses and apartments — sometimes rented for as
little as $200 a month — have been worn by harsh winters, and some
were abandoned long ago.
During his childhood, Mathews dreamed of packing up for New York or
Chicago. But during his sophomore year of high school, a few community
organizations paid for him to make a service trip to Africa, and he
returned with both perspective and a silent vow to repay their generosity.
He would stay in Lima. He would help the town change.
Mathews worked to pay off his mother's house with jobs at a hotel, on
the railroad and at a General Motors plant.
Last year, he spent more than $5,000 of his own money on a losing
campaign for office on the city council. Still, progress in Lima
sometimes felt "like pushing against a wall," he said.
Minorities, who make up 27 percent of the town's population, hold only
three or four positions on the 70-officer police force.
"You get a lot of rural people here, and all they know about black
people is what they see on TV," Mathews said. "There's a blockage
between the minority community and the government. It's not getting
better, and that's the real problem."
Last month, a SWAT team shot a black mother and her infant son during
a drug raid near Mathews' house, killing the mother.
"Everybody's riled up and angry, and we don't even know what happened
yet," said Carolyn Pennington, 67, a white woman who has lived in Lima
for 35 years.
"I was taking my grandson downtown to McDonald's, and I looked in my
rearview mirror and my heart about stopped. There was a black guy
riding my bumper, looking mean. I was terrified, and this old lady
doesn't scare easy."
Said Mathews: "I've never once felt unsafe in my neighborhood. But you
hear some things and see some things where there is just a lot of work
that has to be done with race relations. We need something to unite us."
When Obama announced he was running for president a year ago, Mathews
recognized the chance he'd been waiting for. In a town where a black
police officer still strikes people as revolutionary, Mathews thought,
what could redefine race more than a black president?
Eager to volunteer, Mathews limited himself to one job for the first
time in his adult life. His days are now divided in two: mornings for
suits and community meetings about the senator from Illinois;
afternoons for work boots, a camouflage Ford hat and a rain jacket,
and a job at a General Dynamics factory that builds tanks for the war
in Iraq.
"People at work tell me I'm voting for a layoff by supporting Obama,"
Mathews said. "But I'd rather not have a job if that's what it comes
down to. This is a chance to make history."
Once a Republican stronghold, Lima could potentially swing Democratic
in the general election this time around, locals said; the town voted
to elect Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland in 2006.
Mathews believes that Obama can win the four delegates available in
surrounding Allen County only if a higher percentage of minorities
shows up to vote. In recent elections, minorities have made up as
little as 12 percent of the local electorate.
"There's this attitude that they can't change anything, so why show
up?" said Gary Frueh, chairman of the Allen County Democrats. "But
they can change a lot."
Determined to turn his neighbors into Obama supporters, Mathews wore a
suit and traveled around South Union last week, meeting with pastors
and community activists.
Longing for company one night last week, Huenke drove 20 minutes
across town to visit Carolyn Pennington, a widowed Democrat whom
Huenke considers a "second mother." They sat at her kitchen table,
where they had met many times during the past six months to discuss
retired Gen. Wesley Clark as a potential vice president, Clinton's
campaign tactics, and the building momentum behind Lima's Democratic
Party.
Pennington told Huenke that she had just returned from the grocery
store, where she overheard a young woman gushing about Obama. In the
checkout line, Pennington confronted the woman. "Do you know his
middle name?" she asked. "It's Hussein. Hussein."
"I mean, don't get me wrong. He's all right. If he gets the
nomination, well, we're going to have to vote for him and get behind
him because we're Democrats above anything else. But I just don't like
the preaching that he's doing. He sounds like an old Bible-thumper to
me. I like being talked to. I don't like being yelled at."
Huenke nodded.
"I know what you mean," he said. "If Obama wins, I'll be campaigning
for him tomorrow. We'll take the change and try to make the best out
of it. There's never really any other choice."
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