The Post sat down with the Athens County Republican Party chair to ask him about some of the struggles facing the party in the upcoming election.
When Pete Couladis was elected to city council in 1975, the Republican Party had a 4-3 majority.
Today, as the chair of the Athens County Republican Party, he said it is much harder to try to find Republican candidates for local elections.
The Post sat down with Couladis to talk about some of the political changes that have occurred in Athens throughout the years, his struggles as the party chair in a primarily Democratic area and how the city and county could benefit from more political opposition.
The Post: How does a Republican like yourself end up in Athens in the first place?
Pete Couladis: I grew up here, went to OU, spent three years in the army and came back. I started out as a music major and switched to political science.
P: What made you change your mind?
PC: I think the anti-war movement helped changed me. I was stationed in Fort Meade and I saw a lot of the anti-war demonstrations and people waving Vietnam flags and North Vietnamese flags and that bothered me. … So I guess I have the anti-war movement to credit for moving me in the other direction.
P: How conservative was your upbringing?
PC: Well, my parents were pretty conservative. My dad had a business here in town. … All the people in the neighborhood used to call him the mayor of West State because he always had a political opinion, but when we were kids, we didn’t pay much attention to that. Thank goodness me and my brother had a decent upbringing. You see kids today and what they go through. Things are much different today in many respects.
P: Do you think that has any basis in the political climate?
PC: I suspect that too many people in politics are pandering to (students). They want the student vote, so (the politicians are) not going to come to campus and say, "Stop drinking six nights a week. Don’t block the streets and hassle people. Don’t put graffiti on private buildings." … It shouldn’t be a political issue. It never was before. Now you get too many candidates pandering to get the student vote.
P: Obviously, your role as party chair is to find candidates and promote them, but that’s hard to do when there are no Republican candidates who want to run. How do you deal with that?
PC: Just keep plugging away and trying to find people to run. It’s a hostile environment (for Republicans). The media tends to be hostile, as well. It didn’t used to be like that. Political campaigns were not as harsh and nasty as they are today.
P: Do you think, if there were more Republicans in political offices in Athens, they would adopt that hostility, as well?
PC: Not like that. Not in a nasty way. It never happened before. Even running for city council, there weren’t these attacks like there are today.
P: How did you get along with your Democratic fellow council members?
CP: We got along fine. We didn’t attack each other. We didn’t campaign against each other. But I think there’s kind of a negative tone here in Athens, and people say, “Well, that’s just how it is.” Well, it shouldn’t have to be. But that’s up to the voters.
P: You talked about candidates pandering for the student vote, but all three of the local Republican candidates in this election were students. What do you think about that?
PC: I have to admire them stepping forward to run, knowing they don’t have much of a base to work from here. But the other thing is, there aren’t too many Republicans left in the city to choose from.
P: How were you feeling at the start of this campaign season when you had three candidates running, and how does that compare to how you feel now, after two dropped out of their races?
PC: Well, I wish they would have stayed in. They’ve got to do what they need to do. One of them got a job. The other one’s still a student. But it’s hard to run a campaign and to raise the money. And as a Republican, you have to work 10 times harder than a Democrat, and you’ve got to raise a lot more money to keep your head above water.
P: What benefit do you think it would provide to have more opposed races?
PC: Well, you’ve got groupthink now in city government, where there aren’t very many questions being asked and everybody just agrees with everything. So you can only do so much. And a lot of people just don’t want to put themselves through a campaign where they’ll be attacked and ridiculed in the media.
P: What do you like about Athens, and why have you stayed here?
PC: Well, you know people here. We don’t have the crime — other than the heroin trade and all that stuff. You don’t have the crime you have in big cities. And we have a lot of good things that go on here, music-wise, athletic-wise. We just need more job opportunities.
@wtperkins
wp198712@ohio.edu
