Ohioans can't seem to escape the endless saga of the state's new voting machines, which have been among the most contested government programs in recent times. Since Congress set aside some $2 billion in 2002 for all 50 states to upgrade their elections equipment, the process has been fraught with kinks -counties squabbled about which machines to buy, the state waffled on how much it could afford, and the CEO of the company making the voting machines wrote a letter saying he was committed to delivering Ohio's electoral votes to President Bush. As the state official responsible for elections, Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell has been involved in all these sordid chapters of the voting epic. Now, for the first time, he himself is the subject of one. Blackwell intends to use the machines to help his campaign for governor.
Blackwell faces stiff competition from at least two opponents, Attorney General Jim Petro and state Auditor Betty Montgomery. So to set himself apart, Blackwell unveiled a $15 million ad campaign last week called Help Ohio Vote
which will include focus groups, phone surveys, TV spots and a traveling media tour to educate voters about the new machines. It also could include paycheck inserts, direct mail advertisements to every Ohio voter and a group of journalists that would travel with the campaign around the state. At the center of it all is Blackwell, his smiling visage no doubt central to all the ads and TV spots, and his quotes no doubt filling newspaper pages and TV newscasts throughout Ohio.
Blackwell claims the campaign - which will be in place before all counties upgrade to new voting devices in November 2005 - is well before the governor's race in 2006, and that as secretary of state he is the natural spokesman for the upgrade. Maybe. But it's hard to believe Blackwell would design such a high-profile public service campaign that featured himself so prominently with no eye towards Gov. Bob Taft's job. Elected officials already occupy highly visible positions that present a natural advantage in helping to establish name recognition among voters. Blackwell will use his own gubernatorial campaign organization after the Help Ohio Vote blitz has run its course, and he'll be able to capitalize on how widely his name and image proliferated in the official, tax-funded operation. No elected official should use an office in this way.
Bush incorrectly portrays Sept. 11
Ever since President Bush stood in the rubble of the World Trade Center with a megaphone and his arm around a New York firefighter, the iconography of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack has been linked closely with his presidency. Bush has taken great pains to present himself as a wartime president, from his infamous landing on the aircraft carrier, to his secret Thanksgiving trip to Iraq, to a recent speech in front of a Coast Guard cutter in South Carolina. It is natural for Bush's campaign directors to use the iconography of war and terror in their first TV ads, unveiled last week, and they almost certainly expected the firestorm of criticism over the images of firefighters and the destroyed twin towers. But while the Bush campaign has every right to use the images of terrorist destruction, it should not include the pictures of firefighters on the scene. Doing so cynically politicizes the Fire Department of New York and misrepresents a major firefighters union.
The International Association of Fire Fighters Union approved a resolution last week that condemns Bush's ad, asks the campaign to stop using it and urges the president to apologize to survivors and their families. This seems like a fair request. With the massive war chest of the Bush campaign, it should be a small matter to edit the firefighters out of the commercials. There are thousands of hours of TV tape of the attacks and their aftermath, all fair game for Republican strategists to use in a montage to depict all the events Bush has dealt with as president 17
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