this article, for example, this guy's job is to put four screws into a
metal pipe every 30 seconds.
Let's assume that the employer decides that a robot could do that -- or
that some minimum-wage teenagers after school might do it as well
without health benefits -- how hard can it be to retrain this guy to do
an "equally difficult" job -- like putting six screws into a metal pipe,
or like putting two pickles into a hamburger, or like putting special
sauce on a sesame bun.
--- In Dems2008@yahoogroups.com, "azober2000" <azober@...> wrote:
>
> Obama's campaign gets split reaction
>
> 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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