The News From Ohio

Jonathan Chait, the New Republic's most prominent liberal blogger, has an occasional series of posts about absurd doings in Ohio, usually pulled from local newspapers' annals of crime. I think Chait sarcastically highlights the state out of his disbelief that a place that behaves like this could hold such an important role in the country's presidential elections and that places typically valued for their conservative, Midwestern wholesomeness are far loopier than the liberal Northeast. Then again, writing about a man who calls in a crime that began when he was masturbating at home is a softball that any blogger could hit.

Whenever I'm in Ohio, reading the Columbus Dispatch, which I respect as a high-quality metro daily, I'm struck by how different the serious items are in content from those in the Globe. The territory covered by Ohio's state politics is alarming. Last weekend, the news and editorial pages reported and analyzed State House bills that would effectively eliminate state workers' right to collective bargaining, allow people to bring guns into bars, and require people show ID at the polls so they can vote. All are proposed by Republicans who now control the state government's legislative and executive branches. (The first has passed but is the subject of a lawsuit, while the latter two are in committees.) The tone of letters to the editor is also somewhat aggressive, such as the one about how high school students should stop complaining about the work they have, which apparently was part of one recent article.

These matters are so different from what state legislators here take up that they're practically foreign policy for Massachusetts, though the House of Representatives this week approved a bill to limit public unions' say on their health care benefits. That these matters, particularly the latter two about guns and voting IDs, occupy such a center stage is also troubling, reflecting politicians' perennial concern with foolish matters whose effectiveness is beyond unproven. No sane person will feel more comfortable in bars because he can now bring a gun inside them or will start bringing one because he's now allowed. And no legitimate documentation exists of widespread voter fraud on a state or federal level in the past 10 years, unless you count Florida in the 2000 presidential election, which benefited conservatives quite handsomely and may qualify as unprincipled executive and judicial interference as opposed to voter interference. I'd like to think conservatives can be blamed for this habit, but I know it's also true of Democrats.

I wondered why legislators repeatedly focus on the frivolous when they repeatedly have profound matters confronting them -- say, a sluggish recovery from the worst recession of the past 75 years that is exacerbating the generation-long trend of damagingly vast income inequality. Then, while walking in downtown Columbus, I passed an office building with an electronic news scroll as a ridiculous headlined appeared. I forget the exact words, but in spirit it practically said, "Bill may allow aliens to marry." The topic was irrelevant and not worth legislating, but reporters love these stories because they're controversial and can always be couched in conditional verbs without acknowledging the minute chance they actually have of passing, and politicians love them because the news coverage raises their profile. And so the cycle perpetuates itself.